nForce 500: nForce4 on Steroids?
by Gary Key & Wesley Fink on May 24, 2006 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Synthetic Graphics Performance
The 3DMark series of benchmarks developed and provided by Futuremark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apples-to-apples comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations, they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.
Our nForce 590 SLI system improves upon the performance of the nForce4 system by an average of 1%. These test results are basically a tie and indicates both platforms are performing equally with the same video card.
General System Performance
The PCMark05 benchmark developed and provided by Futuremark was designed for determining overall system performance for the typical home computing user. This tool provides both system and component level benchmarking results utilizing subsets of real world applications or programs. This benchmark is useful for providing comparative results across a broad array of Graphics subsystems, CPU, Hard Disk, and Memory configurations along with multithreading results. In this sense we consider the PCMark benchmark to be both synthetic and real world in nature while providing consistency in our benchmark results.
The margins are little wider at 4% in the PCMark05 results, but the margin of error in PCMark05 is also slightly larger. It is obvious from our test results so far that either platform provides excellent results. If you have a socket 939 platform and are happy with its feature set then we do not see a reason to upgrade at this time.
Rendering Performance
We have added the Cinebench 9.5 and POV-RAY 3.6 benchmarks as they heavily stress the CPU subsystem while performing graphics modeling and rendering. We utilize the standard benchmark demos in each program along with the default settings. Cinebench 9.5 features two different benchmarks with one test utilizing a single core and the second test showcasing the power of multiple cores in rendering the benchmark image.
The nForce 500 desktop platform shows small and almost imperceptible differences in these benchmarks, with the 590 AM2 performing slightly better in the demanding POV-RAY benchmark. Once again both platforms are performing equally.
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DigitalFreak - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Does NTune 5 also work with NF4 boards?Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Yes, but depending upon bios support several of the new features will not be active. We have an updated bios coming for a nF4 board so we can verify which features do and not do work with full nF4 bios support.
nullpointerus - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Does nTune 5 support multiple profiles and automatic profile switching? If so, do these things actually work properly? Unfortunately, nTune 3 was a mess on my MSI board.Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Yes to multiple profiles and working correctly, what is your definition of automatic profile switching? You can setup custom rules that will dictate how the system should operate under different conditions, a game profile for max performance or a DVD profile that will instruct the system to go in to "quiet mode" once a DVD is inserted if you are watching a movie as an example. We are still testing the rules setup, but so far, it works. We only received the kits last Friday so all major features were tested first but I am following up on the bells and whistles now. nTune 5 probably deserves a small but separate article on its features. We just received a new build last night so testing begins again today.
We did report a bug to NVIDIA as the motherboard settings screen will not refresh correctly after loading a new profile. We had to exit to the main control panel and then return to the performance section for a refresh. I personally have close to 30 profiles setup for our test suites at this time. It is just a matter
DigitalFreak - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Sorry - that was smy fault and I'll edit it. Written while not thinking I guess.R3MF - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
"If TCP/IP acceleration is enabled via the new control panel, then third party firewall applications must be switched off in order to use the feature."this statement presumes that non third-party firewalls (i.e. nVidia firewall application) would work fine with the TCP-IP acceleration function.............?
nVidia: here is a great function, but you can't use it without getting haXXoR3d
???
Wesleyrpg - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
hey anand,wheres this dodgy nforce4 networking article that you been promising for weeks?
Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
The nf4 tests with driver sets back to the 5 series is complete, waiting on release versions of the new 9.x platform drivers to see what actual changes have been made since 6.85 on the nf4 x16 boards.
Wesleyrpg - Thursday, May 25, 2006 - link
can people with the 'normal' nforce4 chipset use the 6.85 drivers or are we stuck with the bodgy 6.70 drivers.