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The new Opteron 6300: Finally Tested!by Johan De Gelas on 2/20/2013 12:03 AM EST
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sherlockwing - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkThese Piledriver based Opterons look competitive but the threat of Ivy-EP is immenient. The last time Intel die-shrunk their High end platform they introduced the monsterous 10 core Westmere-EP(the current Xeon E7 lineup), I wouldn't be surprised Ivy-EP introduces 10/12 core extreme E7 Xeons as well as Octa Xeons with better performance/watt. Reply
Kevin G - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkIvy Bridge-E is indeed coming but it is looking to be 6 months out. These Opterons were shipping since November which would give them a 10 month lead time. The real question for AMD is what they'll have in response in that time frame. Steamroller based parts all look to be released in 2014. On the bright side, AMD should be pairing those chips with a new socket as DDR4 becomes available.
One thing though about Ivy Bridge-E is that it will also be a socket 2011 part so migration to it should get relatively quick in comparison to the Westmere-EP to Sandybridge-E transition. The same cost savings for OEM noted in this article for socket G32 Opterons will apply to Ivy Bridge-E this time around. Reply
Oskars Apša - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkWasn't intels 2011 socket to be only physically identical, but electrically totally redesigned? Reply
Hrel - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link"These Opterons were shipping since November"
I reject this statement. Nothing counts as being "on the market" until Anandtech has done a full review of it. That's my stance and I'm sticking to it :P Reply
Beenthere - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link...is that the 63xx series is focused primarily on micro servers where it fits well. If the just disclosed Jaguar cores are any indication of AMD products to be released this and next year, I'd say AMD is back in the game in many PC and portable markets.
The only thing Ivy Bridge has going for it is reduced power but at a price penalty. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - linkSeaMicro was indeed one of first to use Piledriver based cores, but I don't think the Opteron 6300 is meant to be a "typical" microserver CPU. Otherwise, AMD would have focused more on low power parts. This meant to be an update for the general server market. Reply
Jovec - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link... as it is showing the multi-threaded chart instead. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkFixed. Thanks for pointing it out, always appreciated. Reply
Death666Angel - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkHey!
I get a " Page Not Found" error from the Racktivity PDU link. :) Reply
ssj3gohan - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkYou say that AMDs bad implementation of C6 costs them in the energy efficiency tests, but AFAIK with a low of still 10% CPU the CPU should not enter ACPI C3 (Intel C6), it will probably stay in C1e providing there is still more than enough workload to do on each OS tick.
If the xeons are observed to go into ACPI C3, then that is very probably a scheduler optimization specific for intel processors, not an actual implementation problem by AMD. Balancing C-state transitions - especially complete core sleep modes like ACPI C3 - is a notoriously hard task to do because each transition also costs a certain amount of mJ that, on immediate wake, are wasted compared to just leaving the cores in C1(e) Reply
arnd - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkI have dual Opteron 6344 workstation system, which tends to be either near complete idle or near complete busy, so C states are extremely important to me. The CPU has power sensors that are exposed in Linux using the 'sensors' tool. With C6 enabled, I get the power consumption per socket down to 42 Watts, which still seems like a lot, but disabling C6 made it jump to 104W per socket, when under 100% load it is constantly within 1W of the 115W TDP limit.
I did not see a significant impact of C1E, neither with C6 enabled nor disabled, presumably because I rarely have cores that are idle for a short period.
More annoying to me is the lack of S3 suspend mode, the system still consumes around 100W on S1. Reply
nevertell - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkThe difference I believe is that you cannot use AES-NI instructions when using Twofish and serpent. I guess that AMD's AES-NI implementation is just slower. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkSounds reasonable. The question is then why Twofish and serpent are so fast on the Opteron. They probably scale very well with cores. Reply
Yorgos - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkI've been abandoning tech sites due to stupid posters and internet trolls.
There is so much addition info and questions in the comments and I don't know why are you letting people ruin that feature from your site?
You should make a ranking system(similar to /. ) for users, in order to automatically hide someone's comments, so we don't have to double check every time the poster and/or the comment.
