ULi M1695 PCIe/AGP for Athlon 64 – Part 2 with SLI
by Wesley Fink on August 5, 2005 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
SLI and Dual Video
Benchmarking and performance comparisons were covered in FIRST LOOK: ULi M1695 PCIe/AGP Socket 939 for Athlon 64. Please refer to the Part 1 of this review for test comparisons to other Athlon 64 Socket 939 chipsets.The other big news with ULi Reference 2 is the ULi support for NVIDIA SLI with their chipset and the option for dual PCIe video. Does it work?
There is no doubt that dual PCIe video works as intended with the riser card. Mount two PCIe cards, install the driver, and dual video (or triple with the AGP, or quad with AGP and PCI) is certainly possible.
ULi supplied some custom drivers for SLI testing, since at this early stage they have not received SLI certification for their Reference boards. The special ULi drivers are based on NVIDIA driver build 71.24, so they are quite a bit older than the current 77.72.
We then installed two NVIDIA 6800 Ultra video cards. To our surprise, the two double-width cards would install in the riser card. The riser looked tight, but the 6800 Ultra fit just fine.
It is clear from the enabling of SLI with the pre-production driver that SLI will work on the ULi M1695/M1567. ULi just has a bit more work to do on the special driver for ULi SLI.
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Wesley Fink - Saturday, August 6, 2005 - link
The 400 graph has been removed. After considering the questions here it is fair to say the ULi tests were not run under the same test conditions (due to no DDR Voltage controls and limited vCore adjustments) and should not be directly compared. The 242 remains since it was achieved with the same test conditions.Wesley Fink - Friday, August 5, 2005 - link
Yes, this is the only board using the FX57 in OC testing, but we will be testing with the FX57 in the future. Yes, that makes it an unfair comparison.It really was not possible to use our normal OC tests because the Reference board has no memory voltage adjustments at all. We stated this very clearly in the reviews. The option was to report very low results, or to make changes to the test to show how high the board could actually go in overclock (400 clock speed). We chose to show what the board could do on OC, but the results are not directly comparable to past results.
Lonyo - Friday, August 5, 2005 - link
OCZ BOOSTER FFS!!!!Aquila76 - Friday, August 5, 2005 - link
So if you want to run SLI, you have to use that riser card, right? How exactly does that fit in a standard ATX case? The cards are 90 degrees from their normal position. I understand that this is a good board if you're going to use older AGP cards and want an upgrade path; but I would think they could make it a lot cheaper if they left SLI capability off as it seems rather pointless in this format.kmmatney - Saturday, August 6, 2005 - link
I thought the same thing, but yes, its just a prrof of concept - the retail board makers will implement it without the need for a riser card.MarkB - Friday, August 5, 2005 - link
I think it's more of a proof of concept for showing off the chipset's capabilities, instead of making a whole new reference board to house the 2 x8 pci-e slots.I doubt any retail board would use the riser approach.
Sunbird - Friday, August 5, 2005 - link
Here is South Africa the ASRock 939A8X-m based in this ULi chipset has arrived at our local reseller last week.Its a mATX board and has SATA raid and all the other usual stuff. Near the bottom price range of the local market (aka cheap).
grug2k - Friday, August 5, 2005 - link
The AsRock 939AX-M is NOT a ULi M1695 board. It's an old AGP-only board based on the ULi M1689 chipset.lsman - Friday, August 5, 2005 - link
Computex2005 show also has Jetway A695DAG, Chaintech S1695-2WT - Friday, August 5, 2005 - link
This board should be on the short list (hehe, so short there is only one name on it) of boards for the DIY builder looking to keep their current AGP card and move to PCI Express down the road. There are a lot of users that fit that description so this board makes sense in every way. The only downside will be whether the boards are actually produced by some quality vendors who are not stuck on the Nvidia bandwagon.My S754 setup is adequate for any game that I play, so I should be able to make another year on it. After that, S939 and a 3800+ x2 makes more sense, but after buying that, I won't have the $ left to splurge on a mid-high end PCI Express video card. My 6800 cost $295 when I bought it, so moving that to the S939 setup makes financial sense.