Early Athlon Motherboard Review — THG.RU

Introduction

AMD’s new high performance processor has now been released some 9 days ago and supposedly Athlon-systems have started shipping since. It’s still close to impossible to get a single Athlon-CPU in any shop though, but this might hopefully change soon. It doesn’t matter if you acquire a complete Athlon-system or you build one up yourself, the shiny new Athlon-processor requires a special motherboard. The ‘Fester’-motherboards that AMD shipped with the Athlon review-systems will not be used in any commercial system, so that you as an end-user, OEM or system integrator will have to look for an Athlon-platform from one of the various motherboard makers.

There’s only few Athlon motherboards …

Getting a motherboard may sound simple, but unfortunately the story is pretty far from simple in case of AMD’s new Athlon. This review includes only four motherboards for the time being, and one of them is AMD’s Fester-board, which was tested out of competition. You may think that Tom’s Hardware Guide did a bad job in acquiring boards, but this is certainly not the case. As a matter of fact, there’s only a minority of motherboard manufacturers that are actually offering Athlon-platforms right now, the minority is either quiet, or even announcing that they will not produce Athlon-motherboards for rather cheesy reasons.

Is Intel Involved?

So what is the real reason why there were only a handful of motherboard makers at the platform launch-event in Taipei last week? Well, as you might have guessed already, there’s a very strong rumor that the one company that hates and detests AMD’s Athlon really badly is throwing its whole weight in to threaten the entire Taiwanese motherboard industry. We heard rumors of an artificial ‘BX-chipset shortage’ and other unpleasant threats that put a motherboard maker into a tough position. No motherboard manufacturer is particularly keen on making Intel upset. In the past such behavior resulted in lagging shipments of Intel-chipsets, chipset- shipments of only small quantity or in the worst case even in a complete cancellation of the ‘cooperation’ between Intel and the motherboard maker. This is a serious thing, because so far the vast majority of systems used Intel-processors and Intel chipsets. The motto used to be «stick with Intel, and you’ll make money», and thus all motherboard makers stuck to it nicely.

The current situation doesn’t make things easier. Athlon may be a great product, but will it ship in quantity? If it should, Intel could be left sitting on its chipset until kingdom come, but who can assure that? If Athlon should not ship in decent amounts, the majority of users will have to stick to Intel-systems and thus the big money is still made with Intel-systems, including motherboards with Intel chipsets. So the motherboard makers don’t know. Shall they take the risk and upset Intel, or should they turn their backs on AMD to score some points with Intel?

The Sad Situation

Let’s pick three examples, Abit, Asus and FIC. Abit already announced that they won’t do Athlon-motherboards. Does that surprise anyone? Abit never made any Super7-boards as well. It doesn’t seem too unlikely that Abit wants to stay on good terms with Intel. Asus is the next and saddest example. I know for a fact that Asus has designed a highly excellent Athlon-motherboard. However, who expected Asus at the launch-event in Taiwan last week waited in vain. Asus is chicken, they could easily supply Athlon-boards, but they are afraid of Intel’s reaction. Well, well. Example number three is FIC. FIC has got a relationship with Intel too, they are actually a significantly big customer for Intel chipsets. However, FIC belongs just as VIA to the Formosa Plastic empire, and thus FIC used to be one of the first to supply motherboards with VIA and thus non-Intel chipsets. FIC doesn’t have the slightest problem with launching their Athlon-motherboard. They weren’t afraid of Intel in the past and they’re not afraid of them now as well. That’s the spirit, dear readers! Asus is one of the very best motherboard makers in the world, but being afraid of Intel doesn’t score them any points with me.

Praise the Three Musketeers!

This motherboard review includes the Athlon boards from Gigabyte, FIC and Microstar International (MSI). Let’s commend them for their courage and let’s hope that others will follow. I will not rest until I either find out that Intel never threatened anyone, or until I found some hard evidence to once and for all stop this ridiculous behavior. I will fly over to Taiwan and talk to key people in the motherboard business. Intel is either free of sin or it should better stop threatening businesses as long as there’s time. The FTC is waiting and so am I.

