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
nForce3-250Gb: Stress Testing
We performed stress tests on the nForce3-250Gb Reference Board in these areas and configurations:- Chipset and motherboard stress testing was conducted by running the FSB at 249MHz at a multiplier of 9.5.
- Memory stress testing was conducted by running RAM at 400MHz with a DIMM slot filled and at 400MHz with 2 DIMM slots filled at the lowest memory timings possible.
Front Side Bus Stress Test Results:
As normally done in our testing of production motherboards, we ran a full range of stress tests and benchmarks on the nForce3-250Gb Reference Board to test stability at an overclocked speed. This included Prime95 torture tests, and the addition of other tasks - data compression, various DX8 and DX9 games, and apps like Word and Excel - while Prime95 was running in the background. Finally, we ran our benchmark suite, which includes ZD Winstone suite, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, and Gun Metal Benchmark 2. At default voltage, 249MHz was the highest overclock that we were able to achieve with the nForce3-250Gb and the HyperTransport setting reduced to 4X or 800 (Actual 996 at 249FSB) while running these tests.Unlike our experiences with some of the overclocks run on other A64 boards, the nForce3-250Gb was completely stable when overclocked. We did have stability problems at the highest 250 setting, which remains a puzzle, but 249 was completely stable. It would be impossible to run at 249FSB with SATA drives and our picky ATI 9800 PRO without a working PCI/AGP lock.
Memory Stress Test Results:
This memory stress test simply tests the ability of the nForce3-250Gb Reference Board to operate at its officially supported memory frequency (400MHz DDR) at the lowest supported memory timings that our OCZ PC3500 Platinum Ltd memory will support:| Stable DDR400 Timings - 1 DIMM (1/2 DIMM populated) |
|
| Clock Speed: | 200MHz |
| Timing Mode: | N/A |
| CAS Latency: | 2.0 |
| Bank Interleave: | N/A |
| RAS to CAS Delay: | 2T |
| RAS Precharge: | 5T |
| Precharge Delay: | 2T |
| Command Rate: | N/A |
We had no problem running one DIMM of our standard OCZ PC3500 Platinum Ltd at the highest memory timings in the nForce3-250Gb Reference Board. We were also able to run the memory test suite with complete stability at 2-2-2-5 timings.
Filling all available memory banks is more strenuous on the memory subsystem than testing 1 DIMM, but 2 DS DIMMs worked just fine on the nForce3-250Gb. With 2 DIMMs, we could run the same aggressive timings used for one DIMM, which is excellent performance for an Athlon 64 motherboard.
| Stable DDR400 Timings - 2 DIMMs (2/2 DIMMs populated) | |
| Clock Speed: | 200MHz |
| Timing Mode: | N/A |
| CAS Latency: | 2.0 |
| Bank Interleave: | N/A |
| RAS to CAS Delay: | 2T |
| RAS Precharge: | 5T |
| Precharge Delay: | 2T |
| Command Rate: | N/A |
We tested the memory timings with both banks filled using several stress tests and general applications to guarantee stability. Prime95 torture tests were run successfully at the timings listed in the above charts. We also ran ScienceMark (memory tests only) and Super Pi. None of the three stress tests created any stability problems for the nForce3-250Gb Reference Board at these memory timings.
We suspect production nForce3-250Gb motherboards will have 3 or 4 DIMM slots, but as we have reported in the past, we have had some difficulties with every Athlon 64 motherboard so far when we tried to use more than 2 DIMMs. We will test memory slots again when production motherboards appear on the market in a few weeks.
Certainly, we will see 4 DIMMs, or two dual-channel pairs, on the nForce3-250Gb Ultra version for Socket 939.
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Brickster - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
Can one expect the following from nf3-250?-939 Mobo
-DualChannel
-PCI-X
Any other chipsets for this?
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
"Certainly, we will see 4 DIMMs, or two matched pairs, on the dual-channel nForce3-250Gb Ultra version of this chipset."again totaly unconnected with reality.
in A64/Opteron the chipset has nothing to do with memory support. How much DIMMs are supported depends on CPU, mainboard and BIOS ONLY!
There will be NO DUAL CHANNEL nf3-250Gb-Ultra. Just like nf3-250Gb IS NOT SINGLE CHANNEL.
