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AMD Hardware

Athlon 64 Motherboard Triple Threat Round-Up 306

Posted by timothy from the only-8-pages-to-click-through dept.
SpinnerBait writes "Soon after AMD released the Athlon 64 to the public, eager motherboard manufacturers unveiled their latest motherboards for AMD's new baby. Some are offering basic packages that boast features and performance, yet forgo the extras found in premium bundles. Other manufacturers are offering snazzy new packages with all kinds of extras and unique features. The only thing left to do is decide which one is for you. HotHardware has an article posted up, that showcases and benchmarks three top Athlon 64 motherboards, from Asus, MSI and Shuttle. These boards are looking more refined every day."
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Athlon 64 Motherboard Triple Threat Round-Up More

Athlon 64 Motherboard Triple Threat Round-Up

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  • Yes! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26, 2003 @09:45PM (#7316432)
    Now I can finally run... uh... 64 bit Linux, and uh... ummm... SSE2 programs on an AMD chip! Yeah!

    • Re:Yes. Cray thinks so too (Score:5, Interesting)

      by abhisarda ( 638576 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @03:14AM (#7317476) Journal
      Cray Picks AMD Chips for New Line

      Red Storm System to Offer Supercomputer's Speed
      And Low-Cost Components
      By DON CLARK
      Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

      Cray Inc., which pioneered the market for supercomputers, hopes to blaze another trail with machines based on a new line of microprocessor chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

      The Seattle company developed the technology under a $90 million contract with Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, which is installing a system dubbed Red Storm that will be one of the most powerful in the world. Cray plans to announce Monday that it also will sell systems based on the Red Storm technology to other customers.

      Cray's plans have spurred interest in the scientific community, because the company is addressing a technical bottleneck that has prevented systems based on inexpensive components to be applied to the most demanding computing tasks.

      "This is an exciting development," said Horst Simon, director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley, Calif. The center, which provides computing resources for research funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, may consider the Cray machines for its own future requirements, Mr. Simon said. "This type of technology is the correct approach to the current issues in high-performance computing," he said.

      The term supercomputer is generally applied to the largest machines available, which are typically constructed from hundreds of microprocessor chips. Cray, the successor to a company formed by the late computer designer Seymour Cray, is known for augmenting those chips with proprietary circuitry that allows the chips to exchange data at very high speed. It sells a machine called X1 that uses a custom-designed microprocessor along with its communications chips.

      Another approach, stressing low price over speed, uses standard chips from Intel Corp. or AMD along with circuit boards that are similar to those in personal computers or low-end server systems. Such low-price machines, called clusters, often use the free Linux operating system, further reducing costs.

      But clusters aren't suited for some kinds of challenging tasks, because of delays in passing data among the many microprocessors. Wayne Kugel, Cray's program director for the Red Storm project, compares the problem to planning housing and transportation. "The more houses you add near the freeway, the more of a bottleneck you get," he said.

      The Red Storm system combines the speed of proprietary supercomputers with low-cost components found in clusters. Cray says it designed communications chips that exchange data at close to the peak speed of AMD's Opteron microprocessor, or 6.4 billion bytes a second. That is about 20 times the speed of connections often used with clusters. The company hasn't set pricing or a precise delivery date, but expects to begin selling the system next year.

      Cray's plans are good news for AMD, which is a much smaller player in server systems than rival Intel. But AMD is making some progress with Opteron, which was introduced last spring and competes with a high-end chip called Itanium 2 that Intel has been selling for high-end applications.
      Oct 27.

  • Note to self: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by niko9 ( 315647 ) * on Sunday October 26, 2003 @09:50PM (#7316452)
    Nick, wait 'till your favorite distro is out (64 bit Debian) before you spend your hard earned cash. The prices will have come down a bit, the 1.0 bugs will be out and hopefully fixed, and your favorite motherboard maker (Tyan) will be out with a nice non-overclocker but extremley stabel and quiet 64 bit motherboard solution.

    Thanks.

    • Re:Note to self: (Score:5, Informative)

      by hattig ( 47930 ) on Sunday October 26, 2003 @10:04PM (#7316505) Journal
      Tyan already have at least *six* different motherboards for AMD's 64-bit platform.

