ASRock 775Dual-880Pro

Performance:

Due to the nature of the motherboard, we not only compared the performance against that of a similar motherboard, but we also compared the AGP and PCI Express performance. For comparing the ASRock motherboard, we also benchmarked a Tyan Tomcat i915 (S5120). The Tyan motherboard is fairly similar in features to the ASRock 775Dual-880Pro except it sports an Intel 915G Chipset rather than the VIA PT880 Pro. In addition, the S5120 only supports DDR and PCI Express. Although with these few differences, it should still give a fairly good understanding as to the performance level of the ASRock motherboard compared against a high-end server oriented motherboard. While comparing the motherboards we ran a PCI Express graphics card, afterwards we ran the same slew of benchmarks with an AGP 8x solution. Below are the hardware and software components that were kept constant throughout all of the testing today.

In addition to the Leadtek 6600GT 128MB that was used on the Tyan and ASRock motherboard for testing, we also ran a GeForce 5900XT 128MB on the ASRock motherboard to stress its AGP capabilities. Furthermore, to compare the performance against the Tyan motherboard, we ran the same set of benchmarks with the ASRock while it was overclocked with a 227MHz FSB (227 x 15 = 3405MHz). Although we didn't publish any benchmarks while running DDR2, we did test the motherboard using 2 x 512MB Transcend DDR2-533 and it too operated without problems. As for the onboard features, they had all functioned appropriately under Linux. The VIA VT6103 10/100 LAN controller was detected and functioned accordingly with the 2.6.12 kernel, as expected. The onboard 8-channel also worked without faults when we tested it with ALSA v1.0.9. Also, there were no other conflicts with the VIA Chipset, which has a great reputation for their Linux support.