ASRock 939NF4G-SATA2

Performance:

For comparison purposes, we had run the ASRock 939NF4G-SATA2 up against the feature-rich and Linux-happy Tyan Tomcat K8E-SLI. The Tyan Tomcat K8E-SLI S2866 boasts NVIDIA's nForce Professional 2200 Chipset and all around has been an incredibly reliable motherboard under Linux primarily for workstation usage. With the nForce 410 being an entry-level offering from NVIDIA, the 939NF4G-SATA2 is not designed for achieving any breathtaking overclocks. In fact, in our tests the maximum stable frequencies we attained were 2025MHz using a 225MHz FSB and 9x multiplier. Below is the complete rundown of system components used during testing.

The NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT and NVIDIA GeForce 6100 were both used with the ASRock motherboard testing, to demonstrate the capabilities of the NV44 integrated graphics under Linux. As we had mentioned after finishing our ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 testing, with Fedora Core 5 coming out towards the end of last month, some of our testing procedures have been altered slightly to ensure accuracy and reflect the changes made beyond Fedora Core 4. We are in the process of finalizing all of these new benchmarks and practices for use with Fedora Core 5. The benchmarks used were Enemy Territory, Doom 3, HDparm, Gzip Compression, LAME Compilation, LAME Encoding, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Sparse-Vector Scalar Product, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Singular Value Decomposition, and FreeBench.

When it came to the compatibility with the motherboard, there are a few problems to note. When using Fedora Core 5, the Anaconda installer would operate without any problems. However, upon completing the installation and booting the kernel, we were unable to successfully proceed. Constantly we were presented with the message of "hda: cdrom_pc_intr: The drive appears confused (ireason = 0x02)". This error would occur on booting Fedora Core 5 until we had completely removed the optical drive from the system. We had tried numerous Linux configurations, changing IDE channels, toggling BIOS settings, and even swapping CD drives and in all of these situations, we were plagued by this error. The problem had occurred with both the x86_64 and i686 FC5 binaries. We expect this to be a compatibility issue with the nForce 410 Chipset and Fedora Core 5. The other Linux problem we had experienced with the ASRock 939NF4G-SATA2 was the cursor failing to appear immediately after the fresh installation of Fedora Core 5. This issue was corrected after installing the proprietary NVIDIA drivers for the GeForce 6100 integrated graphics.