SUMMARY: Mike has served us up some AMD related content today where he compares two Socket 939 Athlon 64 motherboards. The first is the MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum which is based on nVidia's nForce3 Ultra chipset and the second is the ABIT AV8 3rd Eye which is based on VIA's K8T800 Pro chipset. We tested with an Athlon 64 FX-53 along with a whole bunch of benchmarks over a whooping 24 pages.
Our entry from the MSI lineup is none other than the highly vaunted K8N Neo 2 Platinum Edition motherboard. It is based on the nForce3 Ultra chipset and requires no added Southbridge to function at its full potential. It is a full-featured board and can be found online for about US$139 at the time of this piece. Before we take a look at some of the highlights of the board, let's take a look at a feature list as provided by the manufacturer:
CPU Support Supports Socket 939 for AMDฎ Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 processor Supports up to 3500+, 3800+ Athlon 64 FX 53, or higher CPU
nForce 3 Ultra Chipset HyperTransport link to the AMD Athlon 64/Athlon 64 FX CPU HyperTransport supporting speed up to 1GHz (2000MT/s) AGP3.0 8X interface at 533 MT/s (million transfers per second) Two independent SATA controllers, for four drives IEEE 802.3 NVIDIA MAC for 1000BASE-T Dual Fast ATA-133 IDE controllers
Memory Supports dual channel DDR 266/333/400, using four 184-pin DDR DIMMs. Supports a maximum memory size up to 4GB with ECC. Supports 2.5v DDR SDRAM DIMM.
IDE/SATA An IDE controller on the nVidia nForce3 Ultra chipset provides IDE HDD/CD-ROM with PIO, Bus Master and Ultra DMA133/100/66 operation modes. Can connect up to 4 IDE devices Supports 4 SATA ports. Transfer rate is up to 150MB/s.
NV RAID (Software) Supports up to 4 SATA & 2 ATA133 Hard drives RAID 0 or 1, 0+1, JBOD is supported RAID function work w/ATA133 + SATA HDD or 2 SATA HDD
Other Features Realtek 7.1 Audio Dual GigABIT LAN ports (1x Realtek, 1x Marvell) 3x IEEE 1394 Firewire (VIA 6306) 8x USB 2.0 Live Update 3 Core Cell Core Center