I feel stupid for making that type of comment, also reading specific stupid opinions, below that article. Reply
silverblue - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkI like your ideas, however most of the laugh (or should I say cringe?) worthy comments would be hidden and the entertainment value would be tainted by having to click the Show button all the time. ;) Reply
lwatcdr - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkOr requiring real names. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkI had meetings and people visiting me, so I could not "baby sit" the reactions. But if you don't react to the offensive message we can delete them. So the best way to deal with th trolls is to ignore. Sooner or later, they will be banned. Reply
coder111 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkBecause some of the people posting here are obviously trolling for Intel and do not bring anything constructive to the discussion. Reply
MonkeyPaw - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkYes, it is quite pathetic. An ignore button would take care of this situation nicely. Reply
iamezza - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkAn ignore button and a report button would be great! Reply
coder543 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkYou realize that we have no trouble recognizing that you've posted about fifty comments that are essentially incompetent racism against AMD, right?
AMD's processors aren't prefect, but neither are Intel's. And also, AMD, much to your dismay, never announced they were planning to get out of the x86 server market. They'll be joining the ARM server market, but not exclusively. I'm honestly just ready for x86 as a whole to be gone, completely and utterly. It's a horrible CPU architecture, but so much money has been poured into it that it has good performance for now. Reply
Duwelon - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - linkx86 is fine, just fine. Reply
coder543 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linktotes, ain't nobody got time for AMD. they is teh failzor.
(yeah, that's what I heard when I read your highly misinformed argument.) Reply
quiksilvr - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkObvious trolling aside, looking at the numbers and its pretty grim. Keep in mind that these are SERVER CPUs. Not only is Intel doing the job faster, its using less energy, and paying a mere $100-$300 more per CPU to cut off on average 20 watts is a no-brainer. These are expected to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with no stopping. That power adds up and if AMD has any chance to make any dent in the high end enterprise datacenters they need to push even more. Reply
Beenthere - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkYou must be kidding. TCO is what enterprise looks at and $100-$300 more per CPU in addition to the increased cost of Intel based hardware is precisely why AMD is recovering server market share.
If you do the math you'll find that most servers get upgraded long before the difference in power consumption between an Intel and AMD CPU would pay for itself. The total wattage per CPU is not the actual wattage used under normal operations and AMD has as good or better power saving options in their FX based CPUs as Intel has in IB. The bottom line is those who write the checks are buying AMD again and that's what really counts, in spite of the trolling.
Rory Read has actually done a decent job so far even though it's not over and it has been painful, especially to see some talent and loyal AMD engineers and execs part ways with the company. This happens in most large company reorganizations and it's unfortunate but unavoidable. Those remaining at AMD seem up for the challenge and some of the fruits of their labor are starting to show with the Jaguar cores. When the Steamroller cores debut later this year, AMD will take another step forward in servers and desktops. Reply
Cotita - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkMost servers have a long life. You'll probably upgrade memory and storage, but CPU is rarely upgraded. Reply
Guspaz - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkLet's assume $0.10 per kilowatt hour. A $100 price difference at 20W would take 1000 kWh, which would take 50,000 hours to produce. The price difference would pay for itself (at $100) in about 6 years.
So yes, the power savings aren't really enough to justify the cost increase. The higher IPC on the Intel chips, however, might. Reply
bsd228 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkYou're only getting part of the equation here. That extra 20w of power consumed mostly turns into heat, which now must be cooled (requiring more power and more AC infrastructure). Each rack can have over 20 2U servers with two processors each, which means nearly an extra kilowatt per rack, and the corresponding extra heat.
Also, power costs can vary considerably. I was at a company paying 16-17cents in Oakland, CA. 11 cents in Sacramento, but only 2 cents in Central Washington (hydropower). Reply
JonnyDough - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link+as many as I could give. Best post! Reply
Tams80 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkI wouldn't even ask the NYSE for the time day. Reply
coder543 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link99%? I love your highly scientific numbers. and yes, of course only Intel can design a perfect processor. I'm glad you were here to let everyone know.
To quote Abraham Lincoln, (no, not really) "All of our servers run Intel. Everything AMD makes is no better than British tea." Reply
Tams80 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkHow much are Intel paying you? XD
Seriously though; you've gone through the entire comments* posting walls of texts that add little to the discussion. Not only that, but your posts are a little offensive.
