Monday, September 28th 2009
ASRock Innovates Socket 939 Motherboard with AMD 785G Chipset
This creation by ASRock is bound to surprise you. The motherboard specialist used a present-generation AMD 785G + SB710 chipset to drive a socket 939 motherboard, called the ASRock 939A785GMH128M. That's right, socket 939, supporting some of the oldest processors in the Athlon 64 and Sempron 64 series. The socket 939 CPU is powered by a 5-phase power circuit. It is wired to four DDR memory slots, supporting dual-channel DDR memory at speeds of up to DDR-400 MHz.
The AMD 785G chipset packs an ATI Radeon HD 4200 class integrated graphics processor with 128 MB SidePort memory, while the SB710 southbridge provides 5 internal SATA 3 Gb/s ports, and one eSATA port. The expansion slots on this micro-ATX motherboard include one PCI-Express 2.0 x16, one PCI-E x1, and two PCI slots. The IGP connects to its displays using DVI-D, HDMI, and D-Sub. 8-channel audio, and gigabit Ethernet make for the rest of it. There is no word on the availability or pricing as yet.
Source:
OCWorkbench
The AMD 785G chipset packs an ATI Radeon HD 4200 class integrated graphics processor with 128 MB SidePort memory, while the SB710 southbridge provides 5 internal SATA 3 Gb/s ports, and one eSATA port. The expansion slots on this micro-ATX motherboard include one PCI-Express 2.0 x16, one PCI-E x1, and two PCI slots. The IGP connects to its displays using DVI-D, HDMI, and D-Sub. 8-channel audio, and gigabit Ethernet make for the rest of it. There is no word on the availability or pricing as yet.
64 Comments on ASRock Innovates Socket 939 Motherboard with AMD 785G Chipset
You are probably looking at one of the best s939 overclocking boards now. What I find even more interesting is how they used the 785G to incorporate a 16x2.0 slot for 939 users.
Very innovative.
is there some market for this?
So while it's interesting, and shows the flexibility of AMD's chipset architecture - when could it be cost effective to go with this as an upgrade?
I may actually know two people who would be interesting in this if the price is right....say $70 to $85.
So, a good idea but only if the price is right... £30-ish
Please ignore....incorrect information. No excuse, that was just a fail.
I skipped every two generations of sockets on AMD. My first socket (excluding slots) was the K7 (XP). Then, I skipped s754 and went to s939. Finally, I've skipped AM2 and went to AM2+. I'll probably skip AM3 and wait it out for AM3+ (if there'll be such a thing)!
Socket 939 rigs were great, and still offer very acceptable performance today, especially for most home users that don't play games. The problem is that the parts tend to fail after so long, motherboards being a notorious failure point that is usually difficult to find a replacement for on EOL hardware, and even harder to find a cheap and good replacement.
The fact that s939 was the short period where AMD actually performed better than Intel, and many system integrators started switching to using AMD. There was a relative flood of s939 Pre-builts hitting the market. Pre-builts with weak motherboards, that tend to blow caps after 3-4 years of use... I still see one of two of these in my shop a week...
So this gives people the option to replace just the failed motherboard, and keep the good processor and RAM, instead of replacing the whole machine. People don't like replacing the entire machine if they don't have to, especially when the current machine still fills the need.I don't know, I skipped 754 and went straight from Socket A to 939. Man, I still miss that 939 machine...Operon 148, 2GB DDR-500, x800GTO2...the glory days!!! Probably still my favorite build.
www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=P4i945GC&s=