Round Up and Comparison of Socket 939 PCI Express motherboards
PCI Express x16 socket 939 motherboardsChipset NForce 4 Ultra, NForce 4 SLI, VIA K8T890
PCI Express / PCI
There's no doubt, if you want a new PC, PCI Express motherboards are the way to go. For the AMD platform, that means getting either an NVIDIA NForce 4 or VIA K8T890 equipped motherboard. There are other chipsets available, but motherboards using these chipsets are not yet available in the market (ATI, SiS and ULi). Because it's one of the first chipsets available, NVIDIA is off with a good head start. Their chipset offer performance, stability and features such as RAID for both S-ATA and IDE, a hardware optimized firewall and of course, SLI support for their GeForce 6600, 6800 and 7800 series of graphics cards.
Motherboards using VIA's K8T890 are just coming to the market now, offering the same level of performance of those with NVIDIA's NForce 4. There are differences such as lack of SLI support and IDE RAID by default, but motherboards with KT890 are priced lower than even non-SLI NForce 4 boards. Since the chipset still comes as two chips, it also less hot than the NForce 4. Most manufacturers didn't use any cooling on the southbridge and only relying on passive cooling on the northbridge. If you're contemplating using a dual core processor such as AMD's Athlon 64 X2, motherboards using the two chipsets are compatible with this new processsor and you will be able to use the second core (older motherboards may require a BIOS update).
Today, we're going to test several of these boards. There are four motherboards using NForce 4 chipsets are ABIT's AN8 Ultra, ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe, Gigabyte's K8NF-9, MSI K8N SLI Platinum. ABIT's AX8 3rd Eye is the odd man out with VIA K8T890. The SLI motherboards (A8N SLI Deluxe, MSI K8N SLI Platinum) may have the added advantage of SLI support (dual physical PCI-E x16 slots), but non SLI motherboards should be more affordable to users so don't count them out yet.
Overview
ABIT AN8 Ultra
AMD Athlon 64 socket 939NForce 4 Ultra
PCI Express, PCI
Overall Score: 88 points
The full specification (taken from ABIT's website)
CPU
* Supports AMD Socket 939 Athlon 64/64FX & Athlon 64 X2 dual-core Processors with 2GHz system bus using Hyper Transport™ technology
* Supports AMD CPU Cool 'n' Quiet Technology
Chipset
* NVIDIA NF4 Ultra single chip
* Integrated NV Gigabit Ethernet and NV Firewall
Memory
* Four 184-pin DIMM sockets
* Support 4 DIMM Dual DDR 400/333/266 non-ECC memory
* Support 4 DIMM up to 4GB Max.
ABIT Engineered
* ABIT µGuru™ Technology
* ABIT Q-OTES™ Technology
* ABIT AudioMAX™ Technology
* ABIT CPU ThermalGuard™ Technology
NV SATA RAID
* Supports SATA 3Gbps data transfer rate
* SATA RAID 0/1/0+1 JBOD
NV GbE LAN
* NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet via NF4 Ultra
NV Firewall
* Native NVIDIA Firewall via NF4 Ultra
IEEE1394
* Support IEEE 1394 at 400/200/100 Mb/s transfer rate
Audio
* 7.1-channel AC97 AudioMAX™ Acoustic Solution
* Optical S/P DIF in/out
Internal I/O Connectors
* 1 PCI-E X16 slot, 2 PCI-Express X1 slots
* 3 PCI slots, 1 x ABIT Audio slot
* 1 x Floppy Port supports up to 2.88 MB
* 2 x Ultra DMA 33/66/100/133 Connectors
* 4 x SATA 3G Connectors
* 3 x USB headers, 1 x IEEE1394 header
Back Panel I/O
* ABIT Q-OTES
* 1 x IEEE1394 Connector
* 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 mouse
* 4 x USB+ 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector
Miscellaneous
* ATX form factor 305 * 245mm
Package
* 1 x Audio Card
* 1 x Back panel I/O shield
* 4 x SATA cables
* 1 x ATA 133 IDE Cable, 1 x FDD cable
* 1 x USB2.0 + IEEE1394 cable
* 1 x A5 standard User's Manual
* 1 x A5 µGuru User's Manual
* 1 x B5 multilingual Quick Installation Guide
* 1 x CD title, 1 x SATA Driver Disk
* 1 x Jumper Setting Label
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