It is a surprise move by ASRock to use VIA chipset for its AM2 board. As usual, ASRock wouldn't go for it if there aren't treasures hidden in the CF stepping chipset. As you can see from the benchmarks, the performance is almost on par with the other two platforms using high end chispets NV 590 SLI and ATi RD 580.

In terms of features, this board supports the new AM2 socket 940 processors. With 1GHz HT and Cool'n'quiet. It comes with 4xDDRII-800 slots which can accomodate up to 8GB of DDRII memory in total. On top of that, it has  1 x PCI Express x16 slot and 2 x PCI Express x1 slot. The board comes with 2 x Serial ATA 1.5 Gb/s, support RAID 0, 1, JBOD and "Hot Plug" functions. To enhance the board, ASRock embedded two SATA II ports via the Jmicron JMB363 chipset and GbE using Realtek GbE controller. The mainboard also comes with a HDMI_SPDIF header, providing SPDIF audio output to HDMI VGA card, allows the system to connect HDMI Digital TV/projector/LCD devices. Compared to the AM2V890 board, this board do not come with an open ended 4x slot. So you can't run multichrome on this board using S25 or S27 cards.

In terms of overclocking, the board has the basic options like voltage for dimm and cpu, cpu freq range of up to 300MHz and a up to 25x multiplier option. Most importantly, this board is AMD Live Ready. There are options to lock PCI and PCIe too. For overclocking options, please see Gallery for BIOS options. In our overclocking test, we set the HT multiplier to 4x (800MHz) and set the CPU multiplier to 10x, CPU Vcore to 1.4v and push the CPU CLK to 280MHz. Guess what, the system went into WindowsXP  at 2.8GHz and it is stable running with the Corsair pair at its SPD.

Overall, I am impressed by the performance and o/c of this board based on the VIA K8T890 CF stepping chipset. This is definitely a higher end board compared to the AM2V890-VSTA. Although it has GbE and SATA II, it didn't come with 1394 and eSATA ports. Similar to the AM2V890, this board uses the VIA VT8237A which is abit dated. ASRock would have paired it up with the newer VIA South bridge.

Pricing (US)

Pricing (UK)

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Pros

• Hot Plug SATA
• SATA II RAID (Jmicron)
• GbE

Cons

• No eSATA
• No 1394

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.