AGP is alive and well!

An AGP video card is also available with Phenom processors.

The manufacturer wants to celebrate the appearance of quad-core Phenom processors with a rather interesting mule board, which motherboard, if not entirely, has a predecessor on offer. Doesn't everyone still remember that certain 939Dual-SATA2 board, which, thanks to the ULi chips that have been purchased since then, also has an AGP bus in addition to the PCI Express slot ?! Well, now something similar has been born on the design tables of ASRock.

ALiveDual-eSATA2 also has both sockets, but the hardware build has changed a bit. The AGP socket is provided by the nForce3's 250 chip, while the sixteen-fold PCIe slot is provided by the ULi M1695, which acts as the south bridge. So this would be the basic concept, which is then mixed with other little things. Here, for example, are the SATA connectors, of which a total of 5 are housed on the PCB. The emphasis is not on this either, but rather on the kind of controllers. Two of the five ports run on the nForce chip, while the other two can be derived from a separate JMicron controller. Only the latter bears SATA II certification. The remaining external connector is presumably also handled by the JMicron chip, however, to make the story even more twisted, it is shared with the number one SATA II port.

Another unusual feature from the manufacturer is that the printed circuit board of the page also carries a Wi-Fi pin string to which we can connect the wireless module that will appear later. Finally, it is worth mentioning network communication, which can be implemented thanks to a gigabit controller hanging on a PCIe bus.

There is no information about the price of the new ASRock card yet.