ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2

With our overclock reaching in the area of 270-290MHz FSB before it ultimately fell prey to stability problems, we were certainly pleased considering this motherboard was from ASRock -- a name that is synonymous for their cheap yet reliable motherboards. While this motherboard may be one of the best overclockable ASRock motherboards we have yet come across, it certainly did not sport the best Linux compatibility. Among the issues that faced this ULI M1697 + M1695 solution was the integrated LAN ASIC failing to cooperate with Fedora Core 5, and most importantly -- the failure for NVIDIA's SLI to run under Linux. ASRock presently makes a Windows patch available for their ForceWare drivers to enable SLI technology on this ULI-based motherboard, but when it comes to Linux such a formula seizes to exist. Keep in mind, for our testing we were using the 1.0-8751 Beta drivers, so it does not look like NVIDIA is opening up the Chipset options anytime in the near future -- unless of course, the feature was to be cracked. With Linux SLI being inoperable on this 939SLI32-eSATA2 one of its key features is rendered virtually useless. While this is not the solution if you are interested in running the system in a multi-GPU configuration, for those staunch budget enthusiasts this is yet another viable possibility. Of course, the system's performance with the ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 is limiting in some fashions as we had seen in the benchmarks when compared against the Tyan Tomcat K8E-SLI. Some of the motherboard's other key features include integrated Firewire, Gigabit LAN (that is if you can get it working), AMD AM2 CPU Socket support (requires expansion card), Serial ATA 2.0, and 5.1 channel HD audio.