Athlon64 Motherboards: First Look at Chaintech, FIC, and MSI

Media Encoding and Gaming Performance

Based on results from our Athlon64 Preview several weeks ago, Gaming was expected to be a standout area in Athlon64/FX performance. However, the impact of Dual-Channel memory compared to the Single-Channel Athlon64 was an unknown. It is clear in the benchmarks that if Single-Channel memory is a handicap, then it is certainly not much of a handicap. In virtually all gaming tests, the Athlon64 3200+ performed in the same ballpark with the Opteron running at 2.0GHz. Our 3 Athlon64 boards and “overclocked” Opteron are neck-and-neck in just about every gaming benchmark.

The 2 boards with memory timing adjustments — the Chaintech ZN3-150 and the MSI K8T Neo – do best, often switching 1 and 2 positions. The FIC is very close, and considering it is handicapped by slower memory timings in the pre-release BIOS, we fully expect it will be very close in performance with memory timings set to levels used by the Chaintech and MSI.

The X2 results are very interesting, since this benchmark is DirectX 8.1, but makes heavy use of Transform and Lighting effects. Here, the 2 VIA boards seem to do a bit better, but the percentage difference of about 3% to 4% is hardly significant.

We will soon be migrating to a new and improved encoding benchmark, but for now, we have benchmarked our standard DivX 5.02 and xMpeg 4.5 encoding bench. With our recent move to ATI Radeon 9800 PRO video cards, Intel has taken a substantial lead in encoding performance. This was an area recently dominated by AMD when we were using the nVidia Ti4600 as our standard video card. AnandTech has been listening to complaints about encoding benchmarks, and will be announcing new benchmarks in the near future. For now, Intel continues to lead in our current benchmark, but the difference is much smaller with the Athlon64.