FIRST LOOK - nForce4: Gigabyte K8NXP-9
by Wesley Fink on November 12, 2004 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Performance Tests
DirectX 9 Gaming
There were many positive responses to using a larger group of DirectX 9 games in our last "First Look", so we're including more recent DX9 games in this "First Look" at a production nForce4 board.
The real comparison here is the nVidia nForce4 Reference Board and the Gigabyte K8NXP-9. Gigabyte has done an excellent job on their nForce4 board. The K8NXP-9 wins every comparison with the nF4 Reference board except Aquamark 3, which is virtually the same with both boards. If this is a reflection of what is coming with shipping nF4 boards, we all have reasons to be pleased. For now, it is fair to say that the Gigabyte K8NXP-9 provides the best performance we have seen on an nForce4 motherboard
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arswihart - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
quote by Wesley Fink:"#6 - Full performance comparisons of nForce3 Ultra and nForce4 were run at nF4 launch at http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?... Performance of nF3 and nF4 is basically the same - the only real difference is PCIe instead of AGP."
but you are showing here that the production board from Gigabyte is a little different than the reference nf4 boards. I think it would be helpful to at least include one good nf3-250gb board in some future nf4 round-up or review, for comparison's sake, as i think its more practical at this point to compare nf3 to nf4, rather than reference nf4 to production nf4.
Thanks for the review though, and I'm also interested in the price of these nf4 boards. I've seen somewhere quoting these boards on average at like $180
Whizzmo - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
Possible Typo:Page 2, below the second mobo pic, the following:
Four ports are 3Gb/s ports provided by the nForce3 chip, and
should probably be:
Four ports are 3Gb/s ports provided by the nForce4 chip, and
Danke :)
johnsonx - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
oh, ok... 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps signalling rates, which translate down to 150MB/s and 300MB/s data rates, respectively. The SATA uses 8b/10b encoding, so 10 bits of signalling are need for each 8 bits of data.Anyway, nevermind.
johnsonx - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
ok, it's late, so I may be tired and crazy....but what's all this about 1.5Gb SATA and 3Gb SATA? I thought standard SATA is 150MB/s (SATA-150), while the new SATA 2.0 spec runs at 300MB/s. Even converting those speeds to Gigabits per second, you get 1.2Gbs and 2.4Gbps.
Jalf - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
Would be nice to see it compared to ATI's A64 board. That looked like a pretty good performer as wellstelleg151 - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
Any clues as to when we will be able to get our hands on one?RyanVM - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
Too bad the secondary SATA controller isn't on the PCIe bus.xtknight - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
wow, very interesting. looks like the gigabyte mobo is a winner. by the way, doom 3 belongs under OpenGL benchmarks.PorBleemo - Friday, November 12, 2004 - link
So much for that "Fatal1ty". :PProviaFan - Friday, November 12, 2004 - link
Page 2 "Four ports are 3Gb/s ports provided by the nForce3 chip"Oops?