Computex 2005 Coverage Day 0
Bluetooth 31 May 2005

ASrock

ASrock has always been in the forefront of bringing technological breakthroughs in their motherboard designs. Firstly, they brought us the K7 series of boards based on the SiS 748 and then we have the Combo series of boards e.g. Combo-Z. Right after which we see upgradeable boards allowing one to upgrade to a new socket type by purchasing a riser card. P4Dual-915GL, 775Dual-915GL is another innovation this year, which allows one to use a PCI-E card and the integrated core and AGP 8x.

At Computex 2005, ASrock will showcase a number of new boards that will probably be good enough to tide you over for the next 1 or 2 yrs when new CPUs are released as the boards are upgradeable.

In the Dual Series, ASrock introduces a new board model 939Dual-M2. 939Dual-M2 has interesting specs as follows :

939Dual-M2

• ULi M1695/M1567 chipset
• FSB 1000MHz (2.0GT/s), DC-DDR400
• HTT, AMD cool n quiet
• ASrock Future CPU Port for upgrading to M2 in the future
• PCI Express x16
• Native AGP 8x
• PCI Express x1
• Hybrid booster for safe overclocking
• PCI Express based SATA 2 controller on board
• Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s RAID 0,1,JBOD
• 7.1 channel audio, 10/100 Ethernet
• ASrock 8 Ch I/O, 4 USB ready to be used

We have reviewed the ULi M1695/M1567 before and the results were impressive and comparable to NF3 (AGP) and NF4 (PCI-E).

K8Upgrade-761GX

This new board based on SiS 761GX chipset also allows you to upgrade to future CPU. The specs are as follows :

• Socket 754, FSB 800MHz (1.6GT/s), DDR400
• ASrock Future CPU port for upgrade to 939 or M2
• Integrated Graphics
• PCI Express x 16 VGA interface
• Serial ATA 1.6Gb/s SATA HDD_HotPlug, RAID 0,1,JBOD
• 7.1 ch audio, 10/100 Ethernet LAN
• 8 ch I/o with 4 ready to be used USB 2.0 ports

These two boards can all be upgraded to Socket M2 in the near future. The older board K8Upgrade-1689 can also be upgraded to Socket M2 through the upgrade slot M2CPU.

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