A Look At AMD's Socket AM2 Platform

System Impressions

We found the system to be surprisingly stable; in fact, it did not give us any problems. At the same time, it should be mentioned that Socket AM2 systems will be using the chipsets and drivers currently available, and these can certainly be called mature. From a platform environment point of view, this is a nice advantage for AMD.

The motherboard and BIOS were still in an early stage, because there were no settings to change the memory timings whatsoever. There were also plenty of BIOS options that we would recommend removing from end-user products. The memory speed could be switched from DDR2-400 to DDR2-667 and even DDR2-800. In addition, it is much easier to match an even 400 MHz memory clock speed to the 200 MHz base clock speed than it is with the DDR2-667 at an odd 333 MHz.