After days of testing out the ULi M1695 reference board, I am impressed by its performance. In the performance department, it actually has amazing results when compared to other chipsets. It all takes an innovative design and there you have native AGP 8x and PCI-E implementation all on the same board. Although we have seen boards supporting AGP by deriving the bandwidth from the PCI bus, this method is slow and is a major bottleneck. The ULi solution breaks this myth that you can't have the best of both worlds on the same board at performance levels that are comparable or even better than existing AGP or PCI-E solutions. The benchmarks have already proven that.

Features wise, the ULi M1695 paired with ULi M1567 looks more like a "Dual North Bridge" solution supporting the Athlon 64 X2, FX processors as the 1567 handles the AGP. Since it has two "north bridges", it is possible to actually run both PCI-E card and AGP card at the same time. In fact at the launch event in Taipei, ULi demonstrated by hooking the system with 6 monitors using a PCI-E, AGP and PCI based graphics card all on the same mainboard. They call this technology TGi (Triple Graphics Interface). Although the board has some neat features, the south bridge M1567 does not support SATA II nor HD Audio. I was told that there will be a new single chipset that will support these new features.

Overclocking has been the area which NF4 reigns. With the coming of ULi M1695, it has a strong contender not only in performance but also in the overclocking department. In the design of ULi M1695, we have been asking for FIX PCI, PCI-E, ASYNC CLK etc. Looks like ULi has listened and they have independent clks ready this time round. Below is a screen shot of the system running a Athlon 64 Dual Core 4800+ at 2.7GHz. CPU FSB is set to 300MHz, Multiplier is 9x, RAM is run at ASync DDR266, CAS 2.5,6-3-3.

Latest :
Dual 8x PCI-E, how does it compare to SLI
FX-57 on ULi M1695 o/c to 2.8G at 7 x 400HTT air cooled using heatsink

In conclusion, I think ULi has made quite an impressive chipset. From my understanding, a couple of companies will showcase their ULI M1695 solutions at Computex 2005 in the next few days. We hope to see more of such innovative design that does not cripple performance.

Pricing

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Pros

• Native AGP 8x
• USB 2.0 
• Chipset is cool

Cons

• FSB limited to only 400MHz
• No GbE

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.