Socket 939 Motherboard Roundup: ABIT, MSI, Gigabyte

It has been about three months since AMD initially released its Socket 939 Athlon 64 processors. And now that some time has passed, a few more full-featured Socket 939 motherboards are available that all seem to have gotten it right. We’re going to take a look at four of them today in this roundup: MSI’s K8N Neo2 Platinum and K8T Neo2-FIR, Gigabyte’s K8NSNXP-939, and ABIT’s AV8. Two of them are powered by VIA’ K8T800 Pro chipset; the other two by NVIDIA’s nForce 3 Ultra.

. . .Benchmark Summary: Throughout the synthetic, gaming, and encoding tests, all four of the motherboards we’ve looked at in this article performed at near identical levels. In the “real-world” testing with the Business and Content Creation Winstones benchmarks, however, the two NVIDIA nForce3-powered motherboards - the Gigabyte K8NSNXP-939 and the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum - had a distinct performance advantage. And now for our picks…

MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum:
. . .our top pick: the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum. This motherboard is well equipped; it overclocked very well; its performance was top-notch and consistent; and, at about $140, the MSI K8N is also competitively priced. We have been using this board for a few weeks with nary a problem and will be using this board for future Socket 939 processor testing. When we took all these aspects into consideration, the K8N Neo2 Platinum seemed to be the best all-around choice, in our opinion. It’s strong in every category and would be an excellent choice for anyone looking to build a high-end Athlon 64 based system. We’re giving the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum a solid 9.5 on the Heat Meter and declare it HotHardware’s Editor’s Choice…

ABIT AV8:
. . .The ABIT AV8 was a strong performer, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a better value in this market segment. We’re giving it a 9 on the Heat Meter; had the K8T800 Pro not faltered in the Winstone tests, the AV8 could very well have been our top choice…

Gigabyte K8NSNXP-939:
We were very impressed by Gigabyte’s K8NSNXP-939. It’s the most feature-rich motherboard in this group, the bundle was spot-on, and performance was consistently very good. Gigabyte also scores some points for actively cooling both the nForce3 chipset and the VRM and by building in some redundancy with the Dual-BIOS feature. Anyone who has ever killed a motherboard because a BIOS flash went awry will definitely appreciate the Dual-BIOS feature! The K8NSNXP-939 also did well in our overclocking tests, and even some of the simpler items such as the AGP locking mechanism and clearly labeled headers gave us the impression that Gigabyte really paid attention to the details. Unfortunately, the K8NSNXP-939 was the most expensive motherboard in this group, and by a significant margin. The lowest price we found for the K8NSNXP-939 was $180USD, but most retailers had it priced right around $200. That makes the K8NSNXP-939 roughly $50-$100 more expensive than any of the other motherboards represented here. And although Gigabyte has a heck of a motherboard in its lineup in the K8NSNXP-939, we feel it’s a bit expensive. We’re giving the Gigabyte K8NSNXP-939 an 8.5 on the Heat Meter…

MSI K8T Neo2-FIR:
. . . The MSI K8T Neo2-FIR is a very good motherboard that just happened to get overshadowed by some worthy competition in this roundup. We’re giving the K8T Neo2-FIR an 8 on the Heat Meter.

Socket 939 Motherboard Roundup: ABIT, MSI, Gigabyte @ HotHardware