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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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.