AMD's 760 Chipset: DDR for the Athlon is here

Issues

In order to make sure that the AMD 766 chipset did have a functional ATA-100 controller we attempted to test its theoretical maximum transfer speed, however as you can see above we noticed that under Windows 2000, the controller wouldn't burst above 60MB/s. While this doesn't matter for current hard drives it could be a problem in the future, however when we ran the same benchmark under Windows 98SE we noted a 78.5MB/s score meaning that the issue is driver related. Hopefully updated Windows 2000 Bus Mastering drivers will resolve the issue.

Other than the aforementioned hard disk controller performance issue, the AMD 760 performed fine under both Windows 98SE and Windows 2000 SP1. There were no major performance anomalies that could be attributed to driver issues under either OS.

The only suggestion AMD gave us was to make sure to use NVIDIA's 6.27 Detonator3 drivers under Windows 98SE since they properly supported the AGP 4X capabilities of the chipset whereas the newest 6.31s didn't. However it was ok to use the 6.31's under Windows 2000 SP1 with the AMD 760.

An issue we encountered with the AMD Corona reference board was that it would not allow us to set the FSB to 100MHz DDR (200MHz). This prevented us from doing any clock for clock comparisons using the 133MHz DDR vs 100MHz DDR FSBs. Even when we plugged in a 100MHz FSB CPU the board simply attempted to use the 133MHz FSB, it doesn't seem as if there's a pin that sets the FSB state on the Athlon or if there is the reference board doesn't perform a detect as to the status of that pin.

For the most part the issues we encountered were minimal, the success of the AMD 760 will be dependent on motherboard manufacturers properly implementing the chipset and AMD releasing updated drivers under all of the major OSes.