There will be DUAL CHANNEL S939 Athlon64 CPU.
Also, another topic not well understood at Anandtech, Tom's, etc.: A64/Opteron FSB speed, HyperTransport speed, etc. - they (the writers) are mixing up clock frequency in MHz, data frequency in DDR and MHz, bandwith in GB/s. They think FSB and HyperTransport is the same thing. They think that HyperTransport is 800MHz (or maybe 200MHz "quadrupelt") - maybe becouse of similarity with P4. They think that their nf3-250Gb has a "250MHz FSB". They don't explain to the users on what depends the memory clock in a A64 system. They think that "Dual CPU support" is a feature of the chipset.
Shame on you!
Diogenes2 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
I remain puzzled about the continuing declaration by Anandtech about the lack of AGP locks on NF3-150 boards..I have no way to confirm it ( with O-Scope, etc. )at this time, but I am running 265 FSB on my Gigabyte GA-K8NPRO, and having no problems with my Saphire 9800 Pro.. This was not the case with the KT800 board I experimented with for a while, which would not tolerate an FSB above 225, as far as AGP was concerned..
I recommend that when the NF3-250 boards hit the shelves, buyers take advantage of price drops on NF3-150 offerings.. I don't see the modest performance gains of the NF3-250 as anything to get excited about..
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
just 2 lines below, another error:"nVidia includes the hooks for AC '97 6.1 audio in nForce3-250"
6.1? Don't you mean 5+1 ("6-channel 5.1")????
OK. This can be a typo-mistake, but when you add all typos, totaly wrong infos, etc. - it is too much to bear!
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
"Even with the memory controller on the chip, there is only so much real estate practically available on a single-chip chipset. "What???? This is not true! Where did you get such information?
SiS745, anyone? Single Chip: AGP+DDR memroy+PCI+UATA+AC97+...
also, current 0.13um, 0.15um is more advanced than SiS745.
Other single chip: ALi M1689, SiS630, SiS540
There IS enough real estate for a SoundStorm APU.
The problem can be pin-count, but is not.
Give us the area in mm2 and production technology in um of nforce3, nforce2 IGP, nforce2 MCP-T.... then can we speak.
Also give for comparation other chipsets - north&south&singlechip, other CPUs, other GPUs... give numbers for total transistors, total pins...
Generaly I think that the quality of articles in Anandtech and Tom's Hardware has declined VERY MUCH and is below acceptable now. Once these two were my favorite sites. Now I visit them only becouse they are big and so get the newest stuff and make MANY benchmarks. But if you need information about internals of a component and not its speed - they will most likely give you WRONG information. There are many other mistakes in mainboard and chipsets and other articles that start to annoy me...
tagej - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
I do not find it surprising at all that most customers don't care about the sound storm stuff. After all, the vast majority of PC users (outside of the geek market of course) have their PC hooked up to $9.99 basic speakers -- sound storm is not going to make a difference at all, and is simply not a selling point.The 250Gb certainly looks sweet at this point... I'll be watching closely to see how the first retail boards do.
aak97 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
Just wanna know, did the nForce3-250Gb ref board comes with any WinXP 64bits drivers? I'm sure a lot of people (including myself) will be interested in some benchmarks on the Preview version of WinXP 64bits.Foxbat121 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
#4,The "customer" in the survey probably refers to nVidia's largest OEM like HP, eMachine etc. These companies only care about save a few $$ and probably only chose nForce2 without SoundStorm.
#7,
The whole point of SoundStorm is to use Dolby Digital encoding and output everything throught digital sound output where analog codec chip does not get in to the play. If you use analog ouput, you will be better of with a sound card.
KHysiek - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
Now with Intel adding Azalia high lever audio to it's boards NVidia looks clearly dumb with it's chipset w/o Soundstorm.clemedia - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
"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"Apparently you COMPLETLY overlooked the fact that most (all, AFAIK) SoundStorm boards offered digital output which bypassed those codec's completly. Which just happens to be EXACTLY what I use, and was a major selling point, allowing me to send out my DD/DTS signal to my amp for DVD's as I use for regular computer use. VERY handy.
I would have no problem switching to something else if they offed a good DICE solution. (I think C-media makes a software DICE chip, but I would rather go with something better)