few months ago, we took a look at a sampling of Athlon 64 Socket 939 motherboards, and ended up giving an Editor's Choice award to the NVIDIA nForce 3 Ultra based MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum. At the time, the K8N Neo2 Platinum struck the best balance between features, performance, overclockability, and price. Another motherboard tested in that round-up was also powered by the nForce 3 Ultra, and two others were based on VIA's K8T800 Pro. Since then, a few new PCI Express enabled chipsets for the Athlon 64 have sprung up, but they haven't begun shipping in any real volumes just yet. Plus, PCI Express graphics cards are more expensive than their AGP counterparts for the most part, and folks who already own high-end AGP graphics cards probably aren't too keen on abandoning their investments just yet. Fortunately, there's a lot of life left in AGP, and some new chipsets from companies like Silicon Integrated System, or SiS, and ALi are still being introduced.



Link: Hot Hardware