nForce 500: nForce4 on Steroids?
by Gary Key & Wesley Fink on May 24, 2006 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Gaming Performance
The overall gaming performance of the nForce4 platform is still excellent and clearly indicates this is a mature and well tuned system. The nForce4 outperforms the nForce 500 platform in three of our tests while basically tying it in the Call of Duty II benchmark. We had a consistent 3% spread in the Serious Sam II test with the nForce 500 performing very well. Our LinkBoost benchmarks indicate that is does not make a real difference in the performance of the video card.
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artifex - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
If they want the TCP/IP acceleration to be a draw for that crowd, they'd better fix this thing with firewalls not being supported. I could not imagine running a corporate server like that. And it's a bit much for them to hold out Vista as a possible fix, as many of us would like to wait a while before dropping Vista into production environments. Like a couple years. :)
Jaylllo - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Is it just me, or do ATI/NVIDIA/INTEL make up a boatload of stupid names for simple features?afrost - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
So when do we get low power chipsets to go with our low power CPUs?Nvidia's mid to high end GPUs use less power than ATI GPUs....but it's the other way around for chipsets......????
seems odd
Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Rumor has it, in the late fall. ;-)
FinFET - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
On this page http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?... the nForce 550's summary reads"Several of the higher and options have been dropped from the 550 chipset"
I believe you meant
"Several of the higher end options have been dropped from the 550 chipset"
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Corrected.peternelson - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
How can you say there is not improvement?
The 590SLI gives increased number of PCIE lanes to total 46.
These are available as 16, 16, 8, and six individual 1x connections.
Assuming some slots on the motherboard:
x16 slot: card x16 nvidia graphics card
x16 slot: card x8 ARECA EIGHT SATA 300 HARDWARE RAID CONTROLLER
x8 slot: card x8 MYRINET 10 GIGANET hardware accelerated LAN
I'm not particularly interested in consumer level SATA and LAN but consider them a free bonus. What MATTERS is that there is enough BANDWIDTH to use some PROPER peripherals without bottlenecks.
Egglick - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
The only new "feature" I'm really interested in is the TCP/IP acceleration, which lowers CPU usage. The rest of it is a bunch of gimmicks and garbage as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather not use those "features" at all, as they're much more likely to cause problems than any sort of performance boost.When I think of that, coupled with their stupid SLI Memory program (another gimmick), my view of NVidia's chipsets is significantly lowered. When the time comes for me to upgrade, I'll be strongly considering ATI's chipset offerings instead.
bob661 - Thursday, May 25, 2006 - link
Egglick,Your name should be Buttlick with that comment. So, let me get this straight (or gay depending on which way you swing), these extra features that Nvidia is giving us are apparently no good since you say so. The rest of us might as well just shut off our computers, grab a pr0n mag, and spank it like it's 1999. Jesus, who needs a brain with you around.
Pirks - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Yeah, right... ATI are completely smoke'n'mirrors free guys... cool! :)