System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- VIA K8T800 Pro S940 reference board (13/04/04 BIOS)
- ASUS SK8V VIA K8T800 (non-Pro) S940 motherboard
- EPoX 8KDA3+ nForce3 250Gb S754 motherboard
Other components
Software
- Windows XP Professional
We'll be comparing VIA's reference S940 K8T800 Pro board to an established ASUS SK8V S940 K8T800. We'll also look at how both motherboards fare against a well-tuned S754 nForce3 250Gb from EPox. It lacks a second memory channel but can use low-latency memory. It should be an interesting trade-off, especially with CPUs running at similar speeds. Differences in memory size may also play a small part in skewing results.
No problems to report during installation or benchmarking. Benchmarks were carried out three times unless otherwise stated. Clock speeds were as follows:
2210.9MHz - AMD Athlon 64 Model 3400+ / EPoX 8KDA3+ (nForce3 250Gb - 2-2-2-6)
2202.8MHz - AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 / ASUS SK8V (VIA K8T800 non-Pro - 2-3-2-6)
2200.1MHz - AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 / VIA K8T800 Pro reference motherboard - 2-3-2-6)
Overclocking
The performance BIOS that our reference board shipping with didn't allow multiplier adjustment. As such, we were limited to a maximum driven clock or 213MHz; the board had a relatively low clock limit of 255MHz, too. That's not, I repeat not, a chipset limitation. It's just the CPU's ceiling with a multiplier of 11X. It's a moot point in discussing overclockability of a reference board. That discussion, we feel, is best left to retail examples which you can buy off the shelf. A perusal from around the web indicates that 250MHz is a real possibility. We'll report back as soon as a retail example lands.