nForce 500: nForce4 on Steroids?
by Gary Key & Wesley Fink on May 24, 2006 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
SLI Performance
The performance pattern continues in our SLI benchmarks with the nForce4 platform slightly outperforming our nForce 500 system in certain benchmarks while finishing right behind in others. The interesting showing is the reversal in the Serious Sam II benchmarks with the nForce4 system showing improvements and a significantly better minimum score.
NVIDIA has stated the nForce 500 series contains optimizations for improved SLI operations, but except for the F.E.A.R. benchmark we are not seeing anything to back these claims up. It could be due to the beta platform and graphics drivers we are utilizing, or perhaps the improvements are only seen at specific resolutions and settings. All SLI board benchmarks are run at 1600x1200 with 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled. This resolution requires at least a 20" flat panel monitor, while our standard 1280x1024 benchmarks can be achieved with the more common 19" and 17" flat panels.
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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.