      Most of them are for Opteron though, but that means that there is a lot of experience within Tyan for the platform, so the A64 boards will be good from the get go.

    • Re:Note to self: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Amen to that!

      What with recent posts on 300+ Mbyte fixes for the latest Mandrake release and LG CD-ROM destruction because of firmware bugs, it always pays NOT to be on the (b)leading edge! Nobody tests their products before release anymore, counting on customers to test their latest products. I refuse to be guinea pig!
      • Debian tests "frozen" for months and months before releasing, since they don't have to keep their latest release hidden as an incentive to get "subscribers" to support their business.

        If 6-month-old software just isn't l337 enough for you, even packages which go into "testing" have to sit for at least a few weeks with no critical bugs.

        That, and Lucky Goldstar has always been a manufacturer of...bargain products. I paid extra for my Plextor CD-RW, but it rips flawlessly and can read CDs which choke other d

  • Big Whooop (Score:2, Funny)

    by grennis ( 344262 )
    I'm waiting for the Athlon 128.

  • Exploding Motherboards (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Davak ( 526912 ) on Sunday October 26, 2003 @09:50PM (#7316456) Homepage
    What ever happened with the exploding motherboards? [slashdot.org]

  • Me want.

    It rolls over a P4 3.2 gig in the gaming benchmarks. [hothardware.com]

    I guess I am assuming that the Athlon 64 doesn't have some special Quake benchmarking code... :)

    • i'm sure glad I ordered the ASUS with my a64 2 days after release...either way it would have run but i'm glad that mine scored higher in the benchmarks and I would highly reccomend it for anything.

      mine didnt come wiht the wifi or the ram (but its the same ram I bought..very nice) but the onboard networking is incredibly fast and low resource for onboard networking...nice job asus!

    • According to some hardware sites the SSE code in Quake 3 didn't work properly for previous AMD motherboards. Considering the game obviously makes very good use of SSE it could mean a big difference if the extensions are working properly for the Athlon64.

  • run 64bit with less than 3G memory ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ticktack ( 617118 ) on Sunday October 26, 2003 @09:59PM (#7316485)
    Non of three motherboards supports more than (max) 3G memory, what is the purpose of using 64bit cpu?
    • 64bit CPU is a lot slower than 32bit CPU with the same technology anyway.
    • ... which the article says supports only 2GB of RAM. Why do they say that? The MSI board specs they list show:

      - Supports three 184-pin DDR SDRAMs up to 2GB memory size

      Why would you get a 2 GB total limit from 3 memory slots? I read that as the DIMMs being 2 GB each, which sounds like 6 GB to me.

      The Asus and Shuttle boards seem a bit firmer about their memory limits, but they claim a 3 GB limit. And the Asus board uses the same chipset as the MSI - the Via K8T800, which Via says has a 4 GB memory limit [via.com.tw]

    • Well for a lot of things at least it still is faster than Barton or Thunderbird for a lot of things even in 32 bit mode.

      If they were running a real 64 bit OS then at least they'd get the larger and twice as many registers. I suspect the doubling of the number of registers in the A64 architecture is what makes it run faster in 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode. As a lot of the other 64 bit architectures IIRC have the same number of registers for both modes, 32 bit mode actually runs a little faster than 64 bit
    • Non of three motherboards supports more than (max) 3G memory, what is the purpose of using 64bit cpu?

      AMD64 has a larger register file, which helps some compilers to generate better code.

  • From the article (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 1984 ( 56406 ) on Sunday October 26, 2003 @10:02PM (#7316496)
    "The Northbridge comes with passive cooling, however, the design is not the most effective for dissipating heat. We think a taller, more extruded heat sink like MSI's is more effective at wicking heat away from the chipset."

    Let's keep it scientific: did you do any measurements, or just you just reckon you have a better eye for heat dissipation than the folk at Asus?

    • My Tyan board has a short heatsink on main motherboard chipset (is it really a Northbridge?). It barely gets warm to the touch. The AMD64 moves most of the Northbridge features into the CPU, cooling isn't much of an issue now.

