Tested Mainboards

We took three mainboards to carry out a preliminary test of the capabilities of integrated chipsets for the Athlon 64 platform. One mainboard is based on the long-announced ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset and the other two are built around the new chipsets from NVIDIA, GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100. Although based on different chipsets, the mainboards resemble each other in characteristics and price. They are all targeted at small home PCs and are designed in the MicroATX form-factor. These are generic features of many mainboards based on modern integrated chipsets, by the way.

So, let’s examine each mainboard closely.

ECS RS480-M

Mainboards on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 are not widely available. Many shops don’t have them at all and you’ll see just a model or two in shops that do offer such products. Why? Because this chipset is a favorite of PC integrators, so a bulk of ATI’s chipsets are going directly to OEMs. But some mainboard manufacturers that work under OEM contracts still find opportunities to produce retail user oriented mainboards on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200, too. ASUS and ECS are among such manufacturers, for example. So, the Xpress 200-based mainboard we received for our tests, the ECS RS480-M model, is an analog of a mainboard used in personal computers from some major PC integrator, an ECS partner. This doesn’t prevent the ECS RS480-M from having certain traits typical of enthusiasts-targeted mainboards.

The first thing to be noted is that the manufacturers have ceased to regard Socket 939 as a top-end platform. As you can see, this socket can be now installed on mainboards which sell at about $80 in retail. This is not a big surprise, though, now that Semprons for Socket 939 are available (for details see our article called A Secret Disclosed: AMD Sempron 3000+ for Socket 939 Review ). The ECS RS480-M supports the full range of Socket 939 processors, including the Sempron. Starting from BIOS version 1.0g the mainboard can also work with dual-core CPUs.

The three-channel CPU power circuit on this mainboard has no special cooling of the MOSFETs, but they do not heat up much at work. The installed capacitors are made by OTS, a company that doesn’t have a good reputation among PC enthusiasts, frankly speaking.

The ECS RS480-M offers two DDR DIMM slots for your memory modules. They must both be filled for the memory controller to access the memory in the dual-channel mode. The mainboard’s BIOS does not give you much flexibility in fine-tuning the memory subsystem: memory frequency and CAS Latency are the only adjustable parameters here.