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Socket-A Chipset Roundup
EconolineCrush writes: "The Tech Report has a review up of VIA's new KT333 Socket A chipset. Though it's really a review of the KT333, a total of seven different chipsets from VIA, SiS, AMD, and NVIDIA are compared to determine the uniprocessor Socket A performance king. This is definitely worth checking out if you're in the market for an AMD platform, or are curious to see how your current chipset stacks up against the latest and greatest."
Perhaps they should be reviewing the total stability of any given solution. I for one know that I used to have an Iwill board based on the ALi MaGIK chipset, and it was a hell of a lot more stable than my current KT266A.
Tom's Hardware has a good article up.
"A total of 26 various benchmark tests clearly shows that the VIA KT333 chipset the best and most capable chipset for AMD CPUs. With only a few exceptions, not even the Nvidia nForce with its expensive dual-channel technology (DDR266) can put up a real fight against the newcomer KT333. With the launch of the KT333, the KT266A will become a thing of the past - you simply won't want to miss out on all the new features such as ATA/133, USB 2.0 or DDR333 support."
So does Anandtech: here.
"When the KT266A was launched it completely blew us away; the performance of the chipset was spectacular and it was clear that it would quickly become a top pick for all Athlon owners. The KT333 doesn't have nearly as great of an impact but the reasons behind that are understandable; both new features supported by the chipset, DDR333 and Ultra ATA 133 aren't features that will result in tangible improvements in performance today. Instead the KT333 is more of a technology enabling platform for VIA. The chipset will not cost any more to manufacture than the KT266A and thus motherboards won't increase in price. While DDR333 SDRAM isn't officially available today (the specification isn't complete), when it is first made available it will carry a price premium over DDR266 SDRAM."
I will be happy on the day that I don't get a motherboard which repeatedly powers down the system, randomly. (FYI: Yes, I tried Linux, WinME, and WinXP)
The only chipset (recently) that works for me is the ALi Magik
There's a bunch of other good reviews of the set in all its forms and splendor.
Digit-Life
HardOCP
AnandTech
AMDDb
Via Hardware
</karmawhoring>
This tagline is umop apisdn.
The article was ok, but the testers leave alot to be desired, it doesnt look like they paid much attention to bios settings, they said that they were stuck running the sis745 chipset at 2.5 cas latency. The sis chipsets come set at 2.5 default.. but you can change the setting in the bios depending on what kind of ram you put in. The fact that they diddnt bother changing a bios setting to show the potential of the board says something. While some may say that the cas should autoconfigure to spd.. its a simple setting to change. I have a ECS 735 that runs cas2 although I had to manually change it. If you spend the time to get to know your motherboard.. you can usually get all kinds of performance out of it.. Dont just plug it in and expect to beat the benchmarks.
Fire in the hands of the village idiot is no tool, but a weapon of mass destruction
Something that caught my attention in one of the photographs with this article is the funny squiggly PCB lines at the lower left in this image. Any hardware people who can enlighten me as to the function of these squiggly lines? Is this a timing device or some design artifact?
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
When SiS735 chipset has been released - it was fastest and - probably - most stable chipset for Athlon. Only one (major) vendor created motherboard with it - ECS k7s5a. Other vendors was selling KT266-based motherboards, much more expensive, slower and just worse (I am not sure, but isn't true that VIA bridge still has problem with SB Live on Windows?).
I would pay a lot of money for ASUS SiS735-based motherboard, but it just doesn't exist. Why?
ECS k7s5a is fast and stable. The only problem is that a lot of ECS mobos are defective. I am not sure what should I buy now - Soltek or Asus mobo on KT266A? ECS k7s5a? Wait for something new?
Are there any Linux benchmark of motherboards? With stuff like kernel compiling time, drm performance, hdparm results, etc...?
It sure would be nice if Intel would make a chipset for Athlon/Duron. I am so sick of Via chipsets I have sworn off non-Intel rigs for the near future. Intel's engineers would have the perfect forum to put up or shut up, depending on the performance of their solution relative to the existing chipsets. Of course, this is just wishful thinking, but damn it'd be nice...
