ASrock 775Dual-915GL is something of a surprise to me as ASrock engineered something innovative and it displayed their strong RD in product design. As we received the board, we were amazed on how the AGI 8x and AGI Express and how it works. For those familiar with AGI on the previous generation of boards, it is not surprising. As for AGI Express, ASrock made use of the PCI-E support on the south bridge and make it a PCI-E x 4 which provided adequate bandwidth for most PCI-E cards.

In our test, we compared the performance to the EPoX 915P mainboard which supports native PCI-E x16. As this is a hybrid board which supports AGP, PCI-E and integrated graphics, we benchmark all the available options and compared the performance.

As it is integrated graphics, the results are reasonable for those who just needs another PC for basic wordprocesing or even simple 3D games. The results are actually better than my previous experiences with integrated video. With the PCI-made AGP slot (AGI), the 9800XT seems to be a bit underperformed. Well, part of the reason being that PCI bus is made into a AGP. The bottleneck is still with the PCI bus. I would reckon that fitting it with a lower end AGP card would be a better option for the AGP Slot.

If you have read the previous pages, you would have noticed that the PCI-E performance difference between the full fledge 915P versus derived PCI-E AGI Express isn't that much. In fact, the minimum difference registered was 0.06% and maximum difference was 3%. So, can the PCI-E x 4 performance can really match the PCI-E x 16 available on the 915P for a 6600GT card, the answer is YES if you would tweak the PCI-E bus speed slightly above 100MHz. The option can be found in the BIOS.

ch the performance of existing 915P PCI-E performance, you can either increase the PCI-E bus speed beyond 100MHzThis technology was present on the P4Dual-915GL too

ASrock Surround Video

Putting performance aside, something that surprises me is the capability of the board to support up to 5 displays simultaneously. 2 ports from AGP card 2 ports from PCI-E and 1 port from the on board 915GL integrated video. What are the practical use of that? Well, one of our users just posted in our forum that he had seen stock broking firms uses that to see the stock updates. I would say it would be good for developers that needs multiple windows and debug screens.

This board does not have much options for overclocking. In fact, we are not very successful going beyond 210MHz.

Overall, it is an interesting board and it shows the engineering power of ASrock. In fact, I have spoken to ASrock about this product and I find that it might be better if they implement native AGP 8x using 865G chipset. That might be a better approach. For those of you who are using the P4 Socket 478, you might want to consider the P4Dual-915GL.

Pricing

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Pros

• Multi graphics port support
• Surround display
• 8 ch audio
• USB 2.0 

Cons

• Performance is average
• No Diagnostic LEDs

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.