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LOSTCIRCUITS		SHORTCUTS: Top Page MP vs. MPX Do's and Don'ts ASUS A7M266D MSI K7D-L Tyan Tiger MPX Feature Comparison Overclocking, SiSoft Memory SiSoft Memory / CPU IDE Performance Gaming Performance Conclusion
AMD MPX Production Boards ASUS A7M266D vs. MSI K7D-L vs. Tyan Tiger MPX: Dual Power at 1900+
(Review by MS, March 11, 2002)

At One Glance

After wading through the previous pages, it is probably a bit hard to keep track of all features or non-features of the three MPX boards described. Thus, I thought I make it a bit easier of putting together a small table of the features of all boards.

Feature	ASUS A7M266D	MSI K7D-L	Tyan Tiger MPX
On-Board USB	No	Yes	Currently Disabled
USB PCI card	4 Port 2.0	4 Port 2.0	4 Port 1.1
On-Board Network	No	Intel	3Com
O-Board Sound	CMI 8738 6-channel	VIA AC97	No
32-Bit PCI slots	3	3	4
Power Circuitry	Dual 3 Phase	2 Phase	2 Phase
Overclocking	SoftBIOS +1 MHz => 150 MHz*	SoftBIOS => 150 MHz	SoftBIOS => 150 MHz
Voltage Adjustments	V_DDR, CPU0	No	No

* The clock generator can be programmed in 1 MHz steps. We went up to 160 MHz and stopped there since the highest speed that the board actually runs at is 141 MHz

Test Configurations

We ran all boards with multiple graphics cards (ATI Radeon AIW 32 MB; ATI RADEON 8500, MSI Phantom 8809 (GeForce256); MSI StarForce 822 (GeForce3); ASUS V8200 T5) without noticing any compatibility issues. In addition, we ran additional network cards, which in the case of Tyan and MSI resulted in two separate Ethernet ports in the system. Again, there were no problems at all.

The actual test configuration used the following components:

AMD MPX-based mainboard
2 x Athlon XP1900+
1 x Mushkin PC2100 512 MB Registered ECC DDR
ASUS V8200 T5 AGP card
IBM 60 GXP (30G) HDD
Hitachi 12x DVD ROM
- Win2K SP2
- AMD PM Drivers
- AMD AGP Patch (LargePageMinimum)
- AMD IDE Drivers (Ver 1.43)
- DX 8.1
- nVidia Detonator 23.11 drivers

We tested all boards with a variety of unbuffered memory modules from Corsair XMS2400 (256 MB) over Mushkin High Performance (PC2100 256 and 512 MB) as well as running the Tour de Force with 4 x Registered Mushkin PC2100 512 MB DIMMs (two sets of either 64Mx4 or 32Mx8 chip organization) for a total system memory configuration of 2 GB. With two unbuffered DIMMs, all systems were running stable.

next page: => Stability, Overclocking =>

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