Asrock dual939-sata2 first impressions

This board is soooo freaking sweet. It is exactly what I expect out of a mobo: good documentation, good labeling on the board, a hellofalot of features, AGP 8x and PCI-e support, 4 dimm slots, a slot for a daughterboard to support upcoming AMD platforms, SATA2, SATA, IDE, USB 2.0, onboard sound with surround sound support (doesn't matter since i'm getting an audigy 2 zs anyways, but still!) and a few o/c features.

At first it didn't POST but as it turns out that's because my proc can't do 128bit memory (some call it dual channel) with the chips I have (both have the same timings and density, the only difference is brand name) with these chips. I ended up putting them in 2 & 3 and all is well albiet in single channel mode. Works fine with my 9700 AIW don't have any kind of speed loss as far as the card goes, and of course in certain games I'm seeing a speed increase due to the vastly superior processor.

The tricky part will come when I get my XFX 7800 GT PCI-e video card. The board does support running both kinds of cards at the same time but I've seen some posts on the ocworkbench forums about problems with using a similar setup (nvidia card for speed, ati card for multimedia capacity).

Anyways, I freaking love the board, it's very very stable and it actually gives the proc just a little more juice to increase stability. My one complaint is that the IDE ports are very low which was a problem even on my mini-tower, and that the chipset temps seem a little high, i wonder if it wouldn't have been a better idea to go with active cooling instead of just a heatsink.

Asrock is Asus' cheaper brand, right? I'm looking to build a Athlon X2 in the coming months after I get this current build straightened up. Whatever happened to Abit? They posted a huge net loss recently.

I always liked AMD over Intel, but I get Intel's CPUs for cheap because I'm a retail employee. AMD's programs suck.

Yeah it is the cheaper brand of Asus, but don't be fooled, they give good support with the Asrock name, and personally I've never missed out on getting a box full of crap i don't need along with my mobo. However, if I was a value added reseller I might cry over the fact it only comes with 1 sata cable, 1 ide cable, and 1 fdd cable. BUT it would be a good board to put in a system for an idiot who may screw up the BIOS since it resets if it doesn't POST 3 times in a row.

Oh yeah, and one cool thing about intels is that they ARE really good overclockers. Even all the way to 6ghz!

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