Closer Look: Platform

Since the new Athlon 64 processors feature their own bus, they should be installed into a special processor socket: Socket754 with 754 pins and about 4cmx4cm dimensions.

754 pins. This is even more than by Xeon.
The reason is the integrated memory controller.

Therefore, you will need new mainboards based on new chipsets to be able to use the new Athlon 64 processor. For our test session of Athlon 64 2800+ we managed to get a mainboard from one well-known Taiwanese manufacturer. Unfortunately, we cannot share a picture of this mainboard with you, however, it has already been mentioned in many on-line sources multiple times, including our web-site.

This mainboard made an impression of the finalized sample: it worked quite stably and didn’t cause us any problems during work. The mainboard was based on VIA K8T400M chipset.

VIA K8T400M – is one of the major core logic
solutions for Athlon 64 platform.

This chipset boasts quite normal features. It supports AGP 8x, ATA/133, USB 2.0, etc.

Now they use VIA VT8235 South Bridge.
Later it will be replaced with VT8237 South Bridge with SerialATA support.

According to the chipset’s features, our mainboard was equipped with two DDR DIMM slots for DDR400/DDR333/DDR266 SDRAM, an AGP 8x slot, 5 PCI slots and 6 USB ports. Also there was an additional SerialATA/RAID controller from Promise, which added a couple of extra SerialATA-150 connectors to the mainboard as well.

The system built of this mainboard and an Athlon 64 2800+ processor worked very well in our lab. Here is the BIOS report, for instance, which we obtained during system boot up:

Our mainboard used AMI BIOS.

And this is a Windows XP message about the type of the system CPU:

Again the relatively low core clock catches our eye.

By the way, the BIOS Setup of this mainboard boasted a couple of very interesting issues. For example, this is the page for HyperTransport bus configuration:

As we have promised you: 16bit, 800MHz.

And this is the page for managing the memory controller integrated into the CPU:

DDR400 SDRAM is supported!

The mainboard’s BIOS Setup also offered some CPU overclocking opportunities. It was possible to change the bus frequency and the clock frequency multiplier. It is hard to say whether the mass Athlon 64 processors will be shipped with an unlocked multiplier. But our sample was exactly like that.