ASRock 775Dual-VSTA

this is a great mobo i bought two and i didnt have problem yet. Very stable

Any reviews I've seen show a 2-10% performance drop over other boards (even other AsRocks) due to the older technology. Great if you really need the functionality, but I'd avoid if you can upgrade memory/GPU as well. Not quite the gem the 939 DUAL-SATA was.
Synergy6

It means I can keep everything but the cpu and mobo, any other option I bin my memory, ATA 133 hard disks, PSU, gfx (basically the other option is a whole new PC)

Re the PSU - this takes the old 20 pin mobo connector, I can even re use my old but good 500W PSU  

In that case, yes, I would recommend it. Just don't be surprised if you eventually upgrade and get slightly slower performance compared to otherwise similar systems, that's all.
Synergy6

Ei guys im planning to get this mobo nxt week



just a question becoz i have a 7300GT ddr3 PCI-E and i want to know if the PCI-E 4x of this mobo will slow down the performance of the 7300GT?


Tnx in advance

Not in ze slightest.
Synergy6

In case you haven't seen this article...
http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2814&p=1

"Our results confirm that there is not a throughput performance penalty for using AGP over PCI Express on the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA. In fact, just the opposite is true in this case as our AGP graphics cards consistently scored better than their PCI-E counterparts. This is attributable to the PCI Express Graphics slot being limited to X4 operation at the upper resolutions and the slight overhead penalty incurred due to the VIA chipset design. However, the performance of the PCI Express slot is not that bad with the worst penalty being around 5% with our video cards. (Pairing the motherboard with a top end GPU results in performance that can be up to 10% slower in certain applications than competing motherboards.) If you have either an AGP or midrange PCI Express card then this board will handle both in a more than acceptable manner with today's applications."

I have one as my test board because of the wide options it has.

I have run:

CPU:

D805
P531
D915
E6400

Even able to OC a little:

D805 @ 3.4GHz
D915 @ 3.37GHz
E6400 @ 2.4GHz

RAM:

PC3200
PC4200 DDR2
PC5400 DDR2

VGA:

FX5500 AGP
MX440 AGP
X550XT PCI-E
X600XT PCI-E
X1600 Pro Super PCI-E

As for a 2-10% performance decrease, that appears to be at the higher end of the gaming resolutions.

This board is very good for the price compared to others.

Very good. Perhaps you noticed he said "7300", to which "higher resolutions" isn't really going to apply.
Synergy6

...AND they are what; $50?!?!? I also have 2 of them. For all the benefits and cost...can't be beat!

a good value motherboard. the downside of its cpu performance vary from 1% to 10% compared to other premium boards. its pci-e only run in only 4x mode due to chipset limitation, but the agp works great at 8x mode. it only has two sata interface. not so overclockable (up to fsb 297 mhz), i noticed that via chipset has this 5-12% overclocking ability.

sometimes it freezed my samsung syncmaster 793mb crt monitor when doing both cold and warm boot, needed to plug off the power cable off from the monitor and replugged in again to make it worked while the system was stable enough using the default bios setting. i didn't know what's the problem of mine, perhaps it was the board, vga agp, or the monitor. but when i tested it on other crt and lcd monitor it worked fine. and when i tested my monitor to other system, it worked fine too! *strange but real. don't know what is wrong..


its temperature range in 30 to 43 celcius degree while the smallest degree was at idle and 43 degree at full load.

just remember to update to the lates bios to make it works at decent performance.

overall satisfying is what you will get if you're not into any overclocking thing.

here is mine:
e6300 @ 1,86ghz
775dual-vsta (bios version P1.80)
2gb ddr400
x1600pro agp
120gb sata