NVIDIA, SiS and VIA Bring on Chipsets for AMD Socket 939

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Manufacturer	NVIDIA	SiS	VIA
Northbridge	nForce3 Ultra	755FX	K8T800 Pro
CPU Support	Athlon 64 & FXSempron	Athlon 64 & FXSempron	Athlon 64 & FXSempron
Socket Support	Socket 754, 939	Socket 754, 939	Socket 754, 939
HyperTransport	800 MHz, 1 GHz	800 MHz, 1 GHz	800 MHz, 1 GHz
Graphics Interface	AGP 3.0 / 8X	AGP 3.0 / 8X	AGP 3.0 / 8X
Architecture	Single Chip	Two Chip	Two Chip
Chip Interconnect	-	MuTIOL1066 MB/s	Ultra V-Link1066 MB/s
Southbridge	-	SiS964/965	VT8237, VT8251
PCI	6x 32 Bit PCI 2.3	6x 32 Bit PCI 2.3	6x 32 Bit PCI 2.3
Audio	AC97 2.17.1-Channel	AC97 2.3	AC97 2.3 (VIA Vinyl 6-Channel)PCI Audio (Vinyl 8-Channel)
Network	Integrated Gigabit Ethernet+ NVIDIA Firewall	MII 100 MBit/s	Integrated 100 MbitDedicated VIA Velocity Gigabit
Storage	2x UltraATA/1334x SATA-150	2x UltraATA/1332x SATA-150	2x UltraATA/1332x SATA-150
RAID Support	Mode 0, 1, 0+1	RAID 0, 1, JBOD	Mode 0, 1, JBOD
USB	8x USB 2.0	8x USB 2.0	8x USB 2.0

To maintain comparable values for all the boards, we increased the clock speed of the NVIDIA and SiS chipsets so that CPU-Z reported the two running at 2,412 MHz. With the memory, we had to do without the ideal timings of CL 2.0-2-2-5 because it didn’t work with the SiS board - the Aquamark crashed several times with this setting. This was not the case with the reference board - SiS certainly didn’t have the extreme Corsair modules available. We decided to use CL2.0-3-2-6, which can now be attained with high-value modules from other manufacturers.

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Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.