Athlon64 Motherboards: First Look at Chaintech, FIC, and MSI

FIC K8-800T: Memory Testing

The K8-800T has 3 memory slots, but they are a little unusual, like those found on the Chaintech ZNF3-150. According to a note in the FIC manual:

If you use double-sided PC3200 DDR DIMM, only DIMM1 socket is allowed. IF single-sided PC3200 DIMM is used, either DIMM2 or DIMM3 is allowed, but not both at the same time.

These interesting memory requirements will be explored further in future Athlon64 reviews and the Athlon64 motherboard roundup. It looks as if the DIMM slot precautions on the VIA K8T800 based FIC are similar to those on the Chaintech nForce3 board. We can only say that we had run all memory tests and benchmarks with 2 DS PC3500 DIMMs in slots 1 and 3, and we had no trouble at all with board stability. We made no attempt to check 3 filled slots in our memory stress tests, as we really didn’t want to push it with a pre-release BIOS, which are often more fragile than production BIOS.

Front Side Bus Stress Test Results:

We performed stress tests on the FIC K8-800T by running Mushkin PC3500 L2 DS DDR at 400MHz with DIMMs 1 and 3 filled.

We ran a full range of stress tests and benchmarks to ensure that the FIC K8-800T was absolutely stable at standard DDR400 speed. We ran several tasks — data compression, various DX8 and DX9 games, and apps like Word and Excel — while Prime95 was running in the background. Finally, we ran our complete benchmark suite, which includes ZD Winstone suite, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, and Gun Metal Benchmark 2.

The FIC showed no stability problems in our stress tests with both banks filled with double-bank DIMMs at stock 400 speed.

Memory Stress Test Results:

The memory stress test is very simple, as it tests the ability of the FIC K8-800T to operate at its officially supported memory frequency (400MHz DDR) at the lowest supported memory timings that our Mushkin PC3500 Level II can achieve. Despite dire warnings in the FIC manual, we ran 2 DS DIMMs at DDR400 as follows:

Stable DDR400 Timings (2/3 banks single-channel populated)
Clock Speed:	200MHz
Timing Mode:	Auto
CAS Latency:	2.0
Bank Interleave:	Auto
RAS to CAS Delay:	3T
RAS Precharge:	6T
Precharge Delay:	3T
Command Rate:	N/A

Since there were no memory timings available in our pre-release BIOS, we were forced to run Memory Timings at “Auto” settings. CPU-Z reported “Auto” was setting memory timings at 2-3-3-6. Please keep in mind that when comparing benchmarks, the FIC tests were run at slower memory timings than Chaintech or MSI. While 2-2-2-6 timings, set manually, did provide slightly better performance, the real difference between Auto 2-3-3-6 and manual 2-2-2-6 timings was small. For most situations, Auto timings will provide excellent stability and speed.