In the Advanced Section of the BIOS we find the CPU options and memory timing adjustments. The motherboard clock speed goes as high as 400 MHz, CPU voltage can be increased to 1.55V. There are a whole list of memory timing adjustments to adjust - CAS Latency, RAS to CAS, Command Rate, etc.

In the chipset settings section we can adjust the HyperTransport frequency between the CPU and Northbridge, and between the Northbridge and Southbridge. Voltages adjustments are simply listed as "Ultra High" and "High", not very descriptive.

Overclocking Capabilities Limited

Overclocking Results:

stock max. oc motherboard speed: 200 mhz 245 mhz if you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

ASRock motherboards are not designed for value-oriented consumers, but this board does incorporate some overclocking capabilities. First though, the CPU clock multiplier was set to 6x and memory frequency to 133 MHz mode. This way neither the processor or memory would hold the motherboard back in terms of overclocking.

Starting at 200 MHz, the motherboard clock speed was increased in 5 MHz intervals. At 245 MHz the motherboard started to act up and anything higher caused it to fail booting into Windows.

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 motherboard test system was configured for benchmarking, including the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions are indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this motherboard is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system processor: amd Athlon64 4000+ Clock Speed: 12 x 200 MHz = 2.4 GHz Motherboard: ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 Albatron K8X890 Pro II (K8T890) MSI RS480M2-IL (RS480) ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 (ULi M1695) Chaintech Zenith VNF4 Ultra (NF4 Ultra) MSI K8N Diamond Plus (NF4 SLI x16) DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR (NF4 SLI) Epox 9NPA+ SLI (NF4 SLI) ECS KN1 Extreme SLI (NF4 SLI) DFI LANPartyUT NF4 SLI-DR Expert (NF4 SLI) Videocard: MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E Memory: 2x 512MB OCZ Gold GX PC3500 DDR Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: Athlon64 4000+ Reference Heatsink Software Setup: Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware 6.70 nVIDIA Forceware 81.95 Benchmarks: SYSMark 2004 Business Winstone 2004 Content Creation 2004 Super Pi SiSoft Sandra 2005 PCMark04 PCMark05 3DMark2001SE 3DMark05 AquaMark3 Comanche 4 X2: The Threat UT2003 UT2004 Doom 3