System information
This page gives detailed information about the computer I used for benchmarking.
thandor.net - system
Specification of system 29, AMD Solo 5
This is the fifth generation of AMD Solo motherboards; the AMD Solo 5. It's a very early engineering sample of the Athlon64 platform. This motherboard has a first revision (A0; Thor) HyperTransport I/O Hub and second revision (A1; Lokar) HyperTransport AGP3.0 graphics tunnel chipset. Since the early CPUs are slightly different compared to production Athlon64's you can't run production CPU's in this motherboard or run the early engineering samples in modern/production motherboards. You can read about the CPU here: AMD Athlon HX 1400.
I have used the default drivers that came with Windows XP SP3 to run the benchmarks. To verify I've installed AMD Driver Pack 2.20 and found that benchmark scores were practically equal.
The graphics card I used is a Radeon 9000. I verified performance using a Medion GeForce Ti200 and got similar results in Quake II. Note that Quake II runs in software mode so the graphics card is not that relevant.
Memory bandwidth is provided by two Hynix 256MB 166MHz DDR333, PC2700 CAS2.5 modules that run at 155MHz (CPU/9) according to CPU-Z and 166MHz as configured in the BIOS. This is what the motherboard defaults to.
By default the BIOS settings are quite basic. However, there are hidden features available. I haven't found a hotkey to unlock them on the fly but using Modbin you can see extra 'Debug and Bring-Up Features'. Technically I can enable the settings using Modbin and flash the BIOS chip but for the sake of keeping this prototype original I won't mess with the BIOS. You can download the BIOS here.
Hidden settings.
Using a hex-editor I've found that the BIOS filename originally was 'ASLAX1-2.BIN'. Using a decompressed file of the BIOS I've found the following CPU names:
Athlon HX SFF
Athlon HX
Mobile Athlon HX
Opteron DP LC
Opteron UP LC
Opteron UP w/ 1MB
Opteron DP w/ 1MB
Opteron MP w/ 1MB
Reserved
Opteron UP w/ 256KB
Opteron DP w/ 256KB
Opteron MP w/ 256KB
AMD Engineering Sample
I have used the default drivers that came with Windows XP SP3 to run the benchmarks. To verify I've installed AMD Driver Pack 2.20 and found that benchmark scores were practically equal.
The graphics card I used is a Radeon 9000. I verified performance using a Medion GeForce Ti200 and got similar results in Quake II. Note that Quake II runs in software mode so the graphics card is not that relevant.
Memory bandwidth is provided by two Hynix 256MB 166MHz DDR333, PC2700 CAS2.5 modules that run at 155MHz (CPU/9) according to CPU-Z and 166MHz as configured in the BIOS. This is what the motherboard defaults to.
By default the BIOS settings are quite basic. However, there are hidden features available. I haven't found a hotkey to unlock them on the fly but using Modbin you can see extra 'Debug and Bring-Up Features'. Technically I can enable the settings using Modbin and flash the BIOS chip but for the sake of keeping this prototype original I won't mess with the BIOS. You can download the BIOS here.
Hidden settings.
Using a hex-editor I've found that the BIOS filename originally was 'ASLAX1-2.BIN'. Using a decompressed file of the BIOS I've found the following CPU names:
Athlon HX SFF
Athlon HX
Mobile Athlon HX
Opteron DP LC
Opteron UP LC
Opteron UP w/ 1MB
Opteron DP w/ 1MB
Opteron MP w/ 1MB
Reserved
Opteron UP w/ 256KB
Opteron DP w/ 256KB
Opteron MP w/ 256KB
AMD Engineering Sample
| Motherboard | AMD Solo 5 |
|---|---|
| Chipset | AMD8111 A0 |
| BIOS | 07/29/2002-AMDK8-SMC61W4-ASLAX1-00 |
| RAM | Hynix 166MHz DDR333, PC2700 CL2.5 @ 155MHz. |
| Drive | Seagate ST340015A |
| OS | Windows XP SP3 |
| Drivers | Default Windows XP drivers. |
| Additional info |
Benchmarks
I have used this motherboard to benchmark solely the early engineering sample that came with it. Note that you cannot run regular production CPUs in this motherboard nor can you run the earliest engineering samples in modern/production S754 motherboards.
This system ran 10 benchmarks of which the last one was a(n) AMD Athlon HX 1400.
