ASrock P4Dual-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 chipset 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 other 865PE and another ATi 9100 board. Well as the AGP slot is derived from the PCI slot, we didn't expect it to be a great performer. The more interesting one would be the PCI-E interface which runs at x4. In our test, we noticed that the speed difference though slower than an equivalent board running a similarly clocked processor and the same graphics card within acceptable levels.

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. We tried out P4 2.4C and is disappointed that it can't go beyond 210MHz. This P4 2.4c can easily do 250MHz on most 865PE boards.

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.

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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.