Socket 939 Motherboards MSI and NVIDIA vs. ABIT and VIA

October 11th 2004 | CPUs & Chipsets

Yes, two chipsets will be covered here as well as two motherboards. Fighting for your upgrade dollars are the nVidia nForce3 Ultra powered MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum and the VIA K8T800 Pro propelled ABIT AV8 – 3rd Eye. We’ve seen the nForce being the choice in chipset for the Athlon 64 based on the Socket 754 packaging, so we’ll run a series of tests to try to determine where your allegiance needs to lie for this new processor type. So sit back and relax as we toss an Athlon 64 FX-53 into both boards and see where the power lies. We already know the processor is strong, so now we just need to figure out which board will best support its power!

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MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum
Pros
Very good performance in memory and processor intensive tests
4x SATA with RAID capabilities for them all
Colored ports for easy installation
Dual GigABIT LAN ports
Better HDD performance
Cons
Only a single IDE cable
Retarded color coding of memory slots
Rating – 8.5 out of 10

ABIT AV8-3rd Eye
Pros
Superior performance in all gaming tests
More BIOS settings available
Priced slightly less
Guru Clock
Cons
Ribbon cables?
Only a single IDE cable
IDE connector on board will be hard to attach in tall tower cases
Rating – 8.5 out of 10

Socket 939 Motherboards – MSI and nVidia vs. ABIT and VIA @ TweakTown

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