If you are going to be building a fast system and are looking for a motherboard that could be the heart and lungs of that machine, look no further than this motherboard that has everything you could need.

This Socket 939 motherboard which is suitable for all newer AMD Athlon 64 chips, has everything you could need for a new computer.

It’s features include…

• 2 pairs of dual ddr memory
• 2 IDE headers
• 6 SATA header (2 from one chip, 4 from another)
• nVidia nForce4 SLI chipset
• PCI express with SLI support
• Creative sound blaster audio built-in
• LAN support (up to 1000MBs)

The Socket allows use of all of AMD’s new Athlon 64 chips including the new dual core models that are around. My recommendation would be the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ with Venice Core as the best value for money in getting cpu processor.

The DDR memory can be used in pairs, so make sure that you buy dual channel DDR memory to take advantage of that. It can take two pairs, which means that up to 4GB of memory can be installed. If you plan on doing some overclocking, make sure to get some that can run at higher speeds.

The IDE headers can support all of the speeds.

There are 2 chips on this board for the SATA support. One of them connects to the pair of SATA headers and the other one works for the other 4 that are together. Combined with the ability to have hardware driven RAID in modes 0, 0+1 or 1 you will not lack much for future upgrades.

One of the greatest features of this board, which is especially applicable to people who like to play games is the SLI support. SLI allows two PCI express cards to be used together. The two cards share each others features and result in nearly twice the speed and power of a single card working alone. This technology was developed by nVidia, so your graphics card would have to support this technology and of course be an nVidia card.

The board is rounded off with the LAN support and built-in audio, which is touted as having superb quality for a built-in sound solution. Many of the first built-in sound cards were terrible, but this one rivals many high quality add-on models. Of course the board also includes USB 2.0 support.

This all sounds impressive but the board really shines when it is put to the test and pushed to it’s limits.

Just like the other components of the computer the motheboard is a subject of overclocking. Seeing as overclocking involves increasing the bus speed, it only makes sense that the board should be able to handle more than just the standard amount (which is up to 200MHz for this board ie 400MHz memory)

In testing this particular board was able to handle over 300MHz, meaning 600MHz memory speeds. That is 50% over what it’s stated maximum is. Very good for a nice overclock.

For me, the best parts of this board are…

• Almost everything is included
• The quality of those extras is high
• Overclocking potential is good

Even without the overclocking ability, this board certainly provides enough of the parts extras that are needed for almost any computer. A great buy and certainly one of my top picks for my next computer.

Get it online right now at the internets most trusted retailer

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2005 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Motherboards, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.