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

MSI MS-9130: Board Revision 1.0, BIOS 1.0BD

Actually meant for dual boards: MSI MS-9130

The "little" Athlon 64 CPUs for the mass market are intended for the Socket 754 platform. In the preconditioning phase we examined several boards with Socket 754 based on the VIA K8T800 chipset, which is also available (see above) for the "big" Socket 940. Huge problems occurred even at the beginning of the tests: None of the Boards would work universally with 1 GB memory. This is not a trivial consideration, when two double-sided modules each with 512 MB work smoothly in the single-memory interface of the Athlon 64. However, 8 rows must simultaneously be held open. Only a single board, the MSI 8KT Neo, could handle 1 GB memory. However, the voltage of the memory had to be raised from 2.5 volts (standard) to 2.7 volts to make operation nearly stable. Several details on memory timings: Although the memory from TakeMS ran with CL2.0-4-4-8, sporadic failures were noted.

For the normal Athlon 64: MSI board with VIA K8T800 chipset

Northbridge and Southbridge of the K8T800 chipset

MSI 8KT Neo MS-6702: Board Revision 1.0, BIOS 1.0

Gigabyte GA-8KNNXP based on the NForce-3 chipset for Socket 754

Boards with NVIDIA NForce3 chipset are also available for Socket 754. Here we used the Gigabyte GA-8KNNXP.

Gigabyte GA-8KNNXP: Board revision 0.2, BIOS 1.0