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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xsilver - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
is there going to be a 5xx nvidia chipset to support conroe?the lack of performance on AM2 makes this chipset highly unexciting
Gary Key - Thursday, May 25, 2006 - link
Yes, it is shaping up to be a very good chipset performance wise with Conroe. ;-)
The main issue with the nf5 chipset actually resides with the AM2 not really being any different than S939 except for the memory controller changes. As in the past, performance will improve once AMD does their memory controller tuning and the bios engineers have more time with the platform. Also, if you could get this board to run at 400fsb with 1:1 memory and 1T being stable, it would be a killer.
Lonyo - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Is this the same Foxconn board that AMDZone found was poor compared to the Asus NF5 board?http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&...">http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=m...q=viewar...
Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Yes, however, the performance of the Asus board with the latest bios improved scores in certain benchmarks. However, without knowing the bios settings that AMDZone used, it is hard to determine if the new board revision from Asus or bios made a difference. We have already received bios updates for all the boards in our coming roundup.Some have made a slight performance difference, some corrected some early test issues we found. The Foxconn board is a very solid setup and still has improvement potential. We found it to be representative of the initial performance results with the nForce 500. As time goes by and the bios engineers have time to properly tune the boards, we are sure there will be some performance improvements but nothing drastically different from what we are seeing today.