How I am supposed to take advantage of my N-Forces dual channel DDR. From each test I see on Toms or Anands they always use one stick of memory.
However, my understanding of the chipset led me to believe I had to use two chips to see any benefit.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
AMD has a nice dual-bus SMP architecture. Via has the DDR333 RAM. NVidea has the dual-banked DDR266. If we could either of these memory architectures paired up with the dual-bus SMP Athlon systems, then we would have the making of a VERY serious dual-CPU machine.
Come to think of it, I recall reading that by adding more north bridges from the 760MP chipset, you could have more than 2 Athlons on a board. If someone were to make a quad Athlon board with dual-banked DDR333, that would be a SERIOUS piece of iron for the enterprise, and at a very reasonable price. It's too bad that everyone's afraid of stepping on Intel's toes...
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
While not performing too badly, it's a shame that the SiS chipset doesn't do a little better against the Via offerings... I've got an SiS 735 board, and it's solid as a rock, and blazing fast under Linux 2.4.18-pre9, and I don't have to put up with Via's flakey-ass south bridge chips. Via might be the speed king, but I'm sticking with SiS' 7x5 line for my future purchases. Here's hoping the 755 (or whatever comes next) kicks some Via ass. (or that AMD comes along and makes another decent chipset again, whichever...)
The Free desktop that Just Works
My theory is to buy the second-tier of technology. For instance, I just picked up an Athlon XP 1700+, with a ECS K7S5A motherboard, GeForce 2 64 MB card, and lots of extras, for less than $400 with shipping, because I decided it wasn't worth an additional couple hundred to go with a GeForce 4 rather than a 2, etc. Pricewatch is a great place to look.
And the best part is that I now have a fairly good computer and still have the money to upgrade again in a year or so if I want to.
Out of curiosity, anyone out here going to buy this top-of-the-line board, and if so, why? (and how do you get so much cash, wanna give me some?) What benefits are there to having the best computer out there vs. the second best? (I'm a poor college student, I'm also slightly curious....)
but the KT333 won all but 2 tests, and wasn't behind significantly at all on them. I wonder if KT333 will perform better when 333mhz bus athlons come around?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Socket A is OK, but my girlfriend takes a socket B. Hasn't given me a bit of trouble.
What decent Athlon boards exist for SMP?
How the hell is the parent post Flamebait?
From the article:
"The pinouts on the KT333's north and south bridge chips follow VIA's V-Map standard, so the KT333 north bridge is obstensibly a drop-in replacement for the KT266 or KT266A. (Heck, it's theroetically pin-compatible with the P4X266A, for whatever that's worth.) Like those chipsets, the KT333 north bridge chip can be paired up with one of several different south bridge chips."
Which got me to thinking, "Why can't someone produce motherboards wherein components other than the CPU are quickly upgradeable?"
Aside from radical revisions, is there any reason why an I/O controller couldn't be swapped out via some sort of socketed interface?
Compare those results with what was there a year ago.
I had ALi Magic1 board for almoust a year and I'm quite happy with it (I run Linux 24/7 on it). I recently bought VIA266A board for another computer. Good stability, more features (on-board NIC, 6-channel sound, AGPpro, on-board IDE RAID), perfomance gains still look marginal to me though.
I find it amusing how Tom's always reduces things to frames per second in Quake3. As if that's the best measure of performance for any component of a system.
I imagine in the future, manufacturers, instead of listing [MHz, drive speed, etc], will list modifiers to Quake3 FPS. ie- specs on a system of the future will read like a Dungeons & Dragons character sheet:
Bob's Machine of 3l33t Gaming
CPU of giant GHZ: +100 FPS
Elven Motherboard: +5 FPS
GPU of Rendering: +80 FPS
Cursed Hard drive:-15 FPS
magic DDR memory: +20 FPS
ISA SB16: -20 FPS
-----------------
Save vs Quake3: 170 FPS
Socket-A Chipset Roundup
Roundups happen at the end. The end of what? Is CmdrTaco trying to tell us something?
