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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DigitalFreak - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Does NTune 5 also work with NF4 boards?Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Yes, but depending upon bios support several of the new features will not be active. We have an updated bios coming for a nF4 board so we can verify which features do and not do work with full nF4 bios support.
nullpointerus - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Does nTune 5 support multiple profiles and automatic profile switching? If so, do these things actually work properly? Unfortunately, nTune 3 was a mess on my MSI board.Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Yes to multiple profiles and working correctly, what is your definition of automatic profile switching? You can setup custom rules that will dictate how the system should operate under different conditions, a game profile for max performance or a DVD profile that will instruct the system to go in to "quiet mode" once a DVD is inserted if you are watching a movie as an example. We are still testing the rules setup, but so far, it works. We only received the kits last Friday so all major features were tested first but I am following up on the bells and whistles now. nTune 5 probably deserves a small but separate article on its features. We just received a new build last night so testing begins again today.
We did report a bug to NVIDIA as the motherboard settings screen will not refresh correctly after loading a new profile. We had to exit to the main control panel and then return to the performance section for a refresh. I personally have close to 30 profiles setup for our test suites at this time. It is just a matter
DigitalFreak - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Sorry - that was smy fault and I'll edit it. Written while not thinking I guess.R3MF - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
"If TCP/IP acceleration is enabled via the new control panel, then third party firewall applications must be switched off in order to use the feature."this statement presumes that non third-party firewalls (i.e. nVidia firewall application) would work fine with the TCP-IP acceleration function.............?
nVidia: here is a great function, but you can't use it without getting haXXoR3d
???
Wesleyrpg - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
hey anand,wheres this dodgy nforce4 networking article that you been promising for weeks?
Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
The nf4 tests with driver sets back to the 5 series is complete, waiting on release versions of the new 9.x platform drivers to see what actual changes have been made since 6.85 on the nf4 x16 boards.
Wesleyrpg - Thursday, May 25, 2006 - link
can people with the 'normal' nforce4 chipset use the 6.85 drivers or are we stuck with the bodgy 6.70 drivers.