Bringing out the cowboy pants and riding spurs, John Gillooly’s rounded up a herd of Athlon motherboards and given them a good branding with the Atomic O. And here you’ll get to see which ones grinned and took the pain, and which ran crying home to mama. Yee-ha!
It's interesting to see how far things have come in twelve months. At the start of 2002 everyone would have said that AMD had a stranglehold on the enthusiast market, riding high on the success of the Thunderbird and Palomino cores. But the passing year saw Intel grab back a big chunk of the mindshare as the Pentium 4 finally matured into a serious competitor and threw off the shackles of RDRAM.
This should have only been a short term worry, as AMD was due to unleash its much hyped x86-64 architecture (codenamed Hammer), in the form of the Athlon 64 late last year. However the date for launch of the Athlon 64 has slipped by almost a twelve months, and it now appears that the earliest chance we will get to cram one of these suckers in our PCs will be this September.
In the interim, AMD has finally released the Barton core for the Athlon XP. While essentially the same as the 0.13-micron Thoroughbred cores, Barton ups the L2 cache from 256KB to 512KB, making the Athlon XP's total 640KB of cache the most currently available on a desktop CPU (the Pentium 4 Northwood core has 512KB L2 cache but a minute amount of L1), at least until Intel's next generation Prescott Pentium 4 core, which will have a cool 1MB of L2 cache.
There have been two reasons touted for the delay of the Athlon 64, the main one being the need to wait for Microsoft to release a 64-bit version of Windows that supports x86-64, and the second is that the Barton core performs well enough to take up the interim slack. There are most likely other reasons for the delay, related to the types of memory supported by the on-die memory controller and the inevitable yield problems that are experienced with new architecture and fabrication methods like Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI).
ABOVE: The MSI 746F Ultra, sporting the company's red PCB.
Last year, the spotlight was on the turbo-charged release schedule of Intel chipsets, with every three months or so bringing with it a new generation of i845 chipset, with very little movement on the Athlon front. However things have changed, even if it has taken a while.
Atomic first tried to organise an Athlon motherboard roundup when nForce2 was announced many months ago, but it has taken awhile for companies to get with this chipset.
Alongside this were initial concerns with memory support on the VIA KT400 chipset, which launched amidst confusion over the DDR400 spec. VIA is remedying this in the soon-to-be-released KT400A chipset, which will have rejigged DDR400 support and some small Southbridge additions.
The recent release of the Barton core, in combination with these chipsets, means that a whole new generation of Athlon platforms has arisen, with three new Northbridge/Southbridge combos making an appearance.
nForce2NVIDIA's second foray into the chipset market has been nothing short of a success so far. While even NVIDIA admitted to the original nForce being mainly a test of the chipset waters, nForce2 has hit with a big bang, accompanied by a much wider range of motherboard partners than its predecessor. The reason for the popularity is a combination of performance and features.
nForce2 is currently the performance champion for the Athlon XP, delivering quicker performance than the competing VIA KT400 and SiS 746FX chipsets. It also has one of the best feature sets on the market, with dual-channel DDR, support for IEEE 1394, USB 2.0, AGP 8x, two onboard Ethernet connections, Dolby-certified 5.1 surround sound and Integrated GeForce4 MX graphics. All this makes one heck of a chipset that is light years ahead of the competition. nForce2 has been built around AMD's HyperTransport technology, which is used for inter-chip communication.
Rather than use the traditional Northbridge and Southbridge naming convention, NVIDIA has new terminology. There are two options of Northbridge-style chips, the System Platform Processor (SPP) and the Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP). These are almost identical chips, differentiated only by the inclusion of Integrated GeForce4 MX graphics in the IGP.
Rather than Southbridges, NVIDIA has the Media and Communications Processor (MCP), which for the nForce2 is named the MCP-T.
KT400When it comes to Athlon chipsets, VIA is the name that first springs to mind. Over the lifespan of the Athlon brand of CPUs, VIA has continuously released newer and faster chipsets, with the most recent being called the KT400. This chipset was released late last year and added support for new technologies such as AGP 8x to VIA's arsenal.
The KT400 is slightly slower than the nForce2, but is still a serious contender for your dollars. It supports USB 2.0, AGP 8x, six-channel AC '97 audio and 10/100 Ethernet. For communication between the Northbridge and Southbridge, Via has used its 8x V-Link technology, which provides 533MB/s of bandwidth.
KT400 is due to be replaced by KT400A over the next few months. This revision was first though to be a dual-channel DDR chipset, like the nForce2 or Intel's e7205 chipset for the Pentium 4. However it has been confirmed as a single-channel DDR chipset with support for DDR400. Undoubtedly we can also expect to see performance boosts to try and cut the lead of the nForce2.
SiS 746FXThe other new Athlon chipset comes from budget chipmakers, SiS, in the form of the 746FX. While not a contender in the performance or features stakes (you will notice that none of the boards tested are based upon this chipset), it is still a viable cheap alternative for the Athlon XP.
Feature-wise, the 746FX is a definite competitor. With DDR400 support, 8x AGP, USB 2.0, integrated 10/100 Ethernet and six-channel AC '97 audio it is similar to the KT400 in support. Communication between the Northbridge and Southbridge is handled via SiS' MuTIOL 1G technology, which is touted to deliver 1.2GB/s of bandwidth.
BIOSes at dawnWith an Athlon XP 3000+ in hand, we issued another challenge to motherboard manufacturers: each should send us its most kick-arse Athlon mobo. With 11 of the best boards on the face of the planet in hand we set out to determine which ones really stand out from the pack. The boards were all tested with two 512MB sticks of Corsair XMS3200, running at DDR333 speeds, in parity with the 333MHz effective FSB of the Athlon XP 3000+ (for nForce2 motherboards, tests were all run with the RAM in dual-channel mode), and an Albatron GeForce4 Ti4800SE.
Testing was done using SYSmark2002, Unreal Tournament 2003 (using the CPU test settings from the HardOCP UT2003 benchmark utility) and the CPU tests in 3DMark03. This was using Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 and DirectX 9, with the latest reference drivers. For reference we have also included in the results scores from an MSI SiS746FX motherboard using the same components.
ResultsDuring the testing process, some very interesting patterns emerged. All the nForce2 boards tested worked beautifully with the Athlon XP 3000+ right out of the box; however most of the KT400 boards required a BIOS flash in order to enable support. Some of these problems appear to stem from a slight rejigging of the PR formula originally used for the Barton core.
Originally the Athlon XP 3000+ was slated to run at 2.24GHz, using the 166MHz double-pumped bus and a 13.5x multiplier. This
Issue: 137 | June, 2012