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As mentioned earlier, using the XP2400+, the system was rock-solid, however, not so with the XP 2800+. Amongst the reasons that play into the stability issues are the BIOS but we also need to keep in mind that the XP2800+ samples out there are engineering samples, some of which have thermal on-die diodes that are not properly calibrated. The AK37 does not offer the possibility to turn off thermal protection for the CPU and this by itself can already cause the problems we encountered.

The theory about the thermal diode has something speaking for it in that the the benchmarks that would not work were all among those with a prolonged run time. Certainly, it was possible to run other benchmarks, the system had no issues whatsoever with CodeCreatures or Comanche4. Let's look at the numbers:

CodeCreatures does not show any differences between any of the mainbaords tested, it is entirely limited by the graphics adapter performance.

In Comanche4, the AK37 is quite a bit faster than the Soyo KT400 DRAGON Ultra but it is still marginally slower than the ASUS A7V8X. This lag behind the ASUS board can be explained easily by the fact that the A7V8X runs about 1.5 MHz faster than the indicated 166 MHz FSB whereas the AK37 sticks to the actual number of 166.5 MHz.

As mentioned earlier, we were not able to run 3DMark2001SE on the AK37, at least not with the XP2800+, and the same goes for ContentCreation Winstone 2002.

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