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 |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
51 Comments
View All Comments
semiconductorslave - Wednesday, December 14, 2005 - link
I was replying to the first comment on the post, "Why do all the new motherboards have all these PCIe slots when there is nothing available to stick in them."I made the assumption that since this person said there was nothing availible, that he or she did not make any effort to search. My example of Newegg and Google was narrow on purpose, showing how easy it is to find out what is availible when one starts looking. I was only trying to make a point that people instead of asking right away, could spend a little effort and maybe say something like, "I found these cards, are there any more?"
But saying, "YOU don't have the ability to see how the information's presentation is relevant." is quite an assumption on your part about my abilities.
mindless1 - Thursday, December 15, 2005 - link
Not an assumption at all, it comes straight from what you wrote, and yes it was in the context of what you'd replied to.semiconductorslave - Thursday, December 15, 2005 - link
You say, "you need to learn to think for someone other than yourself" but I didn't see you list any cards, where I at least did search and made a comment about how one should at least attempt to look for themselves before making comments like there aren't any PCI ex cards. Are you daft? You must just be trying to get my goat. I was trying to make a point but if you want to go on the attack, that isn't a productive debate anymore. I would suggest you don't take your own advice and try to think for anyone else since I don't think you can spare the mental energy.You can now have the final word as this is going nowhere.
Ozz1113 - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
SCSI, raid drive controllers...Wesley Fink - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
Gigabit Ethernet PCIe x1 controllers.Missing Ghost - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
tv tunersceefka - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
PCI-e Firewire 400 and 800 cards by SIIG and BelkinCalin - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
The new Creative xFi cards are PCIe 1xLoneWolf15 - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
Sad to say, they are not, they're plain-jane PCI. People had hoped they would be, but Creative is unlikely to do PCIe until its next-gen card after the X-Fi. Even with the X-Fi and todays most advanced games that can use its features, there isn't enough data being transferred to saturate the PCI bus.
mindless1 - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
... isn't enough data to saturate from this one lone card, but seldom does a board only have one PCI slot. It's not the audio card that's the issue, it's when the audio card interferes with OTHER cards.