Socket 754 Roundup, Part 3: Asus, Soltek & DFI
by Wesley Fink on September 14, 2004 12:03 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
General Performance and Encoding
Values remain tightly clustered for 2nd generation 754 boards in Multimedia Content Creation and Business Winstone. It is interesting, however, that these most recent 754 boards are the boards at the top of the charts. It appears that Socket 754 has matured and manufacturers have learned to squeeze a bit more from the chipsets and processors.
The Soltek is a particularly fast performer at stock speeds. At a price of less than $100, it is a great value if you plan to run at stock and do not have a pressing need for on-board firewire.
The Soltek was a particular surprise in the 2-pass Media Encoding benchmark. In the past, we have seen values tightly clustered in boards using the same chipset and CPU. The Soltek even managed to top encoding by a skim margin. As we have stated in past reviews, the on-board memory controller of the Athlon 64 tends to make any differences between boards much smaller than what we have seen in the past with the memory controller on the chipset. So, variations in performance are more significant than they may first appear.
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Term - Monday, September 27, 2004 - link
Uhm.. the new ASUS bios fix the OC stability problem with SATA right?Wesley Fink - Saturday, September 18, 2004 - link
#34 - The Asus K8N-E manual does state 3MB of memory as the maximum capacity. The specifications have been corrected in the review.LocutusX - Thursday, September 16, 2004 - link
Daxzus,For more accurate "real-world advice" concerning the K8N-E, please see the unofficial thread for that mobo at the Anandtech forums. There are people there who have been using it extensively for the last 2 months, who have tried a wide variety of components/overclocking on it.
justly - Wednesday, September 15, 2004 - link
#27 – WesleyThank you for the explanation about your testing methodology, now I feel more comfortable knowing that you do check for these minor deviations when comparing new products against older ones.
#28 – Wesley (again)
I agree about it being a shame that SiS seems to always get dumped on by big name motherboard manufactures and that even when a good product hits the street it seems to get forgotten about or overlooked. The thing is I still think you are just as guilty as many others reviewers. If you don’t understand what I mean then just look at #32 (by PrinceGaz) since I would have said the EXACT same thing.
This might be a little arrogant of me, but would it really hurt to mention their product when talking about a section of the market that they perform so well in (non-overclockers).
Daxzus - Wednesday, September 15, 2004 - link
also...I was wondering if anyone has a good powersupply and case that might work good for me for a good price.Daxzus - Wednesday, September 15, 2004 - link
I read every thing that was in the review about the 3 diffrent motherboards and I have some questions.In the review it was said that the Asus K8N-E deluxe maxed out at 2GB of memory, but at newegg and some all the other places I can buy it from-and even Asus homepage, say that the Asus K8N-E deluxe has a max of 3GB of memory. What this in error in the reveiw or am I looking at buying the wrong board?
Also I was thinking about buying the Asus K8N-E deluxe and I have a college budget and I was wanting to get some recomendation as to some really good cheap memory to get for it. Also maybe some good budget video cards. I saw that in the review that ATI 9800 was used...wouldn't a Nvidia video card work better considering the chip set?
but all in all thank for the info that you put into the reviews Fink!
Dax
AtaStrumf - Wednesday, September 15, 2004 - link
I just hope that your upcoming OC article will at least mention sempron 3100+, since you (AT)did promise to OC it, but untill now you have not done so.PrinceGaz - Wednesday, September 15, 2004 - link
#28 Wesley Fink-From the aricle- "If overclocking is not particularly important to you, then one of the first generation boards based on the VIA chipset might also meet your needs at a lower price."
And your reply- "There is actually another complaint about Sis. None of the Sis A64 cipsets I have tested, including the 939 Reference Board, have a working PCI/AGP lock."
If overclocking is not particularly important to someone, the lack of a PCI/AGP lock wouldn't matter.
jwix - Wednesday, September 15, 2004 - link
The article mentions overclocking difficulties with SATA drives with the DFI board being the exception. I wonder....if running 2 drives in a raid 1 config, would it make it any more difficult to overclock on the DFI?LocutusX - Wednesday, September 15, 2004 - link
"The problem is ports 1 and 2 on nVidia are coupled with the PHY Gigabit LAN and generally will not overclock very well."Source?