Recently we took a look at one of the newest players to the chipset market, ULi. While having a new name, ULi is actually the acquisition of ALi by the ULi group. ULi has started to show its cards over the last 3 months, bringing out its first all out attempt at the AMD Athlon 64 market with the M1695, a very innovative chipset when added with the latest in ULi’s Southbridge’s.
In our last review we took a general look at the chipset itself. We covered the major features of the chip, these being the Triple Graphics Interface, support for Dual Core AMD64, support for Sempron64 as well as older AMD64 CPU’s on the 754 platform. ULi’s roadmaps at the time also showed us that there would be further innovations such as additional PCI-E graphics ports as well as SLI and possibly Dual SLI setups by adding in different Southbridge’s.
Today we are taking a look at one of the first retail offerings to pass by our labs from ASRock. Some of you may know who ASRock are, others may not. ASRock is actually a relatively new division of the major ASUS group in Taiwan, manufacturing motherboards for the value and integrated markets. On the other hand, ASUS sticks mostly towards the high-end and midrange markets, this way the cheaper products don’t come under the ASUS name, which is all about premium product lines.
We are now going to put the ASRock 939Dual-SATAII motherboard under the microscope and see just how well it competes compared to the ULI reference board and nVidia nForce4 Ultra chipset. Let’s take a look to see what it has under the hood.
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