ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 (ULi M1695)

Test Setup

Test Setup

Since we last reviewed the ULi M1695 chipset on a reference board, we've updated our testbed settings to reflect a more contemporary system today for a mid-range mainstream PC. For this review, we'll compare the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 with a similarly configured Chaintech VNF4 Ultra, one of the better budget nForce4 Ultra boards around. The system configuration of both boards are listed below:-

• ASRock 939Dual-SATA2
• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2GHz 512KB L2 cache)
• 2 x 512MB Kingston DDR400 @ 6-3-3 CAS 2.5 CMD 1T
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
• Leadtek PX6600GT TDH Extreme 128MB - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 71.89 driver
• ULi Integated Drivers 2.13
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 (with DirectX 9.0c)

• Chaintech VNF4 Ultra
• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2GHz 512KB L2 cache)
• 2 x 512MB Kingston DDR400 @ 6-3-3 CAS 2.5 CMD 1T
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
• Leadtek PX6600GT TDH Extreme 128MB - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 71.89 driver
• NVIDIA nForce4 package 6.53
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 (with DirectX 9.0c)

Additional Notes

The ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 encountered a minor compatibility issue with the SYSmark 2004 benchmark suite, which required it to be run with a more relaxed CMD 2T memory timing in order to complete the benchmark. The board remained completely stable throughout the rest of our benchmarking session with the regular 1T timing and to be sure, we even ran it through newer benchmarks like 3DMark05 without problems.

Benchmarks

Below are the benchmarks we will use to measure the platform performance of the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard:-

BAPCo SYSmark 2004
Futuremark PCMark04
SPECviewperf 8.01
Futuremark 3DMark03
AquaMark03