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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Googer - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=4614&...">http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=4614&...http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews...">http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews...
Googer - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
AM2 Now Shiping at Newegg.comhttp://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Subm...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi...rchInDes...
Doormat - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
The media shield feature looks nice. Buy two drives for a RAID-0 array for the OS and whatnot. Then the RAID-5 array for all your important stuff (saved games, documents, pictures, etc). Having both arrays on one chipset is nice.Pirks - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Why would you penalize your write speed with RAID5 when there is RAID1? Why not get RAID1 instead of RAID5 and enjoy 1) reliability (same as RAID5) 2) speed (same as single drive for writing, faster than single drive for reading) 3) low price (no need for more than two hard drives)mino - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
AND lower available capacity for the money you pay. You see 4 300G drives in RAID5 bring you 900GB of (cheap and reliable) storage. Do that with 4 drives and RAID1(or 0+1 for that) means i.e. 2x400 + 2x500 which is SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive.Remember there are guys with 10 drives, any situation you could economically justify 3+ drives for storage RAID5 is the most cost effective way.
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 25, 2006 - link
Too bad the integrated RAID 5 solutions from NVIDIA only work with 3 drives (and potentially one hot-swap). Maybe I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure you can't run 4, 5, or 6 drives in a single RAID 5 array using the NVIDIA controller. That's why you can do two RAID 5 arrays with 3 drives in each array. Problem is, doing RAID 5 without a lot of RAM for the RAID controller can really hurt (write) performance.nordicpc - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Something I noticed yesterday while looking through the AM2 reviews that incorporated both ATI and nVidia's chipsets was the huge disparency in power usage, some 40 watts in some cases.Charlie D. has brought this up over at the Inq aswell.
Not only with nVidia's 5x0 series do you need a huge chunk of copper with 3 pipes to eliminate the fan, but also you'll be paying a bit extra on the power bill it seems, for what? Some extra networking options that most of us never use because they are so dodgy.
Where's the power consumption page on here?
Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
They are coming in a different article as we just started receiving our ATI AM2, nF550, and other boards. The pull in by AMD was a stretch for the board suppliers who had planned on rolling the AM2 series out during Computex and shipping at that time. NVIDIA was caught trying to qualify drivers for both the video and platform side in half the time. We just received final AM2 chips on Saturday morning. ;-)
NullSubroutine - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
mehfitten - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
I concurr.