The Chipset

As you certainly know from my article ‘The Athlon Processor — AMD is finally overtaking Intel’, Athlon has a different bus than Intel’s sixth generation processors and thus it needs a different chipset as well. AMD has put a lot of work hours into their own AMD 750-chipset, working closely with non-Intel chipset makers as well.

The AMD 750 chipset follows the classic roots of chipsets we know for quite a while. It comes with a ‘North Bridge’ that talks to the CPU via DEC’s ‘EV6 bus protocol’, to the graphics adapter via the AGP and to the PC100-memory via a 64-bit 100 MHz memory bus. It’s connected to the ‘South Bridge’ via the PCI-bus and the south-bridge does such common things as taking care of the ISA-slots, the ATA66 IDE-interface, the system management and several other things. This setup is extremely similar to Intel’s BX-chipset and its predecessors. The AMD 750 is not using anything like Intel’s new ‘Hub Structure’, as currently found in Intel’s i810 or the future i820 chipset. This hub-structure is not a bad idea, but we have yet to see its real-world advantages, so that I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Whoever was pleased with Intel’s BX-chipset so far will be pleased with AMD750 as well.

AMD North Bridge and VIA South Bridge

Due to the close cooperation between AMD and VIA, there’s the possibility to use VIA’s south bridge with AMD750’s north-bridge as well. FIC is doing this on their Athlon-board and I know that Asus is doing the same on their ‘phantom product’ as well. The theoretical advantage of this procedure is to avoid possible incompatibility-issues between peripherals and the AMD750-south bridge. You will find out in the review however, that we haven’t seen any problems with either south-bridges.

VIA’s KX133

A bit more than a week ago VIA announced their very own Athlon-chipset and it looks very promising. It is supposed to include AGP4x and PC133, which puts it ahead of the AMD750. This is not surprising, since AMD’s strategy never included the shipment of their own chipset. AMD wants other chipset-makers to build Athlon-chipsets and they are happy to share the technology. The AMD750 arose from the pure necessity to have a chipset ready for Athlon’s launch. Once Athlon is being recognized AMD will hand over the chipset business to VIA, SiS and ALi.

It’s important to be aware of this situation, because this will mean that we’ll have soon Athlon motherboards with much cooler features. ATA66 is already now included into AMD750, something you won’t find on BX-motherboards, but the future Athlon-motherboards will include AGP4x and PC133, maybe soon even DDR-SDRAM or RDRAM-support as well.

The Contestants

The following three motherboards will have to stand up against AMD’s ‘Fester’-reference board:

Gigabite GA-7IX

FIC SD11

MSI 6167

You already know AMD’s Fester from the Athlon-review, so I’ll save showing its picture.

The BIOS

If you want to see a really scary BIOS you have to have a look at AMD’s Fester-board. Due to the fact that this board is for reviewers and OEMs only, AMD included a huge amount of tweaking features to run Athlon at its best. You will see that none of the three retail-boards comes with as many features, but they are still performing just as good as Fester. Here’s a look at Fester’s toughest BIOS-screens:

This is the ‘K7 L2/MSR/Workarounds’ — screen. You won’t find anything like that anywhere else and I guess there’s not much point getting into all those settings, let alone the fact that I don’t understand all of them myself.

Screen No.2 is dedicated to ‘Irongate/AGP Setup’ and includes a ton of SDRAM-settings, which you will find in the other BIOSes as well.

Let’s start with the Award-BIOS of Gigabite’s 7IX

These are the ‘Advanced Chipset Features’, including a automatic SDRAM timing setting for the ones that don’t want to fiddle around with five different memory settings. You can enable and disable ECC in case you are using ECC-memory, the rest is straight forward as we know it.

The next is FIC’s AMI-BIOS

As you can see in the top line of the settings, theirs is a automatic SDP-setting as well, which takes the pain away of adjusting all the memory settings manually. In the benchmarks it turned out that manual setting make you gain a few percent performance, but all in all the automatic setting is fine, easy as well as very sufficient.

