ASRock ConRoe1333-DVI/H

BIOS:

The ConRoe1333-DVI/H is another ASRock motherboard with limited options in its American Megatrends Inc (AMI) BIOS. The BIOS does support a CPU host frequency up to 500MHz and VCCM/VDDQ voltages of auto, high, middle (VCCM), and low. The AMI BIOS does monitor the CPU and motherboard temperatures as well as the CPU and chassis fan speed. Voltages are monitored for the Vcore, +3.30V, +5.00V, and +12.00V.

Performance:

The ASRock ConRoe1333-DVI/H with its Intel 945G + ICH7 combination had passed all of our Linux and Solaris compatibility tests and we had no troubles with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and Fedora 7 Moonshine. The hardware used with these tests was an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400, 2GB of OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2 memory, Western Digital 80GB Serial ATA hard drive, and an ATI Radeon X1950PRO 256MB.

We have already conducted some benchmarks with the Intel GMA 950 graphics found on this motherboard and that article can be read here as it is compared to the ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB with both graphics solutions being powered by open-source X.Org drivers. For seeing how well the ConRoe1333-DVI/H motherboard can perform we had compared it to the NVIDIA nForce 650-backed ASUS P5N-E SLI with an Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon daily build using the Linux 2.6.22-8-generic kernel, X server 1.3.0, and GCC version 4.1.3. Linux benchmarks included hdparm timed disk reads, Gzip compression, LAME compilation, LAME encoding, and RAMspeed.