*I realise I'm being hypocritical here. Reply
JKflipflop98 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkWell, Intel does pay me and I'll be the first to say these chips are lookin pretty good in comparison with their previous generation counterparts. Good value for the money for sure.
As Anand says, however, HPC users are usually after the "extreme" ends of the scale. They're either after max performance or max performance to fit into a certain power/heat envelope. In either case, we win. Reply
Tams80 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkI'm sure you know what I mean. It wasn't exactly high brow humour.
They certainly do look good, especially for a company that has already invested in AMD chips. Intel may well be better in both use cases, but at least AMD are providing competent competition. Reply
tech6 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkThe AMD 6x000 series has always looked nearly competitive on paper but is nowhere near Intel performance and efficiency. We have 3 data centers and one is running a mix of 6100 and 6200 Opterons while the others a re older Xeon 7300s and new E5 Xeons. In terms of single threaded and total performance of the 6x00 series cannot keep up with even old 7300 Xeons and can't touch the E5s. What AMD needs is a 30-40% boost in real world performance before they could be considered competitive. AMD also needs better relations with VMWare to optimize memory management on that platform.
The price difference won't help them as the cost for a data center host is mostly software and can be $15 vCloud and $10K hardware. That reduces the cost advantage to 5% but delivers worse performance and uses more power.
Most data centers are looking to get the most from their VMWare investments while reducing power consumption and these AMDs do neither. Reply
duploxxx - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkinteresting information, but hard to catch if you don't add some figures and real data.
Firsts of all the 7300 series had huge disadvantages with there FSB, so mentioning that these are way faster then the 6100-6200 opteron series is debatable. I 100% tend to disagree and we had severe Vmware performance issues on these machines on our highend applications.
i'll just used anandtech as a refference:
even the 7400 series are a dog against opteron 8000 series and they are way older and slower against the 6000 series.
for the E5 you have a point there, often the E5 series show a higher responsive platform, but once you load real life applications within hypervisor and they are starting to hit those HT cores we have seen several degraded performance within our datacenters, this is not really resulted into the anandtech VAPU's scores due to some sw within the benchmark that provides some code optimised results for the intels (the web servers) hence the higher score.
The 6200 series did showe some response disadvantages but many things have to do with configuration of bios and power profiles in both server and hypervisor. might want to blame the setup rather then the servers. so for 6200 series we actually bought a 10% higher clock speed version to cover that, but reduced that again now with 6300 series. Reply
silverblue - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkI'm going to go trawl the internet (note I said trawl, not troll - very important to bear in mind) for articles on FX CPUs resulting in PCs dying... nope, no matches. Funny, huh?
I've also run a search concerning AMD CPUs producing incorrect results and crashing; any such occurrences would be the results of design bugs which, I must point out, are not limited to AMD. Nehalem had a bug causing spurious interrupts that locks up the hypervisor on Windows Server 2008 R2, for example. Core 2 had a huge list of bugs. Reply
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkIt is hard to disagree with the statement, knowing how overpaid US IT professionals are. But I just want to point out that this mentality is one of the reasons IT is being outsourced at a furious rate. Keep that in mind before you go blaming someone else for US jobs being lost.
This meager cost savings may not matter here, but what about some company in Asia? They might actually bite on a few hundred dollar savings, especially if they are ordering quantities in the hundreds. In that case, $300 becomes $30,000. Which might be more than they spend on the people who deploy those servers. Reply
ExarKun333 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkOutsourced work isn't much cheaper these days and the workers are of much less quality, on a whole. Reply
sherlockwing - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkExcept in Asia( especially developing countries) the cost of electricity is a lot higher due to rapidly expanding industry,population & lacking power plants. Reply
Sivar - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkPlease go away. You don't add any new information to the discussion.
Your writing is of a teenager who knows nothing of processor architecture, the brilliant engineers at both AMD and Intel, or the competitive landscape.
You present no data, only misinformed opinion. You reduce the quality of this discussion, and have shown no interest in improving your knowledge. Reply
JamesAnthony - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkIn the article it mentions you were using the E5-2660 CPU (8 core 2.2 GHz) 95W, in a Dell PowerEdge R720 server
It may have been a lot more useful to also have included the E5-2680 (8 core 2.7 GHz) and the E5-2690 (8 Core 2.9 GHz) as while they are 130W parts, they are ones that are often used in the PowerEdge R720 and from what we find in a lot of server sales the higher performance ones are very popular for transactional database servers and payment processing servers.
