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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."
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.
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...?
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.
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.
Did you read the article or just skip to the conclusion? I quote from the middle of page 4:
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
The problem's not software, it's hardware. There's a line that goes back to the power supply called "power good" and if it's deasserted then your power supply will shut down. There are other possible reasons, like excess heat. Make sure your power supply is working perfectly and your case's internal cooling is adequate before you assume your mainboard is flaky. I've never observed my ASUS A7M266 have this kind of problem, nor on any other board unless the power supply was inadequate or flaky.
The Tyan Tiger MP kicks ass, IMHO. (AMD 760MP chipset). I've been running it since December, never crashed (from hardware, anyway. :-) One note with this board, be sure to get a *heavy-duty* power supply. My SMP box has an Enermax EG651P-VE-something or other (550W), which works *very* well (but is kind of expensive).
Be sure to stay away from the AMD 760MPX chipset (note the X) until early March, because on the current revision, *USB doesn't work at all on the Southbridge* (although I've heard vendors are shipping USB 2.0 cards to get around this problem, but do you really want to lose a PCI slot?)
---NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf!
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
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
You got 640 kB of RAM in that, Billy?
(kidding!)
Good point about the MPX chipset. I've been waiting patiently for the Asus A7M266-D and now that it's out, the USB is busted! Plus the boards I've seen have built-in audio, which I'd actually rather *not* have. And what's the deal with that little daughter-card looking thing where the power comes in? Looks kludgey. But the PCI USB 2.0 card is supposed to work in the 64-bit slot, no? So maybe 'losing' a PCI slot isn't that bad. I'm assuming the two 64-bit PCI slots are on a separate bus from the 32-bit slots... would this mean less IRQ conflicts?
So the Tyan Tiger MPX was starting to look good, but then I hear the USB card Tyan is shipping is NOT a USB 2.0 card. So now it seems like you're really losing a PCI slot, since there don't seem to be that many 64-bit PCI cards out there now (or you buy a new 64-bit USB card and junk the free one). Built-in LAN sounds great, and the board looks a lot cleaner, especially the standard hard drive power connector by the ATX power connector for more current. Tyan probably learned a lot from their first SMP Athlon boards.
Anyone else have any experience with SMP Athlons? Oh, and did you use Athlon MP's or did you cheat and use the XP's?
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.
No the board is a hybrid chipset - it uses Via Southbridge, and that is where the problems lie.
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.
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'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.