nVidia nForce2 Ultra 400Gb: Fast LAN, Firewall, SATA, RAID for Athlon XP
by Wesley Fink on May 13, 2004 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Content Creation, General Usage, and Media Encoding
No one would claim that the Athlon XP 3200+ is at the same performance level as the Athlon 64 3200+, but it is still an excellent buy. This is particularly true since many 2500+ Barton chips, with the same 11 multiplier as the 3200+, will run at 400FSB (3200+ speed), and yet cost only about $70.
In 2004 Winstones, the 3200+ performs at about 90% of the performance of the Athlon 64 3200+. The XP architecture is not the best choice for media encoding, since Athlon 64 3200+ is 20% to 30% faster in our 2-pass encoding benchmark. PCMark 2004 uses encoding as part of the PCMark bench and shows the 3200+ XP at about 85% of the Athlon 64.
Considering the low prices of the Athlon XP, and the fact these will drop even more when Socket 939 appears next month, you still get a lot of bang-for-the-buck with Athlon XP. However, Athlon 64 is the clear performance winner by a wide margin.
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vkristof - Monday, May 24, 2004 - link
Does anybody know when any Ultra 400GB MBs will be available for purchase?plonk420 - Thursday, May 20, 2004 - link
i mainly want to see Xvid tests in addition to Divx, since Divx is HEAVILY weighted in Intel's favor. plus it's pretty decently superior to Divx ^_^ and there's no excuse, now that Xvid's gone one-point-ohGandalf90125 - Monday, May 17, 2004 - link
"Performance on shipping boards will be the same as any other nForce 2 Ultra 400 board - this is about added features."Consequently, it could be argued that the benchmarks are pointless.
Wesley Fink - Saturday, May 15, 2004 - link
#9 - We actually do more overclocking tests at AnandTech today than we have ever done in the past. Check our recent reviews of motherboards where we reach 347 FSB or memory where we test at DDR570.We always test OC on full retail reviews, but the chipset in the review is well known here. This is also a Reference Board - not designed to test overclocking since there are no ratios. We did test OC on the VIA K8T800 PRO Reference Board because the PCI/AGP lock was a new feature on that chipset. However the core chipset capabilities are well know here and there seemed little point to doing OC tests, when the capabilities of the nForce2 Ultra 400 are already well known. 400Gb is a features upgrade using a new MCP (or southbridge), not a new chipset.
noxipoo - Friday, May 14, 2004 - link
Does anandtech do overclocking tests anymore? where is anand these daysWesley Fink - Friday, May 14, 2004 - link
#6 - With chipset introductions and Reference Boards we expected you would be more interested in where they "fit" overall, which is why the Athlon 64 comparisons.You can't buy a Reference Board, and the nForce2 Ultra 400 SPP is the same chip used by nVidia for months. So, there is really nothing new in performance here.
Performance on shipping boards will be the same as any other nForce 2 Ultra 400 board - this is about added features.
GokieKS - Friday, May 14, 2004 - link
Even though the GbE is a great feature (thanks to 2 875P systems, I've already got a GbE network set up, and I can't imagine going back to 100Mbps), I'm more interested in the older nF2 boards with MCP-T, which hopefully will drop in price because of this, to be paired with something like an AXP-M 2400+. :)~KS
Jeff7181 - Thursday, May 13, 2004 - link
Not to be an ass, but what good is it to compare this to Athlon 64 boards? That tells me absolutely nothing about whether I should buy it to replace my A7N8X Deluxe or not. I see a few tests were done with an nForce2 motherboard... yay. There shouldn't be ANY socket 754, 940, or 939 boards in this review since they use entirely different processors.Hey... why didn't ya throw in some Intel 865 chipset mobo's in there for comparision too?
... I'm confused... all this tells me is that an Athlon-64 solution is most likely going to be better than sticking with socket A... and I didn't need to read this article to figure that out, I thought it was a well known fact.
Gromis - Thursday, May 13, 2004 - link
#3, but how often do people upgrade CPUs anyway? I'm a tech in a PC shop, and from what I see, not a whole lot. By the time you start thinking about upgrades, you find yourself in a market for a complete new PC anyway. Those who upgrade every 6-12 months are an extremely tiny minority. I myself used a PII/350 for nearly 5 years, swapped it for a Duron 1200 a year ago, planning next upgrade in another 8-9 months - most likely A64 by then.hifisoftware - Thursday, May 13, 2004 - link
Nice article, but when will we see motherboards with this chipset? It is going to take 3+ month for them to come out then it is a not very usefull chipset.