**The ASrock 939dual-SATA2 (ULi M1695) thread**

Still using one of thesein one of my family machines, keep umming and ahhing on whether to try upgrading, but the AM2CPU boards seem pretty hard to get hold of atm. That said will consider again in the future no doubt!
 
Myself and my buddy never got on with ours.

I always had issues with sata2 drives and my mate could never get s3 standby to work correctly and found it hopeless at getting any decent clock out of his 3700+

Mine ended up being randomly very picky with power supplies.

I actually got more second hand for it than my cherished nf4 lanparty ultra-d when I had a pc component clear out a while ago.

Not one of my favourite 939 board I have used, but I guess it had its place.
 
Well - thanks to this thing becoming Uber-reliable again, I think it'll be coming to W7 with me when my copy arrived later this month.
 
Uriel said:
Well - thanks to this thing becoming Uber-reliable again, I think it'll be coming to W7 with me when my copy arrived later this month.
Click to expand...

Well it was uber-reliable until my Freezer 64 Pro just snapped the AM2 retention module the other day. Hopefully it'll be fine once I get a replacement (3 pronged this time). I'm in no hurry to move on.
 
I still have this board running in my Server 24/7 as a Media server and Web/ftp/torrent etc, managed to upgrade it to Windows 2008R2 (like windows 7 for servers) the only problem was finding a driver for the onboard network card.. In the end I bought an addon gigabit card instead.

Recently it kept crashing and I was about to abandon it (after trying everything I could think) - then I removed one of the 2 dual channel memory chips and its been fine ever since.

The memory was Crucial Ballistix which had been replaced before - and looking at their forums it looks like these are VERY unreliable!...

It's just about running with 1gb - think I need to upgrade to back to 2gb or more again.

I have a Opteron 170 - currently at stock 2.0ghz and would like to overclock it again to 2.5 - I think I need better than 3200memory for this? -the Ballistixs were some weird overclockers kit @4000 ?!... I guess nowdays I can just stick in some 6400 and be done?

What cheapo dual channel 4gb memory can I use with this board that will still let me overclock a little?
 
Opteron 170? You're stuck with DDR (6400 is DDR2) unless you find an am2cpu upgrade board. DDR is expensive.
 
Damn.. thought there was some other diff between the 2 !

So 3200 is DDR1 ? - LOL looks like Overclockers don't even sell it anymore..

I'll have to look around - maybe IT IS time for an upgrade..

I've seen some Barebones Quad systems going cheap recently. £200 with 4gb ram etc.
 
Even the AM2CPU board is a dead-end path now. Unless a modder works a BIOS coding miracle, it won't take a phenom.

I wouldn't bother upgrading it unless you can find some dirt-cheap DDR.

Edit: Although the chipset lives on in a few AM2 boards. The ALiveDual-eSATA2 has it and that will take AM3 chips.
 
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Shaddow, If its a Server running 24/7 handling and storing large amounts of important data why would you even consider overclocking it? surely reliability is more important?
I don't know anyone that overclocks a server which runs 24/7 :confused:

If you feel you need to overclock it because it lacks power it would be a much better option to just replace the whole system and upgrade. If its just a home server I would have thought a 170 opty would be perfectly up to the task.

I have a little home made NAS which is basically a 24 hour media machine and webserver that also handles CIFS/SMB, FTP, itunes and bittorrents perfectly well and all it has is a little 1.66Ghz atom chip to power it.
 
It used to be overclocked when I used it as a games machine.. It was fine then.

I think it may be stuggling recently with 1080p transcoding to PS3.

I just wanted to get it back to it's prime state of 2.0 > 2.5ghz overclock. (That was quite good oc at the time).

But without the memory I don't think I can.

No sign of PC4000 memory on ebay!.. so I might get some cheap (expensive) 3200 and stick to clock speeds. (Or can you overclock this board and keep memory the same - I cannot remember)
 
Just chuck the pc3200 ram on a 133 divider and clock the cpu. I still think its a bad idea if you care in the slightest about your data.
 
The CPU was 100% prime stable when it was a gaming machine. I have no reason to think it wont do so now. If there was any danger I would go back to clock speeds. So where to find cheap PC3200? fleabay I guess.
 
I think the machine had 'reset' back to default settings, and reading thru the Balistix memory forums it seems many boards get the voltages incorrect. I looked again in the BIOS and there was no option to actually change the voltages except a 'Auto, normal, high' switched to high and it seems stable again with both sticks.

I've taken screen shots of bios incase it happens again ;-!

Hard to remember all the tweaks one makes years later... but shows how critical each one can be.
 
I was actually going to suggest this, as I found DDR2 Crucial Ballistix's vdimm is almost always incorrectly set by SPD on many boards. They should be run at 2.1v~ but many mb's set them to just 1.8v. My 3 sets of crucial 10th annie and also a single set of ballistix (all D9 Micron chips) all did this on my motherboards. But then I realised this was all irrelevant as your running DDR1 ballistix which use the older Micron 5B chips, but its actually looking like they do have the same issue.

TBH Micron ram in general, regardless of being DDR1 or DDR2 is voltage hungry! This board isnt to great for vdimm voltage options so it doesnt suit microm ram at all if your after a decent ram overclock.

When I had one of these boards many moons ago I always found cheap Corsair value ram with its slack latencies always ran extremely stable without even a voltage hike.
 
Bracket installed and everything's mostly back to normal. Unfortunately the PC appears not to be entirely unscathed. I could previously get 3GHz comfortably with my X2 5000+ BE. After putting everything back together the CPU struggles for stability at 3 GHz. Prime95 is still fine but S&M stess test usually brings a L1 cache error very quickly. Guess the CPU didn't like going up to 70°C+ before I realised the retention module was bust:(

I've tweaked the case airflow and managed to shave 10°C off the CPU idle temperature (now 38°C with the overclock) without creating much additional noise. Have given it negative presure and installed a dust filter and duct from a side vent to the CPU fan using a few spare bits and bobs I had lying around. Load temps are generally 45°C with Prime. With S&M I can push it up to 55°C though and that's where the error kicks in. I guess most people would be happy with it being several hours prime stable. I guess I'm satisfied (but not entirely happy) with several S&M runs before an error but it's a shame to see it. It used to be rock solid at 3GHz :(

I guess with a bit better cooling it would be fine but I'm not willing to let it get nosy and spending extra money to get a higher overclock on a budget CPU and motherboard combo just seems silly to me.
 
Well My 939 Dual-Sata2 has expired.

5 bulging capacitors and 1 leaking one on the CPU power Phase.

It will boot to the bios but windows locks up or it locks up showing boot code 0075.
 
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