AMD's Athlon 64 Has Arrived: the Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 (and Intel's P4 Extreme)

Asus SK8N: Board Revision 1.03, BIOS 1003 Beta 003 (NVIDIA Settings)

As already mentioned, the K8T800 chipset is momentarily a better basis for Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX. Our test board comes from MSI as an MS-9130. The layout makes the board a dual Socket 940 platform. Basically it is a workstation board that also supports Opteron CPUs. We used the same memory as was already used in the Asus SK8N with NForce-3 chipset: 2 modules each with 512 MB DDR400 (registered) from Legacy Electronics. Regardless - the memories are based on chips from Infineon with an access time of 5 ns. A manual adjustment of the timings is not possible; only the clock speed can be set in the BIOS. In the end, the following timings were selected from the BIOS: CL2.5-3-3-7. Despite the relatively slow timings in memory access, the bandwidth turns out to be somewhat higher at 5.6 GB/s compared to 5.5 GB/s with the NForce 3.