Last but not least there is MSI’s Award-BIOS

I was missing an automatic setting, which will scare away all but the highly experienced users from this motherboard until the BIOS has been changed and an SPD-setting has been added. I also couldn’t find an enabling/disabling of ECC. I could not figure out which is the default, although I was using Micron’s (Crucial Technology’s) PC133 ECC memory.

MSI added a pretty fancy but rather useless feature as well:

Hurray! All the overclockers will love it, MSI included an overclocking-feature for the bus clock. Too bad that this setting is completely pointless, unless you think that you can run an Athlon 600/100 at 800/133 MHz without Kryotech’s super-cooling.

Summarizing the BIOS-setup of the three boards I would like to pick the FIC SD11 as the winner, because it’s definitely the easiest to use. Number two is clearly the Gigabyte 7IX, which follows closely. MSI somehow overshot the target by adding a useless overclocking feature, forgetting the ECC-settings as well as an automatic memory adjustment.

Test Setup

I’m sorry to say that the performance evaluation was one of the most boring jobs I’ve ever done. The boards scored almost identically and the tiny differences I found are hardly worth mentioning.

System Setup

I decided to run BAPCo’s Sysmark98 and four 3D-games to find out performance differences between the motherboards. For Quake2 I ran crusher.dm2, for Quake3 q3demo1 at ‘normal’-settings. Shogo used our own ‘fortress’-demo and Expendable was run in ‘timedemo’-mode.

Business Application Performance

The benchmark numbers speak for themselves.

Under Sysmark98 all boards scored identically, even one point higher than AMD’s Fester.

3D Game Performance

Shogo showed pretty much the biggest differences, giving a slight edge to MSI’s 6167.

Under Expendable the 6167 from MSI scored also slightly better than the rest at 640×480, at the higher resolution the difference is zero, because the graphics card is the limiting factor.

3D Game Performance Continued

There’s hardly any difference whatsoever under Quake2.

And under Quake3 we saw the same, the boards score almost identical results.

Looking at the benchmarks shows us that all three motherboards are completely up to speed with AMD’s reference platform. The performance differences between the three are hardly worth talking about, none of the boards is slow or fast, they are all scoring well.

Features

Talking about the features of the three Athlon-motherboards is a rather quick job. All boards come with three DIMM-sockets, none of the boards requires any jumpers, neither any BIOS-adjustable settings, since the Athlon-processor codes CPU-clock as well as bus clock by itself. The only difference is the FIC SD11’s lack of one ISA-slot although it’s by far the largest motherboard.

Summary

There’s hardly a risk that a lot of you will have any reasons to rush out and get an Athlon-motherboard anytime soon, because it will take a while until Athlon will hit the retail-shelves. It’s still impressive to see that all the motherboards in this test scored well and that none of it showed any kind of unpleasant behavior. All boards ran as stable as everybody would expect it, there wasn’t even the slightest crash at any time in the testing procedure. Thus I’d like to repeat my kudos to the three courageous motherboard makers for a job well done. I would certainly have a hard time picking one of the three boards, so that I’d recommend the following. The FIC SD11 is lacking one ISA-slot, but if you don’t care about it you’ll get the easiest to adjust board of those three contestants. The Gigabyte board is just as easy to use, but its eight power supply transistors are not equipped with heat sinks, which could be a problem with fast and thus power hungry Athlon processors. I personally like the MSI 6167 best, but that’s only because I’m not afraid of fiddly BIOS-settings. However, I’d recommend that MSI do something about the missing ECC-setting. The MS6167 does also have a slight edge in the graphics benchmarks, which makes it score another point with me.

In closing I’d like to ask all motherboard makers to jump on the Athlon-bandwagon. This processor is not only fast, it’s also easy to use and very stable, something I cannot say about my intermittently crashing Pentium III 600 CPUs. The users out there will soon get the message and people will start yelling for Athlon-systems. Intel or not Intel, the industry should get ready for it!