FIRST LOOK: ULi M1697 for Athlon 64/x2
by Wesley Fink on December 13, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Overclocking
With an incomplete set of controls for overclocking, it was not possible to test overclocking using our standard OC setups. With production boards due for review very soon, the decision was made to delay OC tests until we reviewed production boards. This will remove the issue of testing with non-standard setups that make comparison of OC performance to previous OC results very difficult.
Memory Stress Testing
Since this is a new chipset, the best setting for tRAS was first determined. With MemTest86, tRAS performance was the same at tRAS settings of 6 to 11, with a bandwidth fall-off at 5 and 12 tRAS settings. This means that any setting from 6 to 11 tRAS will work well with this chipset. We chose to use a tRAS setting of 7 for consistency with other chipsets such as the NVIDIA nForce4 and ATI RD480.
The ULi M1697 Reference easily handles 2-2-2-7-1T timings at stock speed, as do almost any of the current boards for AMD Socket 939 from NVIDIA, SiS, VIA, ATI, and ULi. By default, ULi configured the Command Rate as 1T with a single pair of DIMMs in a dual-channel configuration. Two DIMMs in single channel mode required 2T Command Rate.
Running four double-sided 512MB or 1GB DIMMs is much more demanding than running two DS DIMMs, and ULi behaved as expected. Like every board that we have tested, except the DFI RDX200, we needed to drop the Command Rate to 2T with 4 DS DIMMs. With 4 DIMMs, the M1697 remained stable with the same aggressive 2-2-2-7 timings used for two DS DIMMs.
*7T was determined by MemTest86 benchmarks to deliver the widest bandwidth with the ULi M1697 chipset. While the board would operate at tRAS of 5T or lower, all benchmarks were run at 7T.
With an incomplete set of controls for overclocking, it was not possible to test overclocking using our standard OC setups. With production boards due for review very soon, the decision was made to delay OC tests until we reviewed production boards. This will remove the issue of testing with non-standard setups that make comparison of OC performance to previous OC results very difficult.
Memory Stress Testing
Since this is a new chipset, the best setting for tRAS was first determined. With MemTest86, tRAS performance was the same at tRAS settings of 6 to 11, with a bandwidth fall-off at 5 and 12 tRAS settings. This means that any setting from 6 to 11 tRAS will work well with this chipset. We chose to use a tRAS setting of 7 for consistency with other chipsets such as the NVIDIA nForce4 and ATI RD480.
The ULi M1697 Reference easily handles 2-2-2-7-1T timings at stock speed, as do almost any of the current boards for AMD Socket 939 from NVIDIA, SiS, VIA, ATI, and ULi. By default, ULi configured the Command Rate as 1T with a single pair of DIMMs in a dual-channel configuration. Two DIMMs in single channel mode required 2T Command Rate.
Running four double-sided 512MB or 1GB DIMMs is much more demanding than running two DS DIMMs, and ULi behaved as expected. Like every board that we have tested, except the DFI RDX200, we needed to drop the Command Rate to 2T with 4 DS DIMMs. With 4 DIMMs, the M1697 remained stable with the same aggressive 2-2-2-7 timings used for two DS DIMMs.
| Stable DDR400 Timings - 4 DIMMs (4/4 DIMMs populated) |
|
| Clock Speed: | 200MHz |
| CAS Latency: | 2.0 |
| RAS to CAS Delay: | 2T |
| RAS Precharge: | 7T* |
| Precharge Delay: | 2T |
| Command Rate: | 2T |
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ATWindsor - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
No Gbit LAN :( That alone makes this chipset much much worse, I won't by a Mobo in this day and age with only 100 mbit (Having a central file-server in your home-network is great, saves you nooise and money)Peter - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
No Gbit LAN inside the chipset? So?Discrete PCI Express Gbit LAN chips are widely available, and they're no larger and no more expensive than the PHY chips you need for chipset integrated Gbit LAN.
All you lose is a single PCIE lane, nothing else - not money, not performance, not board space.
bldckstark - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
My home network can't even spell gigabit. I won't have Gbit in my house for quite some time yet, so this is not an issue for me. I don't know a single person who has a full Gbit home network, or anyone who is even looking to change over. AT played this off pretty hard on ULi, but if this is the reason that the board costs so much less, then I say good for them. Dropping a new chipset from a new company into the high content/high price market is not a very good way to grow. Low price, high content, high performance is how you get to be a household name. From a marketing perspective I think this makes good sense. How many of you would buy from a new chipset maker not knowing about driver support, bios updates, or quality at the same price as the big names? I bet not many. SiS and Via couldn't hold market share even with their reasonably good reputations.SLI is another story tho, and I wasted all my time whining about the Gbit stuff. I'd like to hear some other opinions on the Gbit and SLI.
JayHu - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
In the block diagram (this may be a little harder to change) you have a 'Supper' I/O block.Wesley Fink - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
The Block Diagram was provided by ULi, but we were able to make the correction in Supper and Chenal.Diasper - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
Isn't it about time to change your review wording on the audio section of the review? For as long as I can rememeber you guys *always* use the same words - a simple copy/paste. Surely, you should do better and comment about the audio more because the results are different. You don't even comment on what Azalia part was used! As far as I can see the results from on-board audio keep getting better and better (why don't you comment on this) with ever lower CPU utilization (presumably with this board the higher CPU % on the 3D audio is because it is delivering 8.1 surround as opposed to the others 5.1). In fact with numbers as low as >2.5% for 2.1 audio I'm surprised it isn't competetive with hardware solutions. Can we have some figures so we can compare it to? If you provided a comparison with MSI on-board hardware solution and an Audigy 2 standalone card it'd be perfect.So, please change your wording - there is enough to comment on! Also, if you aren't going to change your wording please provide comparison benches so we have proper information and can compare ourselves. A proper comparison is long overdue!
aflanagan - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2631&am...">Link to Audio Comparisons They are doing comparisons on the audio side. Since this was a reference board I am sure they did not expend the time to do a full test on it as the board suppliers might use a different audio chipset.Diasper - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
Thanks for changing stuff - even better that you're looking to do an audio comparison. Certainly, it'll help answer the question whether gamers still need a separate audio card. Because before it was necessary because a) the sound quality was poor and b) the cpu utilisation was very high in comparison. Now with the audio quality having improved massively such that the majority would be happy and cpu utilisation also getting alot better the question arises whether gamers really need a separate card. If you ever did a full review on it it'd be amazing - do a low res tests and then real world / high quality tests to see if there is any difference. Given that most stuff is gpu limited I'll be hedging good HD Azalia will be sufficient - of course the sitution could be very different for those with dual-core (ie easily enough spare cycles such that there might be no-point from a fps point of view of getting a separate sound card)aflanagan - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
Correct link to the last full board review with audio results. http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2631&am...">Correct Anandtech Audio Link I was trying to compare game scores to the AMD/ULI system.Wesley Fink - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
We dropped the sentence with references to onboard SB Live! While we do have older SB Live! benches with Rightmark 1.24 they can not be compared to 2.1 results since 2.1 behaves very differently. While we do have updated results with the SB Live! chip with 2.1 on an Intel board, we have also found the Intel CPU utilization percentages are different than AMD and can not be directly compared. Until we receive an AMD board with a hardware sound solution we will leave out the hardware comparison comments.Thanks for pointing this out.