Gordon Scott said:
Hi
I was looking for some comments on the best 754pin Athlon 64 offering.
I guess I am concerned about chipset NForce3 vs Via KT800 and even the
KT800 pro.
Right now I have an A7n8x deluxe, and I'm using the nforce drivers, I'm
quite happy with Nforce.
So whats the consensus on this board or a better choice?
Hows the overclockability, reviews seem to comment on the locked pci/agp
bus.
thx for your time and or links.
regards
Gordon
Anandtech has some nice reviews, so you can compare features
for the various boards. Have a look through their motherboard
reviews.
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2206
The subjects to watch out for are, whether a board has an AGP
lock or not (as without a lock, the FSB can only be boosted
to 200*37.5/33=227MHz or so). IDE disk corruption can occur
if you hit that "wall" (I like testing with a Knoppix CD
boot disk, making the CD the only storage device, as then
the boot disk cannot be corrupted - but at some point, you
_have_ to connect that hard drive
The second thing that
can break, is SATA disks sometimes have limits as well.
Apparently, not all SATA solutions are alike in that regard.
You can read threads like this, to see how much fun the
overclockers are having. But take their requests for higher
Vdimm with a grain of salt - the memory controller on the
Athlon64 is on the processor, and if you download the datasheet
for the processor and check the Absolute Max voltage rating
for the memory interface power supply, it is 2.9V. If anyone
tempts you to apply 2.9V or more - just say no! Otherwise,
you could be the proud owner of a dead processor. For this
reason, if you are an overclocker, I would recommend buying
memory that reaches high overclocks with modest voltage. BH-5
would not be a good candidate, as some people run that stuff
at 3.1V.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=40799
If you do a Google search, I think you'll find there are
way more posts about K8V-xx than K8N-E. Try searching on
the model name plus the word "problem", to get some idea of
what things people have run into.
You can also try searching here:
http://abxzone.com/forums/search.php
I don't know what your plans are for the board, for example
how long you plan to keep it, but one issue about any board,
is how the memory subsystem is constructed. The S754 boards
are single channel with three slots. Only two slots are really
usable, as to use more than two, the memory speed has to drop
(see the table of memory configs in the manuals for the K8V-xx
and K8N-E). This is not really an "Asus thing" - the table
is copied from an AMD datasheet, and represents what AMD
thinks their processor can drive. YMMV.
The S939 boards are dual channel, with four slots. But there
are still drive issues. (Either you have to use 2T command
rate timing, which kills memory bandwidth to the tune of 20%
or so, or you have to drop the memory speed from DDR400 to
DDR333, which is roughly the same thing.) But, in the fullness
of time, since the memory bus drive issue is controlled by the
processor design itself, there is always hope that an incremental
improvement by AMD will make this a bit better. In any case,
for my use, I would rather have room for four slots, than be
stuck with only two. If you plan on upgrading past S754 in the
not too distant future, then perhaps this is a non-issue.
If budget is an issue, there is certainly nothing wrong with a
S754 based gaming platform. Especially if you see some of the
3DMark numbers in those private forum postings.
HTH,
Paul
