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With the arriving of year 2006, ASRock is all geared up to surprise you with a series of motherboards that are creative, considerate and cost-effective! The first one to introduce here is 775XFire-eSATA2, which is the first 945PL MB supporting CrossFire™ Technology. It even supports external SATAII I/O port, High Definition Audio, and is Hardware Ready for Windows® Vista!
ASRock 775XFire-eSATA2
Jan 16, 2006, Taipei
If you are expecting new and interesting board from ASRock for 2006, you wouldn't be disappointed. ASRock has announced 945PL motherboard at the very beginning of the year. ASRock 775XFire-eSATA2 is an amazing motherboard. It supports many features that can't possibly be realized on 945PL motherboards for other brands. For one thing, it is the first 945PL motherboard that supports CrossFire™ Technology! You probably have heard of CrossFire™ VGA boards running on ATI® CrossFire™ or Intel® 955X, 975X motherboards, but for 945PL, this is the first time.
Before getting into the exciting part, let me brief you the specification of this amazing board. ASRock 775XFire-eSATA2 supports Intel® Dual Core Pentium D and Pentium 4 / Celeron D, and even Presler and Cedar Mill processors, FSB 800/533 MHz, dual channel DDRII533 x 4 DIMMs, PCI Express x 16 slot, one additional AGI Express slot to adopt 2nd PCI Express x 16 VGA card, and other PCI Express x4, x2, x1 interface cards. As for the support of hard disk type, 775XFire-eSATA2 supports 4 Serial ATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, supporting RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5 and Intel® Matrix Storage), and 2 x eSerial ATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors (shared with 2 SATAII ports). And of course, they are hot-plug supported.
eSATAII is another great feature that represents 775XFire-eSATA2. This motherboard supports eSATAII interface, the external SATAII specification. eSATAII allows you to enjoy the SATAII function provided by the I/O of your computer, offering the high speed data transfer rate up to 3.0Gb/s, and the convenient mobility like USB. eSATAII is equipped with Hot Plug capability that enables you to exchange drives easily. For example, with eSATAII interface, you may simply plug your eSATAII device to the eSATAII ports instead of opening your chassis to exchange your SATAII hard disk. Currently, on the market, the data transfer rate of USB 2.0 is up to 480Mb/s, and for IEEE 1394a is up to 400Mb/s. However, eSATAII provides a much faster data transfer rate than USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394a, and still keeps the convenience of Hot Plug feature. Therefore, on the basis of the advantageous transfer speed and the facilitating mobile capability, in the near future, eSATAII will replace USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394a to be a trend for external interface.
The static below also shows that SATAII HDD with external SATAII interface excels other interfaces in transfer speed with considerable figures.
Another highlight of 775XFire-eSATA2 is its supports of Windows® Vista. To be able to upgrade your system to the upcoming Microsoft® Windows® Vista, 775XFire-eSATA2 is hardware ready for you. 775XFire-eSATA2 is equipped with High Definition audio, and you may just install a VGA graphics card with DirectX 9.0 to support the new operating system.
We run some tests comparing the VGA performance of ASRock 945PL and Intel® 975X ref. MB, and found that the graphics performance of 775XFire-eSATA2 exceeds 975X ref. MB impressively.
| Configuration | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel® Pentium 930 | ||
| RAM | APACER DDRII533 512MB * 2 | ||
| HDD | Hitachi 80G | ||
| OS | Windows® XP Professional + SP2 | ||
| 3DMark2005 | |||
| Test items | ASRock 945PL MB | Intel® 975X ref. MB | |
| CrossFire™ | Single VGA card | Single VGA card | |
| ATI® X1300 | 4350 | 2897 | 2861 |
| ATI® X1600 | 7050 | 5094 | 5004 |
CrossFire™ appearing here is a registered trademark of ATI® Technologies Inc., and is used only for identification or explanation and to the owners' benefit, without intent to infringe.
