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
Benchmarking nForce3-250GB
Before we benchmark nVidia's new nForce3-250Gb, we needed to decide exactly what we were going to test. There were several areas of particular interest:How does nForce3-250Gb compare to other chipsets that we have tested? In this case, the FX5950 video card was removed and our standard ATI 9800 PRO 128mb video card was installed. So that results could be truly compared to previous benchmarks published at AnandTech, the 3400+ was replaced with the 3200+, which we have used for virtually every Athlon 64 board that we have tested. In the interest of consistency, we also replaced the 512MB of 2-2-2-5 memory with 1GB of memory (2 x 512MB) that also ran fine at 2-2-2-5 timings.
How does nForce3-250Gb perform with top components? Is the nF3-250Gb a better performer with an nVidia FX5950 Ultra? Here, it would not have been comparing apples to run ATI benchmarks with the 9800 PRO, since the 9800 XT is the current top-of-the-line. So, full benchmarks were run with both the nVidia top-line 5950Ultra and the ATI top-line 9800 XT. To provide a sanity check, we also ran a full series of benchmarks with the SiS 755 chipset, a 3400+, and the ATI 9800 XT. Since we had found the SiS board to be one of the fastest that we have tested, we wanted to see if nF3-250 benchmarks with ATI were comparable to the best performance we had seen with ATI on Socket 754. If nForce3-250 only performs comparably to the best with a 5950U, the utility of the chipset is somewhat limited. However, if nF3-250 performs just as well as the best with ATI - and even better with 5950U - then the 5950U performance is a nice bonus.
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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?