Follow me
Or is AMD the only choice?
Those are probably there for the cpu to north bridge traces - the clocks need a tiny delay so that the data (which is launched at about the same time) meets setup and hold at the far end
THat NVidia chipset sounds sweet for an integrated multimedia system! Does anyone know if there are linux drivers for the integrated sound on that board?
You got 640 kB of RAM in that, Billy?
(kidding!)
Sounds like a cool carnival game... with the big oversize mallet and all, right?
Wah!
After assembling a new system consisting of an Antec case, Soyo Dragon Plus motheboard, 1GB Corsair DDR RAM, XP 1800+ CPU, 64MB GeForce 2 Ti, Sound Blaster Audigy, Yamaha CD-RW and Adaptec 2930 SCSI card (Notice the lack of cheap components), I've discovered that the VIA chipsets and Nvidia videocards have a history of not getting along, with all fingers pointing at the KT266A chipset.
Running Win2K Pro (fully updated), and the latest BIOS and drivers for everything, and not overclocking a darn thing, I'm still suffering random system lockups doing simple activites such as broswing the web. Games are too tempermental to seriously play. (It was really bad before I uninstalled the latest MS win2K rollup update - click on any browser link and have a 15% chance of the system hanging...)
I bought the Dragon Plus Motherboard based on all the wonderful online reviews of the board and chipset. Not one said anything about the lack of stability with the KT266A chipset, or any problems with lockups. Later, doing some google searching turned up message boards full of other people experiencing the exact same problems. The only "solution" discovered (and even recommended on the Soyo web site) is to drop the RAM/Bus speed to 100Mhz from 133Mhz. That kind of defeats the purpose of making a fast machine...
Now I'm trying to research a motherboard replacment (which means resintalling the OS and most software - shoot an afternoon there) based on stability first, then performance. I'm thinking nForce, but we'll see...
It's a shame to waste the money on motherboard I'm going to throw out, but there wasn't a warning to be found when I did my initial research. (Note to self: Use google more for these kinds of things)
-Matt
The biggest problem with Athlon right now is Via. Their chipsets suck. Its practically impossible to get a combination of motherboard, drivers, video card, and video drivers to be happy. The chips + drives are just too unstable.
I built a machine on the ASUS A7M266 last August and have seen problem after problem. From what I can tell, it is solely due to the Via stuff.
I am seriously considering rebuilding to machine to use NVIDIA, but I am afraid they are also unproven. Who knows if I will trade one instability for another?
I really wish AMD would get with the program and encourage quality chipset development like Intel does. There is a reason Intel chips are so much more stable - it'd because Intel cares about the chipset market. I wish we could say the same for AMD.
Good to see you having problems with the A7M266 that you can tell are related to Via when that motherboard is based on an AMD chipset:
h tm
:D
http://usa.asus.com/mb/socketa/a7m266/overview.
As you can see it's based on the AMD 761 chipset... and as you probably heard, they're quite stable (And PCI bug free)
Maybe that's your problem... the 761 chipset felt offended because you called it a Via
I hate to agree with davecrazy but...
Ah! But AMD yesterday announced their new 8000 series chipset devices for HyperTransport systems (i.e., Hammer initially and MIPS).
This new chipset includes the 8111 hub (a traditional southbridge (USB2, 6-channel audio, ATA133, Network, PCI, etc - similar to the nForce MCP it appears) with 800MB/s uplink via HT), the 8131 tunnel (a dual PCI-X controller with 6.4GB/s uplink and 3.2GB/s downlink) and the 8151 tunnel (an AGP 8x controller with 6.4GB/s uplink and 1.6GB/s downlink).
There are documents on AMDs website (both the press release and the technical details), and a couple of good discussions on AcesHardware forum (http://www.aceshardware.com/forum).
You can chain the devices like this:
[CPU][PCI-X][AGP][IO]
Remember the memory controller for the Hammer is on the processor itself, so there is not a traditional northbridge with memory controller on it anymore.
