Opteron/Athlon64 Chipset Comparison: Via, Nvidia & ALi

[Omega65]

AMDZone: <a href="http://www.amdzone.com/articleview.cfm?ArticleID=1345" target=_blank><b>Opteron/Athlon64 Chipset Comparison: Via, Nvidia & ALi</b></a>


It is clear that performance of all of these chipsets is quite similar overall, and it looks that features and pricing figure more prominently in determining the best chipset for Athlon 64. Unlike with the Athlon XP where the nForce 2 had a clear lead over the other offerings the picture is muddied with Socket 754.

There are a number of VIA K8T800 based motherboards available for purchase now, and VIA has an advantage despite the nForce 3 being around in Asus SK8N form for months. You can find nForce 3 based boards, but they are not as plentiful. As for ALi it is currently unclear who will offer a motherboard based on the M1687. They had been quite successful with mobile wins in the past however, but Asus, Soyo, and Iwill have been their only big supporters with their Athlon chipset.

read the whole review <a href="http://www.amdzone.com/articleview.cfm?ArticleID=1345" target=_blank>here</a>

[Omega65]

One Caveat about Nforce 3 mobos courtesy of the HardOCP Opteron/P4 EE review (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTI0LDQ=) (bottom of page)


Above we saw the nForce3 150 board from Shuttle easily outstrip the VIA K8T800 board from MSI in every single benchmark. At first we were a bit unsure, but the picture becomes quite clear once you see the full data sets from the entire review and have had some time to spend with all of the hardware. It's our opinion that we are seeing the score differences because of the superior IDE implementation by NVIDIA.
......
There is always another side of the story though. Currently we can crash every nForce3 board we have possession of, both retail and engineering samples, when running extreme IDE traffic. We are also hearing that this is why some Taiwanese board companies are going with the VIA solution instead of the NVIDIA nForce3. We've received new drivers here recently, but we haven't had time to test them out to see if the stability has gotten any better.

Something to think about.....

[Gobbles]

this is why AMD needs to get back into the chipset market. I would feel much better about an amd chipset than any of the others. I have never trusted via, and reading Hocp's reviews on the nf3 chipset makes want to steer clear of upgrading till 1 the proc prices drop and 2 the chipsets are on revision 2 or 3

my .02

Gob

[Al_Capown]

Gobbles said
this is why AMD needs to get back into the chipset market. I would feel much better about an amd chipset than any of the others. I have never trusted via, and reading Hocp's reviews on the nf3 chipset makes want to steer clear of upgrading till 1 the proc prices drop and 2 the chipsets are on revision 2 or 3

my .02

Gob
agreed

[Omega65]

All chipsets have errata and bugs. The AMD 8000 chipset currently has AGP problems. That's why you haven't seen any AMD 8000 based workstation (AGP/AGP Pro) motherboards.

So basically pick your poison.

It's never good to go with v1 of a chipset/motherboard in any event. We'll all be better served waiting for the next chipset versions (K8T880 & NF3 250 Pro)