I thought that the 939XLI32-eSATA was the last board based on the ULI 1697. It is until I found out that there is an equivalent of 939SLI-eSATA for the AM2 platform that 1697 seems to be going strong and well accepted by a segment of the market.

From the benchmark results, we can see that the 1697 isn't that far behind the rest of the chipsets when paired up with AM2 processor. The slightly slower performance could be due to the fact that lantecy is introduced due to jumpers used to toggle between Dual 8x or Single 16x PCIe lane setting. 

In terms of features, this board supports the new AM2 socket 940 processors. With 1GHz HT and Cool'n'quiet. It comes with 4xDDRII-800 slots which can accomodate up to 8GB of DDRII memory in total. On top of that, it has  1 x PCI Express x16 slot or can be configured to 2 x PCIe x 8 for "SLI". Do note that "SLI" will only function for drivers 81.98 and below with Powerexpress engine installed. Although the newer drivers will not support SLI anymore, two PCIe x8 opens up lots of possibilities. One of the possibilities is to enable surround video with 2 graphics cards. Another is to pair up a X1800XT and assign a X1600XT as a physics card (we would have to wait for that to happen).

The board comes with 4 x Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s, supports RAID 0, 1, JBOD and "Hot Plug" functions. There is also the HDMI_SPDIF header, providing SPDIF audio output to HDMI VGA card, allows the system to connect HDMI Digital TV/projector/LCD devices.  eSATA is also supported.

In terms of overclocking, the board has the basic options like voltage for dimm and cpu, cpu freq range of up to 400MHz and a up to 25x multiplier option. Most importantly, this board is Windows Vista™ Premium Logo Hardware Ready so you are safe from any future compatibility issue with the new OS whe it is out in the market. There are options to lock PCI and PCIe too.

In our overclocking test, we set the HT multiplier to 4x (800MHz) and set the CPU multiplier to 10x, CPU Vcore to 1.4v and push the CPU CLK to 280MHz. RAM set at DDRII-667 Guess what, the system went into WindowsXP  at 2.8GHz. It even POSTED at 2.9GHz (290x10).  See Gallery for more BIOS options. Setting the RAM to DDRII-533 always reset the board to 200MHz x multiplier (probably a bios bug).

Overall, this board gives you more choices - XLI, SATA2, eSATA compared to the AM2V890-VSTA board we reviewed some time ago. The only regret would be the voltage levels and the lack of a GbE and 1394. That would have made it an impressive board just like the 939SLI32-eSATA2.

Pricing (US)

Pricing (UK)

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Pros

• Hot Plug SATA
• Dual PCIe x8 or Single PCIe x 16
• SATA II
• eSATA
• HDMI_

Cons

• No GBE
• No 1394

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.