ASRock has a history of creating cheap, yet interesting boards -- usually as a bridge between old and new technologies. The 939SLI32 is no different -- this board features a slot that is reminiscent of AGP, yet it's actually a socket for a riser board that can be inserted for socket AM2 support, which can be purchased separately from ASRock should you wish to upgrade your processor in the future. This affects the layout of the board somewhat, with a huge number of jumpers now adorning the PCB.

Speaking of layout, the only glaring problem is that if you have a dual slot cooler on your video card, or go the SLI route then you’ll have significant troubles trying to plug in your optical drives, as the IDE slots are rather poorly placed behind and parallel with the PCI-E x16 slots. Another oddity of the board layout is the 20 pin power connector -- so make sure you have a power supply capable of supporting this older standard.

By far the most appealing feature of the board is its dual 16x PCI-e, especially considering the premium you usually pay for such boards. This affordability is most likely due to the fact that the board features the ULI M1695 and 1697 north and southbridges respectively, instead of the nForce 4 chipset.

Four SATA II ports are onboard, however two can be re-routed via SATA cables internally to provide two e-SATA II ports if you wish. Legacy support is still in full swing here too, with two IDE ports, FDD, and a parallel and serial port.

Four USB and one Firewire port are available at the back, but as usual you can add another two USB ports and one Firewire via headers on the motherboard.

5.1 sound is provided by the Realtek ALC660 codec, which will do the job just fine for the majority of users. The whole board is passively cooled too, meaning silent operation for the anti-noise brigade.

Despite its budget origins, you really can't go wrong with this board, as it performs reasonably close to the competing nForce 4 (200 points less in 3DMark06, amounting to an insignificant 1 frame less in Half-Life 2) . If you need to save your pennies but still demand the best in performance, there's no reason to pass this one up.