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

MSI K8T Neo: Memory Testing

The K8T Neo has 3 memory slots, but MSI claims that SS or DS modules may be used in any of the 3 memory slots, and that all 3 slots may be filled. This is quite different from FIC’s warning regarding slots 2 and 3 being single-sided on the same VIA chipset.

In the interest of getting this review in your hands on launch day, we did not explore using 3 DIMMs on the MSI board. We tested with the same 2 DS DIMMs that we used in our benchmarks of the FIC and Chaintech boards. Due to the confusion that seems to exist with both nVidia and VIA chipset boards with 3 DIMMs, we will explore this subject in more detail in our upcoming Athlon64 roundup.

Front Side Bus Stress Test Results:

We performed stress tests on the K8T Neo by running Mushkin PC3500 L2 DS RAM at 400MHz with both DIMM 1 and 3 filled.

We ran a full range of stress tests and benchmarks to ensure the MSI was absolutely stable at standard DDR400 speed. We ran several tasks — data compression, various DX8 and DX9 games, and apps like Word and Excel — while Prime95 was running in the background. Finally, we ran our complete benchmark suite, which includes ZD Winstone suite, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, and Gun Metal Benchmark 2.

The K8T Neo showed no stability problems in our stress tests with both banks filled with double-bank DIMMs at stock 400 speed.

Memory Stress Test Results:

The memory stress test is very simple, as it tests the ability of the MSI K8T Neo to operate at its officially supported memory frequency (400MHz DDR) at the lowest supported memory timings that our Mushkin PC3500 Level II can achieve. We ran 2 DS DIMMs at DDR400 in slots 1 and 3 as follows:

Stable DDR400 Timings (2/3 banks single-channel populated)
Clock Speed:	200MHz
Timing Mode:	Manual
CAS Latency:	2.0
Bank Interleave:	Auto
RAS to CAS Delay:	2T
RAS Precharge:	6T
Precharge Delay:	2T
Command Rate:	1T

The MSI performed with complete stability at 2-2-2-6 timings with 2 DIMMs. While 2-2-2-6 timings, set manually, did provide slightly better performance, the real difference between Auto, which sets 2-3-3-6 timings on the K8T Neo, and manual 2-2-2-6 timings was small. For most situations, Auto timings will provide excellent stability and speed.