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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 |
The MSI board with VIA chipset would not run at exactly 2,400 MHz, which means we were working at a slightly elevated rate of 2,411 MHz.
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.