If you want to go head to head on Intel's top part vs AMD's top part, then it would seem it should be the E5-2690 vs 6386 SE Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkWe all know that when you want top performance, Intel is the way to go. So I don't really see the point, even AMD will tell you that the 6376 and 6380 are their most competitive parts.. It is pretty obvious that the E5-2690 2.9 GHz will be faster and consume less than a 6386SE. I don't think our readers really need to see numbers on that.
And I really doubt that the E5-2690 are sold that much. Most reports say that the top bins with the highest TDP are less than 5% of the total sales. Reply
lwatcdr - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkWow this is about the most gibberish I have seen in a post ever.
Good heavens you are an idiot.
Let's just tear this post bits so this person will NEVER post on here again.
1"No, it's worth per dollar that you have paid to buy Intel based servers. Intel is more reliable because it has Hyperthreading so you can reduce the latencies that will occur in every workloads."
Hyperthreading has nothing to do with reliability. So that was a waste of bandwidth.
"Unlike AMD's engineers who can not design a microprocessor properly. It was AMD's own fault why AMD did not have money like Intel"
My I introduce you to Titan http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/titan/ The worlds most powerful computer and powered by AMD cpus. AKA yea I think that AMD can actually do pretty well at designing CPUs so this part of your post is also pure manure.
"Look 99% Bank's in the world uses Intel based ATM as Intel processor can send information without any error." And here we can see that you understand nothing about digital theory or communications. Again a waste of bandwidth.
"That is why IBM itself does not use Power based processors for its ATM machine because its CEO has admitted that its engineers are not capable to design a lower power processor. So, IBM uses Intel as the standard processor to exchange information between ATM machine to server, so every digits that sent will come in exact same digits when it has been received."
The IBM power line is for high end systems not for ATM machines. Odds are good that many banks use Power based system for handling ATM transactions. IBM uses Intel or AMD because it is cheap and you can get standard boards. As to the every digit sent nonsense. IT IS DIGITAL you MORON. The communications links have error checking and correction not the CPUs. Please NEVER WASTE OUR TIME AGAIN, YOU KNOW NOTHING OF VALUE ON THIS SUBJECT. Reply
toyotabedzrock - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkSomething is wrong with the LZMA benchmarks.
Can you do a realworld test? There are scripts out there to do this.
LZMA is built around the idea that decompression is supposed to be much faster than compression. Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkFrom the 7zip manual:
"The benchmark shows a rating in MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured speed, and it is normalized with results of Intel Core 2 CPU with multi-threading option switched off. "
So that is the reason why the compression MIPS values are in the same order as the decompression. The decompression "MB/s" values are indeed about 10x and more higher than compression. Reply
Oldboy1948 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - linkIt is an interesting bench and if cache and memory are fast decompress and compress will be very close. It looks better for Bulldozer in this:
ARM has a long way to go if it will be a server one day. Reply
extide - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkCan we PLEASE get folding@home benches?! musky on the hardocp forums has come up with a system where you can run repeatable benchmarks. Myself as well as many others would really love to see F@H benches on systems like this! Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkOk, Link? :-) Reply
alpha754293 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkBecause of the way that the current Opteron architecture is (1 FPU per module), did you run with the number of LS-DYNA processes equal to the number of FPUs on chip or did you run it based on per "core" (i.e. 2 processes per module)? Reply
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkPer Core. So with the -np 32 setting. I have tried less before, but the LS-DYNA really likes the extra load and store units of the second unit. so 32 MPI processes give a 30% boost. Reply
alpha754293 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - linkThat's a healthy boost! It's amazing how these technologies are maturing to the point where conventional wisdom that they might be starved for FPU resources isn't enough to slow them down.
It'd be interesting to see whether it makes a difference if you were to let the OS handle the job/process scheduling or whether manual intervention can help reduce some of the thread/process migration overhead, especially across 16 FPUs. Reply
dmytty - Friday, February 22, 2013 - linkBefore the benchmarks came in, I looked at an HPC build for the new 6300 series. I saw the real sweet spot for AMD being the 6344 which is a CPU of type 2.6 Ghz @ 12 or 6 core (depending how you define a 'core'). Anandtech never mentioned this CPU in the review. (?)
