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MA XIMUMPC JANUARY 2006
BEST ATHLON 64 CHIPSET
If you think chipset performance doesn’t matter for Athlon 64 CPUs, you’re dead wrong. We pitted ATI’s new CrossFire chipset,
nVidia’s new dual X16 chipset, and VIA’s latest PCI-E offering against each other to find the fastest chipset for the Athlon 64THE TESTS
For our showdown, we tapped Asus for its
new A8N32-SLI Deluxe mobo ($250, http://www.
asus.com). The board uses nVidia’s nForce
SLI X16 chipset, which is the fi rst consumer
chipset to feature two x16 slots for dual
graphics cards. That’s 8GB/s of data for
each graphics card, double the bandwidth
of a dual-x8 confi guration. DFI’s LANParty
RDX200 CF-DR ($200, http://www.dfi.com.tw)
represents ATI’s new Radeon Xpress 200
CrossFire chipset. ATI has had some suc-
cess with its integrated graphics chipsets
in AMD notebooks, and the company is
now hoping to replicate that success on
the desktop. To round out the bunch, we
grabbed an Asus A8V-E SE ($100, http://www.
asus.com) which uses VIA’s K8T890 Pro
chipset. Each mobo was equipped with an
Athlon 64 FX-57, 1GB of Corsair DDR
RAM, a Seagate SATA 160GB drive, and a
reference GeForce 7800 GTX card. All of the
motherboards use the latest BIOS and driv-
ers available from the chipset vendor.
We chose a variety of benchmarks that
refl ect overall system-level performance, rath-
er than pure graphics or gaming performance.THE RESULTS
Most people—including us—have long
felt that with the memory controller inte-
grated into the CPU, the chipsets have
become less relevant on the Athlon 64
platform. Our contest between three of
the top chipsets for the platform tell a
different story. Given the same video-
card, which chipset is
the fastest? The quick
answer is nVidia’s new
nForce4 SLI X16 chip-
set. Not every test run
showed a decisive mar-
gin in the X16’s favor,
but combined they
reveal an overall trend—
the X16 is the fastest.
The only area the X
didn’t dominate was in
hard drive performance
under PCMark 2005.
There we saw VIA’s K8T890 Pro take the
lead. The hard drive performance gap
was wide enough to give VIA a win in
PCMark 2005 as well.
In memory performance and graphics
performance, however, the X16 is unpar-
alleled. The surprise was that VIA’sK8T890 Pro, which has been linked to
budget boxes because it lacks dual-card
support, was the runner up, spanking
ATI’s CrossFire chipset. We had high
hopes for ATI’s answer to SLI, but the
Radeon Xpress was less than stellar. Its
hard drive performance lagged the X
and VIA by a good 5 percent and it didn’t
win a single benchmark.
While the gap between
the fastest and slowest
was relatively thin, why
wouldn’t you choose the
obvious winner?THE BOTTOM
LINE
You know the nForce
SLI X16 is the fastest,
but what that means
in real-world terms is
as clear as mud. In
the good old days, you picked your
CPU, then chose a chipset, and bought
whatever graphics card was the fast-
est. Today, that doesn’t work. First you
have to decide whether you’ll ever want
dual graphics cards. Then you have to
pick the videocard vendor you want,
further limiting your chipset options. In
AMD land, that means nForce for SLI or
Radeon Xpress 200 for CrossFire. For
consumers dead-set on ATI videocards,
you have no choice. That won’t stop us
from placing the crown on nVidia’s head
for the nForce4 SLI X16, but we’re not
happy there isn’t a uniform standard for
dual graphics-card mobos.nVidia’s dual x16 PCI Express slot-equipped nForce4 X16 chipset (center) spanked VIA’s (right) and ATI’s chipsets.FANTASTIC FOUR
Dual x16 graphics slots for
future-proofi ng and overall
better performance.
FAB FOUR
Come on kids, can’t we have
a uniform dual-card spec?NVIDIA NFORCE
SLI XChart is a representative sample of all benchmarks run. Best scores are bolded.BENCHMARKS
VIA K8T890 ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 NVIDIA NFORCE4 SLI X
3DMARK05 CPU 5,770 5,920 6,
3DMARK01 SE 30,206 29,527 30,
3DMARK03 16,672 16,686 16,
QUAKE III (FPS) 544 547 564
AQUAMARK III CPU 12,350 12,317 12,