Nice build with a very unique motherboard. Awesome as a box for testing graphics cards and doing benchmarks to compare them.

This is a nice setup. I've had my eye on this board but haven't found the right one yet (as is often the case in life)...

Just curious but what unofficial BIOS are you using?

Neat build and a neat board - I remember playing around with one of them years ago, and had a PT880-based board (AGP only though) for a few years that was fantastic. Out of curiosity, have you tried AGP + PCIe together in that board? I've often wondered if that'd work on those kind of boards, but never had one to try it myself with.

I have the exact same model!

Its a fun board but the FSB wont go far beyond 300 MHz so if you try a Quad get one with 266/1066 MHz FSB.

PcBytes wrote:

Just curious but what unofficial BIOS are you using?

Unofficial bios 3.19a, the last official one by Asrock is 3.10. This 3.19a was released by pctreiber.net (here) and gives support for new CPU's, more memory, and newer video cards.

obobskivich wrote:

Neat build and a neat board - I remember playing around with one of them years ago, and had a PT880-based board (AGP only though) for a few years that was fantastic. Out of curiosity, have you tried AGP + PCIe together in that board? I've often wondered if that'd work on those kind of boards, but never had one to try it myself with.

I'm not sure if that would work, I haven't tried it. Also, I think the PCIe 16x slot is only intended for GPUs. When I get the hardware though I might actually try running some sort of SATA/SAS HBA in it and seeing what happens.

obobskivich wrote:

Neat build and a neat board - I remember playing around with one of them years ago, and had a PT880-based board (AGP only though) for a few years that was fantastic. Out of curiosity, have you tried AGP + PCIe together in that board? I've often wondered if that'd work on those kind of boards, but never had one to try it myself with.

The 939Dual-SATA2 can run both PCIe and AGP graphic at once.

I remember a "Combo" motherboard with this chipset from Gigabyte back then. Really cool to be able to use two types of RAM AND VGA.

I didn't know those could handle C2Ds! Isn't the VIA limited to P4s and Celerons?

Snayperskaya wrote:

I remember a "Combo" motherboard with this chipset from Gigabyte back then. Really cool to be able to use two types of RAM AND VGA.

I didn't know those could handle C2Ds! Isn't the VIA limited to P4s and Celerons?

Nope, it can run Conroe based Core2's (and Pentium D's apparently) as well - it even says it on the board in the pic 😉

The example of this board I got to toy around with some time ago had a Pentium D 800-series in it - they do work. At the time that was latest-and-greatest from Intel, but nowadays I'd probably just skip over Pentium D and go right for Core 2 Duo if given the choice.

I actually played through all of Resident Evil 4 @ 1280x1024 4xAA 4xAF and it played beautifully. Also beat Resident Evil Remake on a Gamecube emulator with this system using Dolphin 3.0. Did you all know that the really old versions, like Dolphin 3.0 are actually able to run nicely on a Core2? It's awesome!

Yep. I used to run Dolphin 3 all the time on a 3GHz Opteron 185 on S939. That rig was able to run New Super Mario Bros at a full 60fps, even upscaled to 1080p. I was quite amazed at how much better it looked emulated on a PC than it did on the Wii itself!

BTW, I used to have that motherboard myself. I didn't have very good luck with it though; it just wasn't completely stable running an E2180 at 1066MHz FSB. Also, 2D video performance with a 7800GS was sluggish. I've heard plenty of good things about that board though. Perhaps mine was a dud.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I didn't have very good luck with it though; it just wasn't completely stable running an E2180 at 1066MHz FSB.

It's funny you say that actually, because this one isn't completely stable either at 1066mhz. I have it underclocked very slightly for stability.