In simple $ terms for the CPU, it's the E5 2640 @ $815 vs the Opteron 6344 @ $415. So how does AMD not have a decisive price advantage?
In 4S land the price advantage widens.
AMD 4S...I priced a build (not including a case) at ~$3860 for 4 x 6344, 128 GB RAM, mobo and PSU. Note that this mobo could also go out to 256 GB. CPU cost is 4 x 6344 = $1660. Again, total system cost was $3860.
Intel 4S...I picked the 4607 as being the best 'bang for the buck processor'. It's 6 cores @ 2.2 Ghz. However, at $885 per 4607 processor the CPU cost is more than double than AMD (ie 4x Intel 4607 = $3540). The same build cost using the Intel 4607 would then be $5740.
AMD @ $3860 vs Intel @ $5740. Why did Anandtech not talk about 4S? Why no mention of the 6344? Reply
dmytty - Friday, February 22, 2013 - linkI forgot to mention that the Intel board I specified for 4S build was $1200 whereas the AMD board was $800.
A marketing person would call the system cost comparison ~$3k vs $~6k.
Again, am I missing something?
The AMD 6344 based 4S system has a ~19% clockspeed advantage and comes in at 62% of the cost.
Worried about electrical cost? You can buy 700 watts of PV solar panels with the cost savings between AMD and Intel. 700 watts peak = ~3.5 kwh daily output. That would nicely mitigate (and then some) the 20 watts/cpu difference (80 watts total with 4x cpu) between AMD 6344 and Intel 4607. You would net about 1.5 kwh/day electricity going with the AMD + PV over the slightly more efficient Intel. Reply
geok1ng - Monday, May 19, 2014 - linkthis is all and good, but looking at spec int 2006 results, Abu Dhabi still does not match performance/watt of Magni Cours opterons. And the best competition AMd can offer against 2 gen old Xeons is still the Opteron 6180. Reply


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A brief look at upcoming ASUS P67 Motherboardsby Ian Cutress on 11/14/2010 1:22 PM EST
- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Asus
- News
53 Comments
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AnnihilatorX - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - link"Surprisingly, only one 8-pin 12V connector is on the board, which is somewhat odd if the board has a liquid nitrogen mode and power needs to be pumped into the CPU."
Just on the right hand side of the first PCIe X16 next to VRMs, there is also a 4-pin molex connector. Reply
AnnihilatorX - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkOh sorry I didn't see that you mentioned it. Are you sure the power just goes to PCIe only? Reply
IvanChess - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkI believe that 4-pin molex connector is a leftover from the AGP days and is actually meant to be plugged into the graphics card as an auxiliary power source. That's what it is on my board anyway. Reply
Kiji - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkStill no UEFI... :( Reply
Kiji - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkScratch that. Seems that the entire P67 lineup from Asus comes with EFI (http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_mainboard/a... Can someone tell me the difference between UEFI and EFI or how do they relate to each other ? Maybe Anandtech can do an article about that, since it will be a trend in 2011 :P Reply
XZerg - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkEFI - Apple's version. UEFI - rest of the industry going to follow - Universal. Reply
ViRGE - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkClose but no cigar. The early Intel-developed versions of EFI are officially known as EFI, while the later EFI versions starting in 2005 developed by the Unified EFI Forum are UEFI. So both Apple and Asus would be using UEFI. Reply
B3an - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkYou're not right either... atleast i'm pretty sure you're not. Macs still use EFI.
PC's will get UEFI, which is basically EFI 2.0.
