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

MeddlE said:
OcUK, you guys are really missing out by not stocking this board, surely you've seen the interest that it has gathered in this thread alone??

Wish me luck.
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I've been into OCuK (I'm local) and mentioned it. They know there's a lot of interest, but they have very good reasons for not stocking Asrock boards in general and this one in particular. As I see it:

i) OCuK's profit per board can't be much at £50 retail, so it would only be worth selling at high volume and low rate of problems.

ii) There are numerous issues with this board (as can be seen from this thread), which might adversely affect OCuK's reputation. It isn't their fault, but there would be buyers who would blame OCuK rather than ASrock, if they bought it from OCuK. I'd buy this board again, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wasn't experienced. This is the first motherboard I've ever had that wouldn't work fully at default BIOS settings (won't detect the HDD).

iii) This from OCuK - ASrock's RMA policy is not the usual kind. If they RMA a board to one of the manufacturers they do stock, the manufacturer will send them a replacement board. OCuK can therefore give the customer a new board right away, as they know that they can get a new board in a short period of time from the manufacturer. ASrock attempt to repair the board. So the customer either waits a couple of weeks for the result or OCuK give the customer a new board and then probably get a repaired board a couple of weeks later, that they might be able to sell as B-grade for a loss, if they are lucky.

So the people running OCuK have decided it's more trouble than it's worth to stock this board. I would make the same decision in their position. It is the only true AGP+PCI-E board and will probably remain so, but it's just not worth selling.
 
Posting this from my Asrock'd system, fully up and running. No real problems, auto settings in BIOS are a bit crap (RAM at 153mhz, etc), manually set things and they are running as they should now. Not overly impressed with the CPU so far (3700+ San Diego), only increased 3dmark03 by 1000 over my previous system. Still, haven't clocked it yet.

Ang, I can understand their stance on this board, although a sale is a sale at the end of the day. It's not just the board either, it's the other bits you buy at the same time.

Oh, my BIOS was 1.20 out of the box.
 
Started playing with the clocking last night, got to 240x11 (2640) stable, RAM at 183?? for some reason. Still waiting for my K8 backplate to arrive then I can use my Tt Sonic Tower and try for 2.8 hopefully at 255x11, fingers crossed.
 
asrock + opteron?

Has anyone tried this board with one of the new 939 opterons yet ?
have ordered mine but will not arrive for 2 weeks :-(
 
MeddlE said:
Posting this from my Asrock'd system, fully up and running. No real problems, auto settings in BIOS are a bit crap (RAM at 153mhz, etc), manually set things and they are running as they should now. Not overly impressed with the CPU so far (3700+ San Diego), only increased 3dmark03 by 1000 over my previous system. Still, haven't clocked it yet.

Ang, I can understand their stance on this board, although a sale is a sale at the end of the day. It's not just the board either, it's the other bits you buy at the same time.

Oh, my BIOS was 1.20 out of the box.
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I bought the board from the first place in the UK to have it and everything else from OCuK. I don't think I'm the only person here to have done that, so I think OCuK aren't missing out on many sales of other items as a result of not stocking this motherboard. I think OCuK customers tend to buy from OCuK for preference. I expect most of their trade is repeat business.

Nice to see that ASrock are keeping the BIOS up to date on shipping boards.

3dMark2003...are you sure that it isn't now bottlenecking on something other than the CPU, e.g. the graphics card? That might be an explanation for the small increase.
 
System is;

A64 3700+ SD
Asrock 939
1GB Corsair PC3200
Asus X800XT PE AGP

Can't really see a bottle-neck there?

With the CPU at 2640 (240x11) and mem showing 188MHz I'm getting 12885 on 03. Not sure what I should be hoping to get, but got 11450 with the system in my sig.
 
silent said:
couldn't agree more!

now i just need to get a floppy disc to work so i can change the bios on mine to o/c :(

everytime i put the bios and flash tool on floppy, pc boots and says it don't recognise any bootable disc in drive. grrrrr.
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That's because you need to create a boot disk from within windows and boot from that. Then put in your disk with utility/bios on it and run the flash tool using the DOS command line.

I don't know if the procedure varies, but that's what I did a couple of years ago on my pc.
 
Netphreak said:
So I decided to try updating the drivers for all my PCI to PCI Bridge system devices in device manager and force them to use the ULi AGP Controller Driver.

