Today, we bring your part 1 of our 2 parts coverage of this ASrock K8 Combo-Z Socket 754/939 board. K8 Combo Z supports both Socket 754 (single channel) and Socket 939 (dual channel) for future upgrades. The major difference is the chipset used. K8 Combo Z uses the ULi M1689 single chipset. This single chipset supports AGP 8X, Serial ATA, Integrated LAN for Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, Sempron CPUs.

K8 Combo Z comes with Serial ATA RAID, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, 1xAGP, 3xPCI, 3x DIMM slots. It does not have PCI-E slots. As ULi M1689 is a single chip and interfaces to HTT directly without the need of a North South architecture and HTT can be set to 5x. It would be a serious contender to the current Socket 754 and 939 chipsets.