64-bit firepower

Mobo Gigabyte GA-K8VT890-9   Chipset NVIDIA nForce4 SLI, Socket 939 Supplier Synnex www.synnex.com.au   Price: $139

Yes, VIA’s still pumping out its chips, however much of its thunder has been assimilated by the nForce4. Feature-wise, it’s not a bad lineup, with everything you need as a minimum required for a potentially powerful motherboard. Onboard are two SATA ports, two ATA133 interfaces, one 16x PCI Express and two 1x PCI-E slots and three 32-bit PCI slots. It still throws a punch down memory lane, sporting four DDR400 dual-channel DIMM slots. If you’re not particularly keen on a long list of expense-inducing features and just want a no-frills, AMD 64-bit ready platform that can perform, this is the board.

Mobo ASUS P5AD2-E Premium   Chipset Intel 925XE, Socket 775 Supplier ASUS www.asus.com.tw   Price: $399
This motherboard has the ability to unlock Intel CPUs. Most unusual, yet highly representative of who this beast is aimed at; the overclocking enthusiast. To satiate our love for terabytes, it has eight SATA ports. ASUS even threw in an expansion bracket with two internal SATA ports and a Molex power port routed outside. Sporting two Gigabit Ethernet ports, onboard 802.11g and some intriguing networking options in the BIOS, you could hack a Gibson with this. With Intel’s HD audio, it lays the smackdown all over AC’97. Highly configurable and full of features, this powerful beast is premium in every manner.

Mobo ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE    Chipset Intel 925XE, Socket 775 Supplier Altech www.altech.com.au   Price: $330
With the aid of some ABIT engineers, Fatal1ty (a rock-star-esque gaming professional) designed this board for gamers. And added wads of red LEDs for ‘futurism’. Short of adding in a direct mind-feed, this minimalist board has one PCI Express 16x slot, only one ATA133 interface, both a 1Gb/s and a 100Mb/s Ethernet jack, four SATA ports and onboard 7.1 HD audio. Considering it was designed for gamers, DDR memory would have been a better choice (gamers are renown for not being rich, as you may have heard), but that’d require another chipset. It’s quite expensive considering the feature set. For the brag factor.

Mobo ECS PF21 Extreme    Chipset Intel 925XE, Socket 775 Supplier Protac www.protac.com.au   Price: $239
Unheard of in the enthusiast market until recently, ECS is pushing out some stupidly affordable boards, and they don’t skimp on the features. With four DDR2 DIMM slots, six SATA ports, three 32-bit PCI slots, one PCI-E 16x and two PCI-E 1x slots, two ATA133 interfaces and the awesomeness of 7.1 HD audio, it brings home the goods. Intriguingly, IDE2 is located at the base of the board, possibly in anticipation for a HDD. For bling, there are meaningless blue LEDs under each expansion slot – hey, whatever floods your moat. Sitting $100 cheaper then the AA8XE, this is, for the lack of a better term, a damn bargain.

Benchmark results

Conclusion

So the results are in, and as expected, the Intel side pulled off nicely on the synthetic tests and AMD on the real-time gaming side. You can already see the type of performance improvements 64-bit CPUs provide architecturally. And as you can expect from motherboards today, features are becoming the primary separator between models and brands.

Keep in mind what you need for each platform – you must purchase DDR2 memory for Intel, but for AMD you can probably use the memory you already have. Naturally, Intel proves to be the more expensive option, however motherboards such as the ECS come as a friendly surprise to the wallet.

Building a system around a 64-bit CPU is only half the equation. Read on to find out about the software side of 64-bit goodness!