Athlon 64-mainboard support

The Athlon 64-series has the latest couple of months gone through some remarkable changes, AMD has launched its E-revision of the Athlon 64-core and above all the new Athlon 64-processors with dual cores has started to show up. These processors are so different from earlier models that that count on that your Socket 939-mainboard supports the new models. To avoid unpleasent surprises with incompatibility thry’ve at Anandtech published an article on the compatibility of the socket S939-mainboards. It should be enough to update the BIOSto support e.g. Athlon 64 X2 but the question is if there is a BIOS to update to .

This article tries to answer this and much more and even if most manufacturers are ready for the new processors there are some who aren’t up to date. It seems that AGP-based chipsets, such as nForce3, lacks support for AMD Rev E and X2.

“In general, motherboards based on the nForce4, VIA K8T890, Uli1689, SiS 756, and ATI Crossfire AMD will likely already have a BIOS released that will work with x2 processors or one will be coming shortly. Those with motherboards based on the earlier nForce3 chipset may not be so lucky – as we could not find a single motherboard based on nForce3 with an available x2 BIOS. We are told nF3 support for x2 is coming, but it is definitely coming more slowly. This means most Socket 939 boards with AGP video may not be supported right now with an x2 BIOS upgrade. We say most, because the new ULi 1689 chipset does support both AGP and x2, and some of the older but popular VIA AGP boards have x2 BIOS updates available.”

This is quite interesting reading for those planning on upgrading their systems with AMD’s latest processors.

– Read on at Anandtech.com