greasemonkey90s wrote on 2026-01-04, 22:45:

Does the kv8 pro support Newark at all? its the only reason i kept my dfi nf3 250gb and msi neo's. Awesome work by the way . big s754 fan but i stop at agp based boards though.

Thank you sir. I am sorry but I do not have any mobile Athlon 64's. I tested personally the following processors:
1. Athlon 64 2800 ClawHammer revision CO
2. Athlon 64 3000 clawhammer revision CG
3. Athlon 64 3200 Newcastle
4.Athlon 64 3200 Venice
5. Athlon 64 3400 clawhammer revision CO
6. Athlon 34 3400 clawhammer revision CG
7. Athlon 64 3400 Newcastle

AlexZ wrote on 2026-01-05, 14:19:

So Radeon X1950 PRO, despite being a significant upgrade from 7800 GS still does not deliver satisfactory results in Quake 4 and FEAR. Compromise would have to be made in resolution/details. It's a decent choice if one can get it cheap in AGP version. For PCIe there are much better alternatives.

For PCIe ABIT board, one should consider at least slim NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT (to avoid blocking SATA ports). It is 1.5 years newer and a significant upgrade from Radeon X1950 PRO. GeForce GTX 2xx is a safe bet, but they are large and won't fit well on some 754/939 boards due to blocking SATA ports. They also run hot and need repasting/cleaning/BIOS fan curve adjustment to live long.

I will say at the end a few words as a conclusion but I can already state that I strongly believe that socket 754 is a replacement year for year for socket A that is the 2000 - 2004 period. I believe that year 2005 games are already pushing the platform too far! Either, as you said it, a good enough GPU to play 2005 games is going to block the SATA ports or you are going to exceed the 2gb memory limit that is required on socket 754 in order to have the CPU run in sync with the RAM.

57. Final test is the infamous Tom2D. After repeating the test countless times on all the systems the following scores remain:

A. nforce3
B. VIA
C. ULI
D. nforce4

VIA crushes all competition with the Clawhammer 3400! All the advantages in the previous tests for the nforce4 is for naught as the colossal score of the VIA K8T800 PRO obliterates everything else and washes away all NVIDIA's nforce4 victories in the vast majority of previous tests!

Clawhammer has been tested through all 57 benchmarks. No score summary yet as we head into the last chapter: Newcastle with radeon x1950 pro on all 4 platforms. After a simple CPU change we now got a bump in speed by 200mhz and a L2 cache reduction to 512kb:

C. ULI
D. nforce4

A. nforce3
B. VIA
Of course the FSB of all systems has been manually set to 200 before the start of the tests!

With all 4 systems ready to go it is time for the final battle! As usual the first test is Code creatures pro - a directx 8.1 benchmark - at the default settings:
1. Code creatures 1024*768
A. nforce3
B. VIA
C. ULI
D. nforce4

2. Again an excellent start by nforce4! 1024*768 and sound is next:
A. nforce3
B. VIA
C. ULI
D. nforce4

3. CODE CREATURES PRO 1024*768 AA 4 X:
A. nforce3
B. VIA
C. ULI
D. nforce4

4. CODE CREATURES PRO 1024*768 AA 4X, SOUND enabled:
A. nforce3
B. VIA
C. ULI
D. nforce4

5. CODE CREATURES 1280*1024 max details:
A. nforce3
B. VIA
C. ULI
D. nforce4

6. Code creatures 1280*1024 max details with sound:
A. nforce3
B. VIA
C. ULI
D. nforce4

7. Code creatures pro at the highest resolution: 1600*1200
A. nforce3
B. VIA
C. ULI
D. nforce4

8. Final and most demanding settings: 1600*1200 with sound enabled
A. nforce3
B. VIA
C. ULI
D. nforce4

Nforce4 is starting strong, leading across all resolutions and settings! Let's see if the trend continues with Aquamark 3, a DirectX 9 benchmark that should be more demanding than CC pro.

9. Aquamark3 - default score:
A. nforce3
B. VIA

C. ULI
D. nforce4

Excellent score obtained by nforce4 - best of all 4 platforms!
10. Aquamark3 1024*768 max details including sound:
A. nforce3
B. VIA

C. ULI
D. nforce4

11. nforce4 stays in the lead. We increase the resolution to 1280*1024 max details, no sound first:
A. nforce3
B. VIA