And amazingly, it didn't crash. And when I restarted I could use AGP 8X with all AGP features enabled!

So atm in device manager I've got 5 AGP Controller 3.0's but I don't really care as this is progress.

I guess I'll try and fix it again when I get a X1800XL.
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I ended up doing the same as you! Even after a repair reinstall of windows!
 
hohum said:
That's because you need to create a boot disk from within windows and boot from that. Then put in your disk with utility/bios on it and run the flash tool using the DOS command line.

I don't know if the procedure varies, but that's what I did a couple of years ago on my pc.
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That will work but the best option is to get the 'Driver Free Disk For Bios Flashing' from bootdisk.com
 
Pizzaboy2003 said:
what HDD'S do you guys run with this Mobo on the SATAII POrt as i have nothing but problem with my samsung and maxtor maxlineIII hdd's run just fine on to orther sata ports.
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Ive had a hitachi 250 sata 2 running fine, but i know there are loads of sata incompatability with this board with any bios (cold boot etc)
 
Weirdly, my problem is only with warm boots. Cold boot, fine. Warm boot, HDD not detected 9 times out of 10.
 
Angilion said:
Weirdly, my problem is only with warm boots. Cold boot, fine. Warm boot, HDD not detected 9 times out of 10.
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and thats on the sataII Port , what hdd have you running on that becurse after last 3 hour paly around i found that it would show up in bio's but when all the times i went to do a install it whouls come up with a fault under instal .then i went unto doing it on the orther two and that whould be fine fist time windows load up i would put the sataII drivers on shut drown and move over, fist time it loaded up ok with my samsung but with load rest of drivers and did the reboot. Gone from bio and no matter how many times i tied to reboot it whould never show up in bio again ,Until i moved it to the orther two Ports

What hdd are you running ?

This is my only problem as this min i am running my 3800+ at 2600Mhz very sweet no problems there.
 
Samsung SpinPoint P SP2004C, for the low noise. It's on the SATA2 connector, but I'm running it in IDE mode. I had lots of trouble with the SATA2 drivers and decided to leave it as it is, on the basis that it works and I'm only losing NCQ. It wasn't detected at all until I set SATA driving to strong in the BIOS.

SATA2 support is flaky, but I got what I wanted with this board - AGP now, for the card I already had, and PCI-E ready for my next card.

It's a fairly decent board. Although space around the CPU socket looks cramped, it will take big coolers. I've got an Akasa EVO120 on it (great cooler, I can't hear it at minimum speed even if I take the side panel off) and I've tried an XP90 (just a test fit).

o/c was a little odd. At stock 1.40V, my 3000 wasn't stable at a 10% o/c, but with just 0.05V extra, it's stable with a straightforward 25% o/c on the base speed setting (which I'd like a single name for), 4x for the HTT links and 5/6ths memory divider. I could probably go higher if I did it methodically. I'm even getting my Crucial no-name CAS3 memory running fine at 3-3-3-8 1T with the slight resulting overclock (5/6ths of 250)
 
this min i am runing 270X9 with ram sat at 166(DDr333)2.5-3-3-7 1T on my 3800X2 and running nice and sweet ,quiet as i have the Zaman7700Aclu running low speed , i have no problem runing my two SataII Hdd (Samsung ,Maxtor ) on the two sata .
Bye the way what Bio's are you using as i know there is a few others bio's around
 
No. 1.21 doesn't add anything useful to me and I don't want to try beta BIOSes on a machine I use for work.

As I get older, I'm moving more towards the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought.
 
Hi There,

over the weekend i took delivery from Overclockers of a new X2 3800, Maxtor III 250GB SATA-II , Tagan TG530-U15 PSU, and SI-!20 HeatSink & some artic silver 5 - I've managed to get this rig up and running with my old corsairs PC2700 RAM , prime95 was stable for 8hours+ without error.

however if i use my new GeIL 2*512MB PC3200 UltraX-BH5 the PC wont POST - doesnt matter how many sticks i put in the board or in which ram slot, it just refuses to POST , i even tried slackening the RAM timings with my corsairs and then tried the GiEL memory , same result.

has any one else used this memory sucessfully or had issues with GiEL RAM ?

if i return it to Overclockers can anyone recommend some good peformance RAM that works with this Board ?

cheers in advance.
 
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