The ASrock 939S56-M is the first retail SiS 756 solution out in the market. From the benchmark numbers, we were quite surprised by the numbers. Paired up with the 6600GT, it has outperformed or has similar results compared to boards based on other chipsets. In fact, in a number of tests, it even surpassed the performance of the reference board. This is all done at default of 200.00MHz.

Features wise, this board has very basic feature set. The board, based on the SiS 756 / 965L chipsets supports the Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64x2, 64, FX, Sempron processors with a FSB of 1GHz of HTT. It supports cool n quiet, 4 GB of Dual channel DDR 400. It has 1 PCi-E x16 slot and 1 PCI-Ex1 slot. In terms of expansion, this board offers 2 IDE channels for connecting 4 IDE HDDs and 2 SATA ports for SerialATA 1.5Gb/s, RAID 0,1,JBOD, SATA HDD Hotplug. 7.1 ch audio is supported using ALC850 codec. It has 4 ready to be used USB 2.0 ports with 4 more thru expansion cables. There is no GbE but it is equipped with 10/100 Ethernet LAN.

Previous SiS boards never locked the bus PCI or used a divider which makes it difficult to overclock. SiS 756 based ASrock 939S56-M changes that and is equipped with a ASync option which locks the PCI/PCI-E. In the overclocking department, the production bios 1.00 comes with a number of overclocking options which you would not want to miss out. Most overclockers will be delighted to find the voltage adjustments of DIMM, vchipset, FSB range up to 300MHz, multiplier from 8x to 25x. (See gallery for more). ASync 166,133,100 operation. HTT frequency can be set to 1GHz, 800MHz, 200 MHz, width can be 8 or 16 bits.

Latest : The minor issues in the BIOS is solved and we present our results of finding the maximum FSB(HTT).

To test how far we can push the max FSB(HTT)*, I lowered the multiplier to the lowest which is 8x.
CPU Vcore is 1.55v, DRAM set to DDR333 to ensure that ram will not affect in our mission to find the max FSB(HTT). HTT is set to 4x (800MHz).

THe FX-53 is put to the test and it can run stable at 285 x 8 with ram running at around DDR450 since it is running ASynC DDR333. That is to say the HTT link is actually running 4x285 = 1.14GHz.

*FSB should be referred to as base frequency generated by the CLKGEN and not FSB or HTT. HTT should refer to the speed of the HTT link and not the base frequency as reported in CPU-Z.

Installation of the board is quite straightforward. The only thing to take note is that you could set the SATA to non-RAID for Windows installation. The default is RAID mode. As there are still some issues with the BIOS, we will update this page when we receive a newer BIOS.

Overall, this mATX board is definitely a board to consider if you are thinking of a stable and fast board paired up with SATA RAID Hot pluggable. The performance is impressive and comparable to the more expensive nF4 chipset minus the features of SATA II, Firewall etc, GbE.

Pricing (US)

Pricing (UK)

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Pros

• USB 2.0 
• 8 ch audio
• ASync settings

Cons

• No 1394a
• No SATA II
• No GbE
• South Bridge is HOT

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.