Athlon64 Motherboard TripleThreat

By Jeff Bouton
October 26, 2003

How We Configured Our Test Systems:

To help fully explain the scores we listed in the following benchmarks, we felt it was necessary to explain how the systems were set up before running the benchmarks. On all of the boards, we started off by setting the memory frequency to BY SPD or Auto depending on the board.  The hard drive was formatted and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 was installed. After the Windows installation was complete, we installed the latest chipset drivers for each board, and upgraded to DirectX 9.0b.  We then installed the drivers for the rest of the components, using drivers supplied on each manufacturer's CD.  Auto-Updating, Hibernation, and System Restore were disabled, and then we set up a 768MB permanent page file. On these test systems we set the visual effects to "best performance" in system performance to limit any effects these settings would have on the benchmarks.   Lastly, we installed all of the benchmarking software, defragged the hard drive, and rebooted one last time.  For a frame of reference, we included the results from a Pentium 4 3.2GHz test system to keep the Athlon 64 3200+ results in perspective.

HotHardware Test Setup Let's get on with the show

Motherboards Tested:
MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R
ASUS K8V Deluxe
Shuttle AN50R
DFI 865PE Infinity (P4 Reference)

Common Hardware:
AMD Athlon64 3200+ @ 2.0GHz
Pentium 4 3.2GHz (800MHz Bus)
512MB (256MB x2) Kingston HyperX PC3500 SDRAM
eVGA GeForce4 Ti4600
Western Digital 30GB ATA100 Hard Drive
52x Creative Labs CD-ROM

Common Software / Drivers:
Windows XP with Service Pack 1
DirectX 9.0b
VIA v4.49
nVidia 45.23

SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks Synthetic testing

SANDRA (the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information and diagnostic utility put out by SiSoftware.  It's a quick and easy way to compare the CPU, Multimedia and Memory performance and compare it to a number of different hardware configurations.  Here we lined up the three Athlon 64 boards for easy comparison.

MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R

CPU

Multimedia

Memory

ASUS K8V Deluxe

CPU

Multimedia

Memory

Shuttle AN50R

CPU

Multimedia

Memory

If we were to start splitting hairs, the MSI board was the slowest of the three, although the differences were quite minor.  When it came to the best performer, the ASUS board provided us with the best overall score in each test, whereas the MSI and Shuttle boards were very close in overall performance.  In the end though, the margins are so close, its very hard to draw any conclusions.  So with that said, we're going to get right into some more benchmarking tests to help paint a clearer picture of each board's performance potential.