  • How about some more pro features? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hirschma ( 187820 ) on Sunday October 26, 2003 @10:16PM (#7316530)
    I just can't help but feel that the manufacturers are missing the boat on what features should actually be present - and features that at least some folks would pay more for...

    * Faster PCI. How about PCI-X? or 66mhz/64bit? Something that lets a power users do more without saturating the bus.

    Of course, it'll be a moot point when PCI express arrives...

    * More PCI. More than one bus would be nice - even two standard PCI busses would be useful to a lot of folks.

    * More memory slots! Um, these CPUs can address more than 2/4 gigabytes. At least 6, and preferably 8 slots would be a good thing - let folks get to some really large RAM sizes inexpensively.

    At least they got gigabit right (but probably hooked to the PCI bus, not good), and Firewire (but not the new faster kind, and again, hooked to the PCI bus).

    I'd think that a properly outfitted board would be a video enthusiast's dream, or a hpc dream, or whatever. I'd expect that once MS actually ships XP 64, you'll start to see prosumer boards that address my gripes. But I'd sure like one now, price somewhere between these low-enders and higher-end "server" boards.

    Jonathan

    • Re:How about some more pro features? (Score:5, Informative)

      by hattig ( 47930 ) on Sunday October 26, 2003 @10:19PM (#7316535) Journal
      Sounds like you want something like the Tyan K8W which has AGP 8x, PCI-X and supports 16GB of memory.

      Sure, it is dual processor, but if you are wanting PCI-X and 16GB of memory support, then you probably want dual processors. I suppose you could live with one processor and 8GB of memory though.
      • ...though unfortunately its SATA 4-way RAID isn't :-(

        Also unfortunate is the price - AUD$1000+ down under. What good is a well-performing dollar when you still get these prices, I ask you?

    • apple.com/powermac for all your wants in that list (well, maybe not "low price" but low is a relative term at the cutting edge.

      We just bought a Dual G5 and slapped a metric asston of RAM in it and it really is a video editor's dream. Final Cut Pro 4, Compressor and DVD Studio Pro 1.5 scream along.

      We didn't really need to upgeade the Dual 450 G4 we were using, but we felt like treating ourselves.
    • I think a lot of these system designers think their buyers are retards. I've found several dual Opteron boards with _one_ memory channel. If the A64 platform is the hot sh!t that people say it is, why not let it have the memory bandwidth it really needs? I have a four year old Xeon that has two memory channels and I think it's still a pretty badass system. I think dual Opterons might be capable of running four memory channels. I understand there's a lot of wire routing and that makes boards more expen
      • Most dual Opteron boards I've seen do support dual-channel memory - except for the Tyan K8W, which supports dual-channel memory for each CPU. It's the only one, at least that has an AGP slot. I'd heard tell (unconfirmed) that memory slots for each CPU, apart from adding to the board cost, also confused most gfx drivers, since it bumped the AGP slot from PCI device 0 to PCI device 1.

        Which boards have only single-channel DDR memory? I ask because I wish to avoid buying them :-)

        • Which boards have only single-channel DDR memory? I ask because I wish to avoid buying them :-)

          The one that I really clearly remember, I think was one of the Tyans, but I thought I saw others. I'll try to look it up ASAP, but not tonight.

          If adjacent slots really are second channels (looked like slots on same channel), then that might have been part of the confusion, but I hadn't seen anything like that before.
    • Those are features of Socket 940 boards like the Tyan, and other workstation Athlon 64 FX/Opteron motherboards. Don't expect those on enthusiast/desktop boards.

  • HotHardware? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Sunday October 26, 2003 @10:17PM (#7316532) Homepage
    It's only fitting since the last x86 system I bought is also able to serve as my college apartment's central heating system in the winter time....
    • I run 4 boxen in our common space. 3 Athlon XP's and a PIII.

      Needless to say, we keep our windows open when it snows, and its still too hot...

  • I'm left with Questions! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jmorris42 ( 1458 ) * <jmorris@[ ]u.org ['bea' in gap]> on Sunday October 26, 2003 @10:25PM (#7316555)
    1. Why are all three "64bit" boards limited to 4GB of memory?

