Socket 754 Roundup: Comparing Generation 2
by Wesley Fink on May 28, 2004 5:57 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Standard Gaming Performance
With our stock 3200+ and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, the results with the 2nd Generation boards are tightly clustered. The MSI, Epox, Chaintech, and Abit boards seem to swap positions in each test, but the difference between gaming performance is just too small to see any single board emerge as the performance champion in this roundup.
Abit's VIA-based KV8 PRO appears to slightly lag the nF3-250 boards in the older Comanche 4 and Quake 3 benchmarks, but it is completely competitive in the newer DX9 games, and one of the best performers in Aquamark3 and Halo.
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intercollector - Saturday, May 29, 2004 - link
I'm a little surprised to see why the MSI K8N didn't get the gold compared to the Epox. Both seem almost identical in every way, except that the K8N seems to include Firewire. Shouldn't this feature make it surpass the Epox board?The only downside of the MSI board seems to be the limit of a 300 max FSB, which is probably fine for 99.99% of overclockers.
Klaasman - Saturday, May 29, 2004 - link
#7-Thanks for link, but my KV8 Pro still wont boot when selecting "fixed" in bios setup.
Why wouldn't my board have the pro chip? Manufacturing screw up maybe?
Wesley Fink - Friday, May 28, 2004 - link
#6 -Bank Interleaving is not an option in any of the BIOS' tested here. Many current BIOS enable Bank interleaving by default. Where it is an option, we definitely enable the best interleaving option available and list what we set in the memory chart. We are not ignoring this option.
bigtoe33 - Friday, May 28, 2004 - link
If you are looking for the latest Abit KV8 pro bios have a look here. http://www.bleedinedge.com/download/bios/abit%20am...multi support and PCI lock inc. if your pro board won't lock the pci bus with this bios then your board may not have the pro chipset.
Myrandex - Friday, May 28, 2004 - link
Well after finishing the article, I was wondering why none of the boards are run with bank interleaving on? Doesn't it increase memory performance for the ones that support it?Myrandex - Friday, May 28, 2004 - link
On the KV8 spec page, it states:Onboard USB 2.0/IEEE-1394 8 USB 2.0 ports supported by nF3-250
No FireWire
Should be K8T800 Pro instead of nF3-250.
Myrandex - Friday, May 28, 2004 - link
Klaasman - Friday, May 28, 2004 - link
What revision of KV8 Pro were you using and what bios version?Nobody else with a recently purchased KV8 can get the locks to work. How come your board does?
Aikouka - Friday, May 28, 2004 - link
Anandtech should have looked at the problem that the Chaintech VNF3-250 has with it's RAID and installing an OS, and the problem where the board refuses to boot from SATA if you enable RAID on any IDE HDDs. People've said they've been able to circumvent it, but I haven't got it to work yet, and Chaintech is worthless when it comes to customer service. I received an automated response about 6 or 7 days after my initial submission on their website (they have no US phone number.) And I still have not received an email from a representative yet.RyanVM - Friday, May 28, 2004 - link
If there's so little variation in system performance between these, why not look at other aspects like USB throughput/CPU utilization, IDE/SATA throughput, ethernet throughput/CPU utilization, etc.Ace's Hardware just did a great article showing that the rather crummy components being used these days on cheaper motherboards have a pretty large impact in performance in those areas.
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=65000298