Choosing the Best AM2 Platform

AM2 Mainboards Roundup

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 08/25/2006 | 03:35 AM ]

The AM2 infrastructure designed for AMD Athlon microprocessors was introduces several months ago. The main feature of this infrastructure is its support of DDR2 memory models, which is a new type of memory for processors designed by AMD to work with. While both ATI and Nvidia announced availability of their chipsets supporting the new infrastructure, it was still hard to spot mainboards built around ATI core-logic.

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In order to gear up for the back-to-school season, manufacturers started to roll out mainbords base not only on Nvidia nForce500 family of chipset, but several ATI RD580 chipset based products appear in retail. AnandTech has taken a look at ECS KA3 MVP Extreme and MSI K9A Platinum mainboards build around ATI’s latest RD580 chipset designed for Socket AM2 infrastructure microprocessors and compared them to the competitive solutions based on Nvidia nForce 570 SLI and nForce 590 SLI.

“RD580 is similar in feature set to the top-line NVIDIA 590SLI chipset. Both support dual X16 GPUs - NVIDIA with SLI and ATI with CrossFire. Both also represent the top-line chipset for each respective manufacturer. Physically the chips differ in ATI RD580 being a low-power single-chip North Bridge and NVIDIA 590SLI using two different chips to each provide an X16 PCIe slot to the architecture. NVIDIA 590SLI provides I/O off the chips that also support the dual X16 PCIe slots. ATI uses a more traditional South Bridge with the RD580 to provide I/O. The South Bridge has been the weak link in past ATI chipset designs. Best performance was provided by ULi South Bridge chips while ATI's own SB450 only supported SATA1 and was plagued by slow UBS 2.0 performance. Beginning with RD580, ATI can now provide a complete and up-to-date chipset by combining RD580 with their new SB600 South Bridge. This came none too soon, as NVIDIA bought ULi in early 2006 and found themselves in the position of supplying their major chipset competitor with the South Bridge chips that made the ATI chipset competitive. With SB600 now in the market, ATI (and AMD) can now provide a complete single source chipset to motherboard manufacturers. This also means ATI is no longer dependent on their major competitor to provide a complete and competitive chipset for the A64/AM2 platform,” explains the author.

“AnandTech presents the Gold Editors Choice for Best AM2 Motherboard to the ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe. The innovative 8-phase design with completely passive cooling works very well. The end result is an exceptionally stable motherboard and the best overclocker among the eight tested AM2 motherboards. ASUS clearly listened to the computer enthusiast when they were designing the M2N32-SLI. ASUS should be applauded for including very fine voltage increments in their BIOS adjustments. Most overclockers are finding these finer adjustments very useful for getting the most from lower voltage boards while presenting less risk of damage,” writes AnandTech web-site.

• AnandTech: AM2 Motherboards-Part 4: ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200.