I know for certain that the current 2010 macbooks and pro's use EFI 1.1. Reply
AmineBouhafs - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - link"And on the fifth day of x-mas my true love sent to me...an Asus Maximus IV Extreme!" :p Reply
The_Lauging_Man - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkBesides the extra 4-pin molex where the first PCIe x1 would be that was mentioned, I see a second right angle mounted 4-pin molex beneath the PCIe X4 slot. There is no mention in the article about this connector. Would both 4-pin molex be for powering the PCIe slots. I have a felling that this would not be the case, but can't say either way. I also like the plethora of 4-pin fan headers on the board. Reply
jonup - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkNice catch! I had to look hard to notice it. I almost thought you were on something good. Anyways, I would like to know if the second molex is indead for the PCIx or is it to supply additional power for all the additional controllers on this board. Maybe it is for the NF200. Reply
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Qapa - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - link1 - Why would anyone need dual GBe?? Are you expecting to have 2 internet connections with 2 different ISPs, and want to be sure be always online? :P
2 - No UEFI? For real? I don't understand that! Specially in high end MBs. And that probably means 2012 till mainstream gets it :(
PS: I also wish something could be done about Intel not having direct support for USB3... any ideas? Cause it is costing us all... Reply
GeorgeH - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - link1) One reason:
2) If it becomes necessary, UEFI can be implemented on top of a BIOS and isn't a complete BIOS replacement anyway:
3) Intel won't release USB 3.0 until the 2011/12 time frame, which very coincidentally is also the Light Peak time frame. I'll let you connect the dots. Reply
Qapa - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - link1 - As I said, redundancy seems ridiculous. And more speed the same.
2 - Point taken and learnt :) On the other hand, I doubt they will add UEFI to their MBs and how would those really be booting faster as UEFI systems should.
AFAIU, UEFI replaces parts of BIOS, not all. But if they already have full BIOS, would they really remove parts to move them to UEFI? Don't think so.
3 - AFAIK, I think they are even trying to put LightPeak in, ahead of USB3. No dots need connecting here. What I wanted was ideas on what to do to change this and make them put USB3 in the market together with Sandy Bridge... Reply
jonup - Monday, November 15, 2010 - link3. I don't know. Did you try showing up at Paul Otellini's house with a baseball bat?
Dont you get it? Intel has business agenda that does not coincide with your need. Intel vs Qapa -> Intel wins! Reply
strikeback03 - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkWell since these chipsets are obviously shipping already there isn't anything to be done about USB3 now, the customers simply get screwed. All the SATA ports should have been SATA 6Gb/s and all the USB ports should have been USB3. Maybe these issues will be fixed on more consumer-level versions of the chipset (that can use the integrated graphics in SB), otherwise they are giving AMD another opportunity. Reply
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - linkSomeone may want to update the Wikipedia page on Link aggregation, if Windows 7 now supports it:
"Note that Microsoft Windows does not natively support link aggregation (at least up to Windows Server 2008)." Reply
Regenweald - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkLarge format printers and plotters often use a dedicated lan port. what if you wanted wired network access on your printing machine as well ? There are many instances where two lan ports can be very handy, as they would in my office right now. Reply
Qapa - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkWell, that's a niche implementation.
More commonly, the printer would be connected to the network as well (router/switch/etc), so everyone can access it and not only your computer.
Still, seems overkill to me. Reply
Egowhip69 - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkNot really niche... More for professionals. Many medium and small shops use home made systems for workstations for money reasons. I work at a large Post house, and even we do that when money is tight and we can't afford the mainstream workstations (as they command a VERY large price premium).
In our shop, most of our systems are SAN attached through fiber. CVFS (the filesystem we use) requires a secondary nic for "metadata". You can do everything through 1 nic, but at a huge preformance penalty if any latency exists.
Plus, with dual nics, you can setup you system as a router, DHCP server, firewall, print server, dual home the system in a work network, etc.
While I do agree, for 99% of the "high end" gamers won't need it... but for the $.30 it cost to throw the second nic on there... why not? Then your product applies to a larger portion of the users out there. Reply
Taft12 - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkThe Realtek network chip these OEMs use is not at all fit for use in a professional environment.
Now please pass me my Intel PCI-E NIC:
http://www.intel.com/products/server/adapters/pro1... Reply
7amood - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkWould love to see ASUS get seriously into smaller mobos (mini-ITX).
I am planning to use the SilverStone SG07 to build a small beast.
ONLY if ASUS put serious thought into building a good Mini-ITX mobo.
I am already planning two bios settings for it, quite mode where not even the behemoth fan of the SG07 is needed and the other for serious computation and gaming. Reply
Qapa - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkThe PC could live a lot longer if it moved to SFF, but mostly companies are taking 2 routes:
1 - laptops
2 - PCs with the same old size from dozens of years!!
