John Gillooly gets down in the hood with 9 of the whackest Athlon 64 mobos.
Normally there is a lag between the launch of a new CPU and the emergence of a range of chipsets. Thanks to perpetual delaying of the Athlon 64's launch date things are different.
NVIDIA, SiS and VIA have chipsets ready to go, and because of that there are no consumer motherboards using AMD's home brand chipset.
Only a handful of manufacturers are making use of SiS' 755 chipset for their Athlon 64 offerings, rather, most manufacturers have a range of boards based around NVIDIA's nForce3 and VIAs K8T800 chipsets. This month we have gathered the premium Socket 754 boards from nine manufacturers together, of which two use nForce3 and seven use the K8T800.
So begins the next flipflop of dominance of the Athlon chipset market. It used to be that in Athlon roundups we would see mainly VIA based boards with occasional offerings from NVIDIA and SiS. And then nForce2 was launched, breaking VIA's dominance and relegating its chipsets to the budget category. We now know why this happened, it was largely due to VIA putting all its efforts into the K8T800, and then suffering from AMD's rolling launch delays.
Motherboards for the Athlon 64 are quite different to what we have become accustomed to. Because the CPU has its memory controller built in, the Northbridge has now turned into a glorified AGP controller. Gone for now are the days of the real difference between chipsets lying in the ingenuity of the team responsible for designing the memory controller, replaced by an almost total focus on Southbridge features.
NVIDIA has even gone so far as to reduce the nForce3 to a single chip, a strategy used in the past by SiS. VIA still use two chips in the classic Northbridge/Southbridge configuration.
With nine of the best Athlon 64 motherboards available sitting in the labs we then disappeared for a few weeks to do some testing. As we suspected, the inclusion of the memory controller on the Athlon 64 CPU leads to minimal performance differences between motherboards. We tested each board extensively, using Unreal Tournament 2003, SYSmark2002, 3DMark2001SE, 3DMark03 CPU test, Aquamark 3 and SPEC Viewperf 7.1, and the biggest performance difference between the fastest and slowest board was 8% in SYSmark. Most of the boards were testing within one or two per cent of each other.
We have published some of the results so that you can see the spread, but you will notice that unlike the usual result plots from these roundups there is no one board that dominates the scores. With this remarkably flat performance spread, the focus of our evaluation has been on features, and there are some remarkably fine examples of featured up motherboards in the Athlon 64 range.
We have chosen two winners, one based upon the choice and selection of features, and the other the best balance between features and cost. You will notice that we have not published prices for these boards. This is a decision we reached based upon the rapid flux of prices and also because a lot of products are currently only available bundled with CPUs thanks to the low number of Athlon 64s being shipped by AMD.
------------------HOT------------------------ABIT KV8-MAX3Chipset: VIA K8T800Specifications: 6 SATA ports; 2 parallel ATA ports; Gigabit Ethernet; IEEE1394a; 6 channel audio; µGuru hardware monitoring; externally vented cooling.Website: ABIT www.abit.com.tw Distributor: Altech www.altech.com.au
ABIT are now into the third generation of its legacy free MAX motherboards, and the K8V-MAX3 is the most feature laden so far. The board lacks serial and parallel ports, but in their place are some innovations seen nowhere else. To complement the externally vented OTES cooling used to keep power circuitry chilled ABIT has added it's new µGuru chip for comprehensive hardware monitoring.The first MAX boards had so many features that ABIT could only fit a handful of PCI slots onto them, but the K8V-MAX3 shows this is a thing of the past with a full complement of five PCI slots.One of the bravest moves made with this board are the six SATA ports. We heartily recommend choosing Serial ATA if you are shopping for a drive, and this large number of ports means huge expandability.ABIT's K8V-MAX3 is not going to be ideal for everyone, but it provides the most comprehensive, up-to-date feature set of any of the boards in the roundup. This really is the cream of the feature crop.
Albatron K8X800 Pro IIChipset: VIA K8T800Specifications: 2 SATA ports; 2 parallel ATA ports; Gigabit Ethernet; IEEE1394A; 8 channel audio.Website: Albatron www.albatron.com.twDistributor: Australia IT www.australiait.com.au
Albatron's K8X800 Pro II is a pretty basic offering for the Athlon 64. It has limited features compared to other brands, but still provides enough functionality for the average user. We were somewhat disappointed that the motherboard only had the hard drive connections that are supported natively by VIA's chipset, rather than some sort of secondary RAID controller. If you are running a parallel ATA setup then this is Ok, but because Serial ATA abandons the traditional Master/Slave relationship the board will only support two SATA drives.This is a decent quality board for the Athlon 64; however it falls behind the competition in the feature stakes.
AOpen AK86-LChipset: VIA K8T800Specifications: 2 SATA ports; 2 parallel ATA ports; Gigabit Ethernet; 6 channel audio; 5 PCI slots; 3 DIMM slotsWebsite: AOpen www.aopen.comDistributor: Blue Chip IT www.bluechipit.com
AOpen's AK86-L is a bit different to the other boards. While it is light on the onboard features, with only two SATA, two parallel ATA ports and no IEEE1394A, it is loaded with AOpen's special BIOS based enhancements. These range from generic technologies like automatic CMOS resetting after failed overclocking to more specific technology like AOpen Jukebox Player, which allows you to play CDs and MP3s without needing to boot into windows. Also featured is Vivid BIOS, which allows you to add colour images to the POST screen without resorting to BIOS hacking.While the AK86-L is a decent board, the feature rich BIOS ends up being let down by the tiny number of features on the board itself.
ASUS K8V Deluxe Wireless EditionChipset: VIA K8T800Specifications: 4 SATA ports; 3 parallel ATA ports; Gigab
Issue: 137 | June, 2012