    2. Why are they being evaluated solely with 32bit applications/operating systems? Can't we at least get a kernel compile time benchmark? RedHat's RHEL3 has a free set of beta iso's available for AMD64 so there really wasn't a good excuse for not finding out how well they perform in their native mode.

    3. What was the reason for the reviewer's obsession with having six-channel audio as analog outputs without a dongle? Isn't that what SPID-F plugs are for?

    4. Since Linux is currently the ONLY supported OS for AMD64 in native mode, information about how well the boards are supported driver wise would have been helpful.

    • Actually NetBSD is the furthest along in terms of AMD64 maturity -- not GNU/Linux. FreeBSD also has an AMD64 port in development.

      -Jem
      • and SuSe 9.0 professional will also support AMD64 quite well. It comes out this week, if I remember correctly.
      • NetBSD is the furthest along in terms of AMD64 maturity

        Just curious, but how do you figure that? SuSe was working with AMD to port Linux and indeed Linux was running on the x86-64 simulator quite early on. I cant find anything to support it, but I have a vague memory Linux was first to boot x86-64 (simulated). NetBSD port appears to have been done in 2001, cant find references to Linux, but the impression was that AMD were really keen to get Linux ported over as quick as possible.
    • I'll make some educated guesses at the answers to your questions:

      1) The boards weren't designed for pros really. They were designed for home enthusiast types that just want to have the latest shit. 4GB will be plenty. If you've need for more memory on x86, there are boards to accomadate you for the Opetron or the Xeon.

      2) Again, the target of the boards and of the site. These really aren't aimed at the pro market. I mean the only people who, at this point, will exploit the 64-bit features of the chip are t

  • 3 more socket 754 boards reviewed (Score:5, Informative)

    by heli0 ( 659560 ) on Sunday October 26, 2003 @10:34PM (#7316588)
    Chaintech ZNF3-150, FIC K8-800T, and MSI K8T [anandtech.com]

    Chaintech ZNF3-150 = nVidia nForce3
    FIC K8-800T and MSI K8T = VIA K8T800

  • I heard that just installing Mandrake linux causes 32 of the 64 bits to fall off...pass it on...

  • We have already reviewed 5 Athlon 64 motherboards (Score:5, Informative)

    by ruiner5000 ( 241452 ) on Sunday October 26, 2003 @10:44PM (#7316624) Homepage
    So why no link to our reviews. [amdzone.com] :)

  • why, oh why.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ffsnjb ( 238634 ) on Sunday October 26, 2003 @10:49PM (#7316640) Homepage
    Can't they leave off the serial/parallel and ps2 ports? Removing the floppy connector, ata-133 and on-board audio would be great. They're totally unneccessary in this day and age for me, probably many others too. For those who need them, they should be an option. Even Abit's KV8-MAX3 has ps2 ports, which is a shame.

    I'd probably drool and swipe the credit card if I could get an A64 board with 8 DDR slots, PCI Express, dual Gb LAN, 8 usb2 ports and 4 FW800 ports on the backpanel. 8 SATA connectors would sweeten the deal.

    • KEEP YOUR FUCKING PAWS OFF MY PS2 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26, 2003 @11:24PM (#7316789)
      why, oh why they don't they remove the most fucking stable thing in my fucking PC...

      I bet the PS2 keyboard I'm using is older than you bitch.
    • And they'd save what, 2 bucks? PS2 is a hell of a lot more reliable, and I'm not interested in buying some stupid adapter. And why is on-board audio unnecessary? Who needs an Audigy 2 besides hardcore gamers? Far too many people use these features to consider dropping them... okay, except for the floppy drive.

      Now, not having tons of DDR slots on a motherboard designed for a 64-bit processor is just dumb...
    • You aren't the only person stuck in the dream for a more efficient motherboard. I want none of what you want on a motherboard and am confident people will agree with me to not want any of my desires on their motherboard. The ISA Legacy design ensures an architecture to be compatible with previous *ware as well as provide a medium for growth. On a modern motherboard, you have The Old mixed with The New.