What I am looking for is "proof".
They keep saying its got great dual channel performance, I haven't found a review comparing two nforce boards where on uses 1 dimm and another uses 2.
Anyone got one? I want to see if this is a real bandwidth bonus or just some slick advertising. If it were truly as powerful as they state then something must be horribly wrong with 64bit access.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Hmmm... I'm still looking for a good Socket A board, I'll keep an eye on the 333. I've had a few problems but have been mainly satsified by the stability of the KT133A boards, though they are a little out of date.
As to ECS and the K7S5A, I wouldn't touch them with a ten-meter cattle-prod. I ordered two right after they came out, and they promptly Bit The Big Green Banana of Death shortly after startup, taking a pair of out-of-warranty Athlon 1.4's with them.
ECS's response was, basically, "too bad so sad." The retailer finally (after 3 months) refunded the cost of the boards (or claimed they have, the money hasn't arrived yet), but I got to eat the cost of two Athlons.
I am one of literally thousands who have had serious problems with these boards. If you haven't, more power to you and I hope your boards stay healthy.
As for me, ECS = shoveling cash into the fireplace.
(And no, I wasn't overclocking them or running them off power from a car battery or anything terminally stupid like that.)
A quick rundown of the steps taken:
The CPU was boxed, and the approved heatsink has been checked for attachment.
The case has 3x 80mm fans in it, plus a chip fan on the mother board. Other chips (video card, etc) have heat sinks. There is also a slim fan/heat sink attached to the bottom of the hard drive.
Internally, Round cabes are used for all interconnects for maximal airflow in the case.
The PCI cards are spaced out to insure a empty card slot on each side of every card.
I've monitored the the CPU and case with the onboard temperature sensors/utility and the chassis tempuratue stabilizes at about 38 degrees centigrade, while the CPU stabilizes at about 46 degrees, unless I'm running a 3d intensive game, then it heats up to about 52 degrees.
The lockups have occured when the system is warm or cold; and the only things that have caused their frequency to changs has been when drivers/patches have been applied.
The idea that one spot on the motherboard is too hot is interesting.... but once you read the steps I've taken to keep the system cool, then you'll probably agree that if such a thing is happening, then it is a design flaw in the motherboard layout which should be a problem with all examples of that motherboard.
Also, with the lockups occuring at times when the system hasn't been given a chance to warm up, that suggests that overheating is the wrong culprit to look at.
-Matt
I can easily comment on this, as I just got my AthlonXP 1600+ in yesterday and dropped it in to my brand new Abit NV7m which has the built on GeForce 2 and the Nvidia motherboard chip.
:-)
A friend of mine had a kt133a chip with his athlon and he had the problems of SB Live + kt133 not working all the time. This motivated me to go out on a limb and try the nvidia route.
For anyone who has been holding off on upgrades for a while like I did though, the purchase of the NV7m with the built on Geforce 2 (running at 6x agp!! according to abit) was a nice upgrade from my withering Voodoo 3 3k. $140ish + s&h for vid card and MB isn't bad since the competition is about the same price. I'm still installing stuff to test the on board video card. I was surprised not many hardware sites reviewed it, and there's very little (in english) on Deja-Google about the nv7m good or bad.
Of special note on this, the motherboard Geforce 2 on the abit board only has Win 2k and Win XP drivers, which sucked, because I wasn't ready to abandon 98SE yet as my gaming machine. Oh well, it was time.
G
This space intentionally left blank.
I've had IRQ problems with my Abit BP6. With all five PCI slots filled (an Adaptec 29160N controller, FireWire card, Soundblaster 128, 3Com NIC and nVidia PCI card) I couldn't get things to work right. I went back to the Voodoo3 AGP (different bus, apparently) and had no problems.
I guess in theory they should share IRQ's; maybe one of the cards didn't play nice. And with five slots and four lines (INTA-INTD) you know there's going to be some sharing, even if there are 24 APICs... right? Plus there's motherboard USB that shares with one of those slots.
Thanks for the tips.