nForce3-250 - Part 2: Taking Athlon 64 to the Next Level
by Wesley Fink on March 29, 2004 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Performance Test Configuration: Graphics Card Performance
nVidia claims that the best performance with nForce3-250Gb is achieved with an nVidia graphics card. To test that, we compared performance of the nForce3-250Gb Reference Board with the top ATI and nVidia graphics cards and a 3400+ Athlon 64. We also included benchmarks from the same 9800XT 256MB video card on a similarly configured SiS 755 board. All benchmarks were run on a single IDE drive to remove RAID as a factor in the performance comparison.| Performance Test Configuration | |
| Processor(s): | AMD Athlon64 3400+ (2.2GHz) |
| RAM: | 2 x 512MB Mushkin PC3500 Level II OR 2 x 512MB OCZ PC3500 Platinum Ltd |
| Hard Drive(s): | Seagate 120GB 7200RPM SATA (8Mb buffer) |
| Video AGP & IDE Bus Master Drivers: | SiS 1.17a AGP/IDE 2.04/RAID 1.03 VIA 4in1 Hyperion 4.51 NVIDIA nForce version 4.04 for nF3-250 |
| Video Card(s): | nVidia FX5950 Ultra 256MB (Gainward) ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB |
| Video Drivers: | nVidia Detonator 56.64 ATI Catalyst 4.3 |
| Operating System(s): | Windows XP Professional SP1 |
| Motherboards: | nVidia nForce3-250Gb Reference Board ECS 755-A2 (SiS 755) FIC K8T800 (VIA K8T800) |
Benchmarks used either Mushkin PC3500 Level II or OCZ PC3500 Platinum Ltd memory modules. Both DIMMs use Winbond BH5 chips and perform virtually the same in our tests.
All performance tests were run with either the 256MB ATI 9800 XT or the 256MB nVidia FX5950 Ultra video card. On both cards, AGP Aperture was set to 256MB with Fast Write enabled. Resolution in all benchmarks is 1024x768x32 unless otherwise noted.
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Odeen - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
Quote:"the best audio Intel offered (on-board) at the time was the crappy Realtek Codec"
Wrong.
Intel offered a software audio solution. I.E. the chipset basically offloaded audio calculations to the CPU. Thus, the 3d audio rendering was crappy, true.
However, Realtek is not the only manufacturer of codec chips, just the cheapest. Boards from Intel and Asus have very nice ADI Soundmax chips with pretty good audio output quality.
On the other hand, Soundstorm offers high quality 3d audio rendering, but it is _ALWAYS_ paired with that SAME crappy Realtek ALC650 chip, which offers lousy analog output quality. I'd personally love to see Soundstorm coupled with a higher-end analog stage, such as a Sigmatel codec chip on an outboard card (ACR form factor, for instance).
And RAID-5 will be in-chipset when chipsets become as powerful as CPU's and average consumers will be taught to buy three or more drives. That is, never - RAID-5 is not for benchmarkers, and anyone with a "Type R" sticker, it's slower than RAID-0, but is obviouly far more secure, and wastes less disk than RAID1. It's a specialized feature for people who realize its value and want to spend the money to implement it.. it'd raise the chipset price by quite a bit, and is thus better off to left to an add-on card.
The other thing is, due to sensitive nature of RAID-5 (i.e. it's harder to implement than a software RAID-0 or RAID-1 that cheap PCI add-on cards and southbridges now offer) people who have the money to spend on RAID-5 will want a solution from people they trust, i.e. Adaptec or the likes.. They wouldn't accept trusting their precious data to a company that makes their son's gee-whiz video card :)
mkruer - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
I want to know when we are going to see RAID-5 in a chipset, for average consumers.Sahrin - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
<i>Customer surveys by nVidia found that most buyers did not use Sound Storm</i>I just can't believe that. I remember Soundstorm being a *huge* selling point for all kinds of people. When it came down to Intel v. AMD (especially when there were only "b" rev chips) Soundstorm was often the deciding factor; the best audio Intel offered (on-board) at the time was the crappy Realtek Codec. A lot of people made decisions to go with AXP-nForce 2 MCP-T boards over a comparable Intel package because of Soundstorm. (I know the Enthusiast market is still just a tiny sliver of sales, even for a chipset company like nVidia but I can't be convinced that this wasn't because Soundstorm is as good or better than products from Creative and/or M-Audio).
Cygni - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
^^ btw, there are only 3 boards offered with the 755 on newegg... ECS 755 A1 and A2, and the ASrock k8s8x.Cygni - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
Looks better than the 150... but SiS is really kickin a$$. I wish the market would embrace the 755 more so we could see a better range of solutions based on it.wicktron - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
any clue as to when production boards will hit the market?