The 939A8X-M is a motherboard for Athlon 64bit processors. I've been using it for nearly 6 months now and in normal operation (several Win32 operation systems)I didn't have any problems with it. The 939A8X-M is no sprinter, so gamers - look elsewhere. I decided to buy the 939A8X-M because it had PCE interfaces, so I could continues to use my old graphics and W-LAN adapters. But it is a cheap motherboard and works well with straight-forward configurations under Windows XP (both 32 and 64 bit) and older versions. All drivers are provided on the CD that comes with it.

The problems started when I connected a seemingly defective USB device. The board did not break, but showed strange behaviour. IDE and PCE devices wouldn't work properly - in a very random way. Even resetting the BIOS and removing the battery for a while did not help much. It took a lot of fiddeling around to get everything going again - and I can't tell exactly what did the job. At some point it just worked again.

Installing Windows Vista was a pain. It took a number of trials, a search for the appropriate SATA driver and manipulating the BIOS setting before I finally succeeded. Obviously the Windows Vista had trouble recognizing the SATA controller of the board. And the driver provided for XP works, but is not signed, so you need to switch off "signature enforcement" during the boot process.

The printed documentation that is provided with the 939A8X-M is ok, but the BIOS settings menu is only explained in a pdf document on the provided CD. Not very helpful, if you don'T have a second computer at hand while you are struggling ting with the Bios setting.

After all I would only recommend to buy the board if you looking for a very cheap board to set up simple configurations and run them under Windows XP, not Vista.

Learn more about this author, Sascha Claus.
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