Check out these Athlon64 numbers and pics

[Byock]

I'll second that. The P2-B and P3-B were very solid boards, I had 2 P2-B, and 1 P3-B.

Loved them, fast, and rock solid.

[Helevitia]

Asus is the best period. There boards are worth the extra $$$.

Dave

[Dr Mordrid]

I agree that ASUS generally makes very good boards, but I'm also extremely happy with the MSI 745 Ultra. This is a very solid board and the SiS 745 chipset handles the bandwidth required by RAID's and/or realtime cards very nicely. Being able to run RT.X100 smoothly proves that in spades.

When the time comes they'll be retired to an honored place right next to the P3B-F's.

No, I didn't dispose of them or their CPU's. Too solid a backup platform for that.

Dr. Mordrid
'

[DirtFarmer]

OOps... OT

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid
My BH6 wasn't bad (or great) until the caps started exploding

I should actually thank ABIT since that incident drove me to try the ASUS P3B-F, which had to be one of the best 440BX boards ever made. I ended up building 6 more PIII systems based on it for the lab and two of 'em are still being used by my kids.

Dr. Mordrid

Let's face it, ABIT sometimes get lumped in with all the other shitty mobo manufacturers, but they did have there following. I still use a BH-6 everyday and her caps haven't sploded yet. Yet, i just finished reviving the stability in a QDI BX mobo today by replacing 3 caps (1000uf/16V/ extra-puffy ones), and we got Redhat 9.0/Apache 2.x/Frontpage 2002 up and running on her too. Seeing more and more failing caps through the shop.

The Asus BX motherboards just got better, and better... and the P3B-F is a legend. I overlooked one and bought a AOpen AX6BC ProII ME instead. It has caps the size of oil drums. Like the Asus BX, this thing has been rock solid fom day 1 even at 133MHz FSB, It still gets me around to this day, albeit slower now on XP Pro.

I'm just amazed that these things work as often as they do, there has been a lot of component malfunctions denied over the years. Anybody want to by a Fujitsu MPG series hard drive? You just hope you can trust the brand.

Bring on the faster architecture, make it stable with a few less fans please.

[Evildead666]

My BE-6 is still running strong, with the original cooling, provcessor and memory, since i bought it in '98.
Its also a very fast board for the Slot 1 Machines....

[HedsSpaz]

I think those benches would be a little more meaningful if I had something to compare them against, heh. Oh well, we all know it's going to be impressive, I'm sure we'll be seeing tons and tons of reviews later this month when NDA's start lifting.

As to the 64bit perf increase over 32bit, it's not as simple as 'twice the performance' nor is it 'mostly the memory' (sorry Nuno, thats just as oversimplified). There are a lot of optimizations in the A64 that can account for a significant portion of it's increase, but the 64bit specifically can be used to create a lot of optimizations that don't currently exist. Their is no good way to measure the performance of 64bit i86 architecture just at the moment, so we'll just have to wait and see. I would suspect that in a very short period of time we'll be seeing a lot of optimizations coming out of gaming companies to take advantage of the 64bit-ness.

Anyway, I'll stop gibbering now.

Ian

[Chrono_Wanderer]

I am still using the P2B as an "entertainment" box. Its also based on the 440BX it is still running very strong, very stable!

[Pace]

Surely that KT7A was crap because it combined VIA with Abit? Intel chipsets save Abit up to a point, but eventually the stability(!) of Abit must crack

Hand picked boards? Funny that no reviewer has ever seen Parhelia banding

Abit still have a following - those mad overclockers who will dump the board after 6 months when the next GeForce is out (New fan spins at up to 250% faster!**)

I look forward to my next Intel board, still planning on dual-CPU goodness, delivered by Supermicro...

And a quote further down for you Ian

It's r9800 Pro 128mb at 520/390 using plain water. So far our best with Intel at 4100mhz at r9800 Pro at 533/390 is 24747, so go figure

Looks like the 2.1GHz is up there with a P4 (presumably) at 4.1GHz - very random comparison of course.

Will be a while before it all becomes clear, but at least it does not appear to be crap...