AMD Athlon 64 & Athlon 64 FX - It's Judgment Day

Motherboard Support Powered by NVIDIA & VIA

Unlike the release of the original Athlon, AMD has full industry support behind the Athlon 64 (although the same can't be said for industry confidence). We have seen chipsets from ALi, NVIDIA, SiS and VIA, however only NVIDIA and VIA are dominating AMD's launch.

Our own Wesley Fink has prepared an article comparing the NVIDIA and VIA solutions, so be sure to check that out if you're interested in the detailed differences between the implementations of the two chipsets.

Because AMD has integrated the memory controller on the Athlon 64's die, the amount of work that needs to be done by the chipset vendors has been reduced significantly. The performance difference you'll see between chipsets should be negligible (even more so than in conventional architectures) as the only variables between chipsets are the South Bridge (IDE, PCI, SATA controllers) and the AGP controller.

AMD has no favorites in the chipset game; although they shipped all initial review systems with nForce3 boards, their reasoning was primarily one of availability, as they had to ship systems out in the summer to meet the deadlines faced by print publications.

As you will find out in Wesley's review, the nForce3 is currently limited to a 600MHz Hyper Transport link between the CPU and the chipset, while VIA's solution runs at 800MHz. The performance difference due to VIA's bandwidth lead is negligible however; remember, we're not talking about memory bandwidth, rather bandwidth between the CPU and the AGP controller. NVIDIA will have 800MHz support in the next version of the nForce3, the 250.

Despite the fact that chipset costs have gone down (as there's no more memory controller), motherboards will not reflect the lower price initially according to motherboard manufacturers. AMD is positioning the Athlon 64 as a premium part and thus the motherboard manufacturers will position their solutions competitively, but don't expect to see lower-than-Socket-A prices.

What's also interesting is the incredible recognition that NVIDIA has managed to establish in the chipset industry with the nForce brand. We are seeing incredible support for nForce3, despite the fact that it doesn't really offer anything above and beyond VIA's solution. We're expecting the nForce3 to be positioned as a premium solution, while VIA will compete for the lower end of the Athlon 64 market - all because of the success of NVIDIA's nForce2 brand; the name nForce3 somehow just sounds all that much more powerful, even though NVIDIA's powerful memory controller isn't being used.

At the start, it looks like NVIDIA will begin to pull ahead as the market leader, but it is unclear how VIA's support for an 800MHz HT bus and potentially lower price point will change things (if at all).