Fan Noise

There are no active fans on the ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2, so there is no fan noise.

Overclocking

Overclocking this motherboard was very easy. The only drawback is that you may need to do a voltmod to get CPU voltages beyond 1.45V out of the board. The voltmod is described here, it is exactly the same as on the 939Dual-SATA2.

In order to find out what the board can do without being held back by CPU or memory, the multiplier was set to x5 and the memory was run at the 3:2 divider.



With an overclock of 327 MHz this board can definitely compete with the "real" overclocking boards.

To do our real-world overclocking at 2700 MHz, an FSB of 300 MHz is required. On the previous 939Dual-SATA2 there was an artificial BIOS limit which made the board very unstable after 275 MHz.
With the 939SLI32-eSATA2 this is gone. Overclocking is now extremely easy:

• Go into BIOS
• Set FSB to 300 MHz
• Set VCore to a value where the CPU is stable
• Drop the HTT bus multiplier to x3 or x4
• Set memory divider to 133 MHz, so memory runs at 200 MHz
• Save and quit

That's it. The board worked rock stable, there were no issues at all. Truly impressive. Even if you set a configuration in which the motherboard does not boot - no problem. If the POST can not be completed, the board will automatically reboot after about 1 second and come back with defaults. This does not change any of your BIOS settings, so you can go back into the BIOS and change the one setting that caused the problem.
I found this self-detection test the best I ever experienced on ANY motherboard. Even many high-end overclocker boards can not compete here. Either they hang sometimes or you have to hold the insert key, or even clear the CMOS. During all benchmarking and testing of the 939SLI32-eSATA2 I never had to do this once. Even in a situation where the system got into a half stable state where it would make it through the VGA initialization but then would hang at the POST screen there were no problems. After resetting the system it came back with safe temporary settings.



Inside the BIOS are also quite a few memory timings you can change, good enough for most people in my opinion. What I don't like is that two voltage options are labeled with "Normal" and "High". Real numbers would be more useful.