Asus K8N or K8V - what would you choose ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Synapse Syndrome
  • Start date Start date
S.Heenan said:
Neither, since Socket 754 is about to be phased out. The Asus A8V Deluxe is
the better choice.
Click to expand...

The extra money for the Socket 939 chips aren't worth it at present and are
out of my price range.

ss.
 
"Synapse Syndrome" said:
Is the nForce-250GB or K8T800 better?

ss.
Click to expand...

I know you are in a rush and all, but have you thought about
your memory requirement ?

There are three kinds of memory subsystems for Athlon64 family.
Single channel unbuffered three memory slots (S754)
Dual channel registered four memory slots (S940)
Dual channel unbuffered four memory slots (S939)

S754 has a practical limit of using two memory slots. That
means you could buy 2 x 512MB double sided unbuffered memory
or 2 x 1024MB of same. With the 1GB modules, you want to buy ones
that use (16) 64Mx8 chips, such as the modules on Crucial,
Kingston, or the Corsairmicro website. Don't buy any "stacked"
modules that use twice as many chips, as they will overload the
memory address bus.

So, if the OS and applications will always fit within 2GB, then
S754 boards are perfect.

The S939 is the high end desktop socket. It has dual memory
channels, whose main advantage is making room for four
sticks of memory. The same unbuffered PC3200 can be used
for this board. You could use 2x512, 2x1024, 2x512+2x1024
or 4x1024. For the last two, the BIOS CMD Rate setting must
be set to 2T (slower), to get the memory to work reliably.
But, with this socket, at least the memory rate stays at
DDR400, no matter which config is used. You can use up to
4GB of memory in the board, but due to address space overlap
between AGP/PCI and the memory, only 3.2GB will actually be
available. AFAIK, the 3500+ is the slowest processor for
this socket.

The third choice is probably too far out for your needs. The
S940 handles Opteron processors. The boards have four DIMM
slots, but the memory type is registered. The advantage
of registered memory, is the memory address bus is buffered
with a register chip on each DIMM, and that allows larger
modules to be connected without overloading the bus. You can
use 4 x 2GB registered memory on a board like this, with a
princely sum to be paid for each module. Usually registered
modules will also include ECC protection, as registered
memory is used in server motherboards a lot. As before, check
the BIOS settings, to see if there is an enable/disable for
ECC, so you can test the speed impact. (The reason this platform
will be harder to use effectively, is the motherboard, OS, and
applications all have to be designed to use more than 4GB of
memory. Many applications will stop at 3GB, so unless the
applications you use are designed for monster systems or
server motherboards, there probably isn't any point of looking
into this platform.)

For S939 right now, the A8V Revision 2 is the most promising
board. The revision 2 board is just becoming available now,
so it is too early to tell whether it will be the "uber" board
for Athlon64. It is supposed to have an AGP lock, which will
allow better overclocking, but the few posts I've read on A8V
indicates there is still work to do on this board. As you are
in a hurry, I cannot recommend that board this week, unless
you can afford to fiddle around a bit. The board works fine for
some people, but people pushing the boundaries are finding
some rough edges.

So, for the time being, K8N-E and K8V family look to be the
most practical solutions, with the limit of two slots at
DDR400.

K8N-E Thread:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=40799
Overclocking limited on K8V:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?threadid=38770&highlight=k8vse+deluxe

I wasn't able to find much info on the VP880, so I cannot
tell you whether there will be AGP problems with that card
or not. Do you have benchmarks comparing VP880 to Nvidia or
ATI boards ?

HTH,
Paul
 
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