nForce 500: nForce4 on Steroids?
by Gary Key & Wesley Fink on May 24, 2006 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Test Setup
In the next few days we will publish a review of the ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 AM2 that will compare performance of the RD580 and nForce5 chipsets. We also have several AM2 motherboard reviews in process that will compare performance and features of AM2 motherboards. This review examines the performance of an nForce 590SLI system against that of a comparable nForce4 SLI X16. We are testing equally configured systems with only the chipset and required memory being different. Our test suite consists of synthetic and actual application benchmarks.| Performance Test Configuration - Foxconn C51XEM2AA | |
| Processor: | AMD Athlon 64 X2 - 4800+ (AM2) |
| RAM: | 2 x 1GB Corsair Twin2x2048-8500C5 DDR2-800 as noted at (CL3-3-3-13) |
| Hard Drive(s): | 1 x Maxtor MaXLine III 7L300S0 300GB 7200 RPM SATA (16MB Buffer) |
| System Platform Drivers: | NVIDIA 9.34 |
| Video Cards: | 1 x EVGA 7900GTX - All Tests 2 x EVGA 7900GTX for SLI Tests |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA 91.27 |
| Cooling: | Zalman CNPS9500 AM2 |
| Power Supply: | OCZ GamexStream 700W |
| Operating System(s): | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
| Performance Test Configuration - Asus A8N32-SLI | |
| Processor: | AMD Athlon 64 X2 - 4800+ (S939) |
| RAM: | 2 x 1GB OCZ EB DDR PC-4000 Platnium Edition DDR-400 as noted at (CL2-2-2-7) |
| Hard Drive(s): | 1 x Maxtor MaXLine III 7L300S0 300GB 7200 RPM SATA (16MB Buffer) |
| System Platform Drivers: | NVIDIA 6.85 |
| Video Cards: | 1 x EVGA 7900GTX - All Tests 2 x EVGA 7900GTX for SLI Tests |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA 84.21 |
| Cooling: | Tuniq 120 |
| Power Supply: | OCZ GamexStream 700W |
| Operating System(s): | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
Our processors are both AMD X2 4800+ units, and our motherboard choices are the NVIDIA tuned and designed Foxconn C51XEM2AA for AM2 and the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe for S939. Our memory selections and settings represent the fastest memory we currently have available for each platform. All other components are equal with each system BIOS being set to default except for the memory timings. The driver sets are the latest release for each platform and would be the driver sets utilized if you purchased either platform today. Although this test is not an exact apples-to-apples comparison, it should provide an interesting analysis if a pending upgrade is in your future.
Memory Performance
The nForce 500 platform with DDR2 memory holds a commanding lead in memory bandwidth over the nForce4 system with DDR. However, as we have already discussed in our AM2 DDR2 versus 939 DDR Performance article, this advantage only provides performance improvement results from 0-7% in real-world benchmarks due to the fact the K8 architecture is not particularly starved for memory bandwidth. We will find in our next round of tests if these results hold true.
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ayqazi - Wednesday, July 5, 2006 - link
I'm a little tired of hearing about so-called "chipset" hardware RAID. The writer of this article constantly made it seem that it was the chipset that was responsible for performing RAID operations on the disks, whereas nothing could be farther from the truth.Yes, the chipset may offload some of the work, but (in the case of RAID 5) the major calculations, like the XOR calculations, are done by the host processor.
According to [L]http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#faker...[/L] and [L]http://spamaps.org/raidtests.php[/L], Linux-based software raid is much faster than so-called fakeraid, since it has been optimised and developed more than the software drivers of the fakeraid chipsets.
Anyway, just pointing out something that gets on my nerves a bit.
raildogg - Saturday, May 27, 2006 - link
I think for most of us who have a nForce 4 ultras and SLIs, it doesn't make sense to upgrade to AM2 motherboards and processors. We'll need new memory too. No performance increase. Just upgrade to a X2 and that should be a good upgrade for those of us who don't have it yet.Powered by AMD - Friday, May 26, 2006 - link
When in the article says:"In fact, the less than stellar write performance of the nForce4 in RAID 5 continues in the "new" chipset"
It does mean that the write performance is good or not?
thanks!
Zoomer - Saturday, May 27, 2006 - link
Means just as bad as before, in a nicer manner. :)Gary Key - Saturday, May 27, 2006 - link
Thank you for the perfect reply. ;-) NVIDIA is working on this for the next refresh, their reasoning at this time is they did not want to introduce potential data corruption issues by improving the performance with the current chipset and driver base. It continues to reinforce our belief that although the nF590 SLI is the most feature laden chipset out at this time, the core continues to be nForce4 Plus in our eyes. This is not bad at all, just what can you do with a less than stellar CPU release (still an extremely strong CPU lineup) from a marketing viewpoint. I think NVIDIA and ATI are going to be hamstrung on sales with the AM2 release but hopefully they can make it up when Conroe (Core 2 Duo) launches shortly. :) The bios revisions we have received this week have improved performance but nothing that would make a nf4SLI/4800+ owner want to upgrade yet.
SonicIce - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
AM2 can just die.afrost - Thursday, May 25, 2006 - link
i'm glad you took the time to type all that out.....KHysiek - Thursday, May 25, 2006 - link
Well, but it does say precisely right about the whole AM2 transition.This is the most pointless hardware upgrade I've seen forfew last years.
The only significant advantage of AM2 is a bit more featured mainboard. And you pay more for less speed. I think AMD is on the way down and no K8L can save them, cause it will be quad core only. What typical user needs quad core for price AMD keeps (like their pricing for current X2 CPU's versus Intel's).
Core 2 is huge leap forward and combined with Intel manufacturing power will make big push back for AMD in coming months.
Pirks - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Gary, what's about that QoS network driver/protocol hanging around in my WinXP for years? I heard it does some quality of service stuff/packet prioritizing/etc soo... is FirstPacket just an interface for this Microsoft QoS thing? Or is nVidia didn't know about it and reinvented the wheel?Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
I raised this question at the Editor's conference as it appeared to me they decided to take advantage of some hooks/protocols in XP. I have a meeting with the platform manager tomorrow and hopefully some discussions with the Network guru next week after his return from vacation. I am trying to get an answer before our roundup is published. I noticed some interesting inter-actions during our network testing, will say this, they (NVIDIA) really took the networking side seriously on this release although most of the features are designed for the server/workstation market, but we get them for free on the desktop. We expect further hardware/driver improvements in the next refresh. I am trying to compare the outbound FirstPacket numbers to a D-Link Gamer Lounge at this time along with how both prioritize packets on the outbound lanes. There are so many different tests and options in just the new networking features to run that is a bit overwhelming at this point and of course the new draft-N equipment showed up this week also. ;-)