ASrock AM2 CPU board can be said as one of the most innovative product of the year 2006. The AM2 CPU Board has also drawn lots of discussions on the unit and its practical use. Looks like ASrock has delivered a product that is innovative and works as promised. AM2 card can also be used on the K8 Upgrade series of boards (check ASrock website).

In the performance tests, we compared it with the ASrock AM2NF4G-SATA2. Although it loses out slightly in certain benchmarks, it perform marvelously well, I would say. This is because if you were to consider the longer trace lengths and latencies introduced, we would have expected a bigger difference in performance. The benchmarks shows us otherwise.

Installation is straightforward if you follow the instructions booklet of your ASrock mainboard. Set the jumpers accordingly and you are almost done. The only annoying thing is that you might need to remove the Socket 939 Retention unit as it blocks the heatsink.

As AM2 heatsinks are not out in the market, in our showcase, we used a old Socket 939 which is quite big and bulky. Some of the S939 heatsinks will work with AM2 retention unit provided the clip has the centre groove, otherwise you might need to purchase a new heatsink. As for the mounting of the AM2 card horizontally in a casing, it shouldn't be a problem as the metal bracket must be fixed on with mounting screw to maintain horizontal.

We tested the overclocking of the CPU on the AM2 CPU board. With the 4000+, we were able to do 6x300MHz easily using BIOS 1.9 on ASrock 939Dual_SATA2. Another tests allows us to push the CPU to 240MHz x 10 running stable. 260x10 POSTED but ended up in blue screen. I think this is largely due to the max vcore selectable as 1.40v. iif it can be adjusted, I think hitting 2.9GHz on this processor shouldn't be a problem at all.

Overall, most readers and myself are excited over this AM2 CPU Board. If you have questions, feel free to visit www.ocworkbench.com/asrock and discuss.

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