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| AMD's AM2 Platform DDR2 ... Moving On | |
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(Review by MS May 23, 2006) |
ASUS M2N32 SLI Deluxe
The test platform used for this report was the ASUS M2N32 SLI Deluxe. The board is very similar to the A8N32-SLI with the obvious difference of using the nForce5 590 SLI chipset and the DDR2 memory interface along with the modified bracket for better mechanical stability of the HSF mounting.
Otherwise, the layout and configuration is largely identical to the Socket 939 board, with its 6-phase VRM and the integrated heatpipe cooling solution for the chipset components and the VRM. One thing to mention here is that different VRM designs are running at slightly different efficacy. This is important to keep in mind for our power measurements since we are measuring at the 12V auxiliary input, that is, before the VRM. To the best of our knowledge, the efficacy of the different designs can vary, depending on temperature and load anywhere between 75% and 85%, in other words, there will be a certain skew in our CPU power representations, however, within the group of test result, we estimate the divergence between the different platforms to be less than 10%.
Six phases promise ultra clean power to the CPU.
One thing plaguing the testing of the AM2 platform was that not all applications were running correctly, particularly the SATA interface was a constant source of grief in that benchmark files were not correctly read or simply not found. Finally, we received a cryptic email from nVidia about the release of new drivers to address the issues under NDA until the AM2 platform launch, however, it was not possible to get access to the files since none of our emails or voicemails were returned.
N2M32-SLI Board Overview: 2 PCIe x16 slots, one PCIe x4 slot and three legacy PCI slots; Six SATA connectors, two e-Sata connectors (SiI 3212 HBA), IEEE1394a Firewire, HD audio (AD1988B)
ADP3186 power controller; Dual Gigabit Ethernet (Marvell 88E1116); TI TSB43AB22A IEEE1394a Firewire controller, ITE LPC legacy I/O controller.
Overall, the M2N32-SLI Deluxe has everything one could possibly hope for, inlcuding a BIOS featuring many possible tweak. On a sidenote, to the best of our knowlege, tRCD and tRP settings below 3 are not supported by the AMD memory controller. Given the high memory operating frequency (recommended DDR667 or above) this is not overly surprising since, for example running latencies of 2T at 800 MHz would be equivalent to e.g. tRCD and tRP of 1 in a DDR400 configuration.
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Athlon64 X2-3800+ (dual core) |
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