SPCR

My favourite magazine, C't, did again a very good test about Athlon 64 boards.
Participants:
nforce3: Gigabyte K8NNXP, Leadtek WinFast K8N Pro und das Shuttle AN50R
VIA K8T800: Albatron K8X800 Pro II, Asus K8V Deluxe, AOpen AK86-L, Epox EP-8HDA3+, Gigabyte K8VNXP und MSI/Microstar K8T Neo-FIS2R

System:
3200+, 512Mb, Geforce FX 5600, 7200 upm hdd
All Watt are AC.

MSI and Gigabyte need much power, Shuttle always on the low side.
Idle power: 82 - 90W
3dMark2001: 128 - 142W
S3: 5-8W

How is the power distributed among the lines:
All boards: 12/5/3,3V -> 70/5-10/20-30%

Cool and Quiet only works on the Epox. Idle AC power went down to 73W from 85W. Under load it was 87W@800Mhz.
Albatron, Leadtek, MSI seem to need a BIOS update to make it work.
The CPU protects itself from overheating.

All boards were stable and none has serious flaws

edit: quiet&cool load, hdd

Hello:

Can you post a link, perchance?

jojo4u wrote:Cool and Quiet only works on the Epox. Idle AC power went down to 73W from 85W. Under load it were 87W.
Albatron, Leadtek, MSI seem to need a BIOS update to make it work.
The CPU protects itself from overheating.

I have an Asus K8V Deluxe with Athlon64 3200+ OEM. Although Cool and Quiet is enabled in the BIOS, I don't know if it's active or not. I haven't loaded any new processor drivers, changed power management, etc. as was suggested was necessary to enable this feature in some other reviews. However, my processor runs very cool.

I use a Zalman 7000AlCu, and with the fan on, the procesor was idling at around 35C, with peaks in the 40s under heavy load. The HS hardly felt much more than slightly warm to the touch. I enabled Asus' QFAN feature, and it runs a bit hotter now. Actually, the system will run for minutes at a time with the FAN completely turned off! Eventually, the temperature will creep up to 48C or so, and the fan will start spinning, up to around 1650 RPM. Then the fan quickly ramps down to zero again as the temperature reaches 43C. I'm not sure I like the presets that Asus used, and my Radeon 9700 totally masks the noise from the CPU fan anyway, so I may end up turning QFAN off. But it still amazes me how cool this processor is. Much better than my old 1.3Ghz Athlon. I bought this processor/MB combo precisely because of it's potential for running cool and quiet, although I was leaning towards a 2.8G P4 for a long time. Going with the A64 has been a home run from both the cooling and performance perspective though.

Jeez, that's amazing. Peaks in the MID-FORTIES? I don't think a P4 3.2 could do that..

NeilBlanchard wrote:Can you post a link, perchance?

No it's an offline magazine. Believe it or not, they want money for reading it ;-)

Here some boards which should support Cool and Quiet:

Epox EP-8HDA3+ (tested by C't)
Asus K8V Deluxe Screenshot here
Gigabyte Gigabyte K8VNXP (no BIOS switch, activated by default) Screenshot here