ASRock Conroe945G-DVI

It's a Core 2 Duo motherboard, Jim, but not as we know it.

There are a few quirks with this ASRock board, but then, it wouldn’t be an ASRock board if there weren’t. For example, it’s a super old 945G chipset, and limits your RAM speed to 667MHz. Oh, and it has a 20 pin power connector. Yet once again, because it’s ASRock it does something funky – it runs Core 2 Duo chips.
The G in 945G means onboard graphics, in this case the Intel GMA 950 through a D-Sub connector – yet in another bout of ASRock eccentricity, there’s also a DVI expansion card that can be plugged into the PCI-E x16 slot for use with newer monitors, or if you wish to use dual monitors.

Meanwhile, the utterly feckless HDMR slot is still there, and like CNR and AMR before it, it simply refuses to die that horrible death that it truly deserves – preferably using boiling oil, spears, and a half shaved Peruvian monkey.

There’s a marginally less useless PCI-E x1 slot, and two PCI slots to fill out the party.

Options through the BIOS, as to be expected, aren’t huge, with things like DDR2 voltage being limited to ‘high’, ‘middle’ and ‘low’. Nonetheless the board happily reached 299MHz FSB with our Core 2 X6800, resulting in a speed of 3.29GHz from the default 2.93GHz, as high as the Intel 975X reference board allowed us. Scrumptious.

Except for the obviously lower memory benchmarks due to the speed limit imposed by the board (resulting in 1.2GB/s lost in Sandra bandwidth benchmarks), the Conroe945G-DVI performed admirably, cheerfully keeping up with Gigabyte’s 965P-DQ6 in every category.

If you’re budget minded, want to get in the Conroe game for cheap, need to run
a small server or just want another cheap box for Folding@Home, it’s hard to bypass this plucky little offering from ASRock.
Give it a go, you’ll be surprised.