      Look at a simple motherboard of the past 80x286 or 80x386 era, where all the parts are your enemy due t
    • Serial ports are incredibly useful for remotely fixing broken BSD boxes (or Linux if you bother to set it up)

      Floppy drives are (unfortunately) REQUIRED to install Windows on SATA drives.
      • Floppy drives are (unfortunately) REQUIRED to install Windows on SATA drives.

        Ain't that just so true. A year and a half ago I built my first PC w/o a floppy. Little did I know that I'd need to insert a floppy disk for the on-board RAID controller (Promise).

        This time around I purchased a USB floppy drive. Detected and usable during an XP install. Best this is I can unplug the bastard and put it away for those yearly system rebuilds.
    • Well, you've got 2 different requests there; to remove the legacy crap and to put on high-end goodies. PATA's going to stay until you can find SATA CD drives and have SATA drives that perform better for less money (Raptor's are sweet, but too damned expensive right now).

      As for the rest of the stuff, you're not looking at the right end of the product line; the Athlon64 is the low-end of the 64bit lineup. Look towards the Athlon64FX and Opteron for your high-end workstation & server needs, you'll find
    • What's wrong with PS/2? It's great to hook keyboard and mouse to, and that is their only use! I've got other things to plug into my USB ports, like a tablet, printer, scanner, joystick, and lots of other things I might buy in the future.

      General purpose ports are nice and all, but I'll have a keyboard and mouse for many years to come. I keep the keyboard and mouse PS/2, and voila, two extra USB ports.
    • Remove the legacy connectors and you shut out a fairly large market. Point of Sale, is one, but the other big one is being able to replace old hardware. I do work for a small chain of video stores, still running Novell 3.1 and DOS in their stores. The printers use parallel and serial, cash drawers are serial, and barcode scanners are AT or PS2.

      Some things (like the barcode scanner) can use USB with BIOS USB legacy support enabled, but the PCI parallel and serial port cards don't work under DOS, and yo

    • Re:why, oh why.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Zathrus ( 232140 )
      Can't they leave off the serial/parallel and ps2 ports?

      Sure. Go buy one of the Abit legacy free boards (not yet available for AMD64 -- doubt it ever will be). Better be quick though -- they haven't been selling well because they shut out a large portion of the market and don't give you anything that Asus or other brands don't have as well, while costing more than the competitors as well.

      Removing the floppy connector, ata-133 and on-board audio would be great.

      No, that'd be pretty flaming stupid. Remov
    • Theres a reason for the PS/2 ports. See, a PS/2 mouse prevents your AMD system from crashing. Don't believe me? Read AMD's errata for the AMD 768 PDF Here [amd.com] and look at issue #10.

      I discovered this from a post on the LKML when I was trying to diagnose strange crashes that occurred when doing IO-intensive stuff. I actually thought it was a bug in the kernel IDE driver for the 768. Sure enough, I plugged in an old dying ps/2 mouse and could write 2 GB of data to the drive without a problem, when it normall

  • What's with the title? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sri Lumpa ( 147664 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @03:52AM (#7317567) Homepage

    When reading the title I thought "Shit! AMD already have 3 problems with the Athlon 64". Shouldn't it be "Athlon 64 Motherboard Triple _Treat_ Round-Up"?
  • Excuse me for not being interested but I want my 8-way Athlon MB please, that way I can stick a new CPU into it when I can afford one.

    • Doesn't the stepping on processors have to be the same to work in SMP? Or is that no longer an issue? I remember reading an article that said you should always buy all your processors together, so that they have the same stepping value. Can anyone correct me on this?

  • c't tested 9 AMD64 boards... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lazy Jones ( 8403 ) * on Monday October 27, 2003 @05:01AM (#7317702) Homepage Journal
    Here's an (abbreviated) article (German!): http://www.heise.de/ct/03/22/146/ [heise.de]

  • AGP/PCI Bus width (Score:2, Interesting)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 )
    Just curious, does anyone know if the AGP / PCI buses on these babies are 64bit? It seems to me that they are just the same old slots as the older motherboards. Wouldnt a true 64bit mobo require a radically different AGP/PCI slots in order to take advantage of the added bus width?

    or maybe im just plain wrong ... any comments ?

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