ASRock 775Dual-915GL

Overclocking:

It was not until the 939Dual-SATA2 release that budget-minded enthusiasts considered ASRock for their overclocking needs. Not only is it possible to pass the 275MHz HTT with this motherboard but volt mods are possible to raise the VCore to 1.550V and VDIMM up to 3.30V. Unfortunately, these overclocking possibilities are not as endless when it comes to the 775Dual-915GL. When we had overclocked our test system, we were unable to surpass a FSB of 218MHz. When pushing the frequency any higher, the system would fail to boot even if the VCCM and VDDQ were set to high. Thus the Pentium 4 530 maxed out at 3.27GHz (218 x 15) and the memory was running at DDR-436 at 2-3-2-5 timings. Obviously, this overclock is limited by the ASRock motherboard, as using the same CPU we have easily been able to push it past 4GHz on air.

Performance:

For comparison purposes today, in order to see how the 775Dual-915GL can truly perform, we will be running it up against the MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum, Tyan Tomcat i915G S5120, and ASRock 775Dual-880Pro. All of these motherboards for comparison are based off the i915 Grantsdale Chipset with the exclusion of the 775Dual-880Pro. The 775Dual-880Pro is based off the VIA PT880 Pro + 8237R but it comes equipped with many of the same features as the 775Dual-915GL such as AGI Express, and other ASRock exclusives that should make the motherboard a fine example for comparison purposes. Below is our complete list of hardware components used in the system as well as the software configuration with SuSE 10.0 OSS.

When it comes to the ASRock 775Dual-915GL, we are pleased to report that there was no compatibility issues with a fresh install of OpenSuSE 10.0, all of the onboard components were detected and operational. Of course ASRock does not use any proprietary ASICs, like Abit with their uGuru, so there was nothing special to point out with the installation. When it came time to use LM_Sensors, all of the sensors were detected and reporting accurate numbers. There did however seem to be some compatibility issues with ASRock's AGI Express and NVIDIA's GeForce 6800GT PCI-E 256MB. When installing the card, stability issues plagued us, however, when switching over to the 6600GT 128MB these issues were eliminated. For benchmarking, we continue to use our standard set of motherboard benchmarks that consist of Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Quake 4, HDparm, Gzip, LAME Compilation, LAME Encoding, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Sparse-Vector Scalar Product & Opstone Singular Value Decomposition, and FreeBench. As always, our standard set of benchmarking practices applied and on the following pages with the results is the benchmark versions used as well as the specific program setup. In addition to the other Tyan, MSI, and ASRock motherboards used for comparison we also ran the same set of benchmarks while the ASRock was mildly overclocked at 3.27GHz (218 x 15) and DDR-436MHz at 2-3-2-5.