ULi M1697 Ref Board Benchmarks 13
Bluetooth 3 Dec 2005

Conclusion

ULi M1697 is the next major chipset from ULi that supports the AMD X2/64/Sempron. Major Improvements made to M1697 includes HD Azalia audio support delivering 7.1 channel surround. Secondly, an AHCI based SATA II 3 Gbps host controller with NCQ. Thirdly, it supports RAID 0,1,0+1,5,JBOD for optimum storage and improve disk efficiency.

Within this flexible chipset, the M1697 can couple with M1695 to support a Dual PCIe x16 lanes platform just like Nvidia's NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 e.g C51+CK804. In fact, it will be worth looking out for vendors to manufacture a 8x + 8x or 16x + 16x for surround video.

In the tests, we find that the performance is simply as good as what the NVIDIA NF4 series can deliver. In fact, in some of the benchmarks, it offers better efficiency, performance or lower cpu utilisation especially in the RAID 0 tests. The USB performance of this chipset is also surpasses that of NVIDIA NF4 series and probably even ICH7 (last time gives 25MB/s). One thing we noticed is that the board performs slightly better when paired with an ATi card than a NVIDIA card. GbE is also missing from the single chipset.

In terms of overclocking, this board has no problem reaching 400HTT. DDR600 is not a major problem too provided manufacturers will incorporate more voltage adjustments onto the retail boards.

ULi M1697 will be officially announced next Thursday in Taipei, Taiwan. This new chipset will definitely start to gain acceptance by readers. Not only ASrock has committed to making 1697 board, 2nd tier manufactures ABIT, EPOX and JETWAY will also be showcasing their solutions at the launch. For more updates, please check our forums.

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