I wish they would focus on SFF as well, I'd make one for myself if it wasn't too damn hard to find the MBs, graphics, etc and at a similar price! Reply
Egowhip69 - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkI agree, I love the smaller boards... but the reason the Mobo Manus concentrate on those two areas, is a simple answer... money.
To shrink the board, you have to do alot more design and research. This ups the cost, so you have to charge more to recoup. And I don't think they sell even close to as many of the mini and pico boards as normal size ATX, probably cause they cost more.
Laptops are the hot item now. More sales means more money, which means more money going back into R&D into that area, which then makes the product better, which helps drive more sales. All a circle.
Boils down to money. I would like more small options, but until livingroom integration really takes off, I think it'll stay as a smaller niche market. Reply
Mr Perfect - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkI was going to ask the same thing, where are the mITX boards? Asus made a nice one for AM3s, so we know they're watching the market. Reply
Etern205 - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkThe P8P67 Deluxe has UEFI bios
After 3:00, look at the top left corner and you'll see the model.
May need to watch it on YouTube to get a clearer picture. Reply
Pneumothorax - Sunday, November 14, 2010 - linkSince Intel's forcing you to by a chip with built in gfx, wouldn't be helpful for at least diagnostic purposes or even a "bad flash" to be able to boot up using the GMA core on Sandy Bridge? Reply
Stahn Aileron - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkIt's a P-series chipset. An H6x-series is probably where the intregrated GPU will be supported, much like how the current chipset work (P5x = Dedicated GPUs ONLY; H5x-series for CPUs with integrated GPU.)
The question I have to ask is will ALL SB-based chips have a GPU in them, or will the higher-end (like the EE) chips use all the silicon for CPU cores? (I mean, if you're shelling out for a high-end CPU, you probaly have a high-end discrete GPU or a SLI/CrossFire set-up of some sort.) Reply
nevcairiel - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkAll SB chips coming in the first generation (1155 chipset) will have the GPU cores. The 8-cores coming Q3/11 presumably won't have them. Reply
duploxxx - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkThe Sandy Bridge platform on P67 relies on discrete graphics only, and as such there are no video out connectors on the back panel, but two PCIe x8 slots on the board itself (or one PCIe x16 if only one card is used). There is another PCIe slot available, presumably x4, for non-GPU duties.
wow Intel is that all youc an design 1*16 or 2*8 nice one for a high-end board..... Reply
strikeback03 - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkThese first SB chips aren't going to be the absolute high-end for Intel, see here: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/sand...
So maybe there will be a further high-end chipset that supports more PCIe lanes for the true high-end SB once it launches. Reply
Stahn Aileron - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - linkI would think so. We (or at least I) haven't heard of any announcements concerning something like an X6x-series Chipset. (I would think X68 if Intel is keeping with it's chipset naming scheme since the 3-series.)
If nevcairiel is correct regarding the all the arly CPUs coming with iGPUs, there's no real need for an X-series chipset board from Intel yet. Then again, that set of SB chips are coming with a new socket type. Maybe the high-end SB chips will come on LGA1366 and you can just re-use the X58 chipset. (Assuming Intel lives up to it's pledge of supporting 1366 for a while longer...Heaven forbid they release ANOTHER socket in so quickly again. I don't want to see an LGA1365 or something for high-end SB chips...) Reply
DanNeely - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkThat's because like LGA1156 intel views LGA1155 as a mainstream platform. The high performance platform will transition from LGA1366 to LGA 2011 sometime around Q3 of next year. Reply
Stahn Aileron - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - linkAh, crap...I forgot about LGA2011...And now that I saw this post and read up on Wikipedia, there will be an X68 chipset for the high-end... Reply
Veroxious - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkI agree about the price. I wish there was not such a big price differential between uATX and full ATX as well........... I hate uATX because they are usually very minimal and when the features are up to scratch the amount of PCI-E slots are lacking Reply
neoflux - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkAny details on ASUS's P8P67-I mini-ITX board? Specifically, is RAID built in and what Wi-fi specs are built in i.e. b, g, or n and then 2.4 and/or 5GHz?
As seen here and here:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/19982 Reply
neoflux - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkAlso, why does it have HDMI, DVI, and VGA if the P67 series doesn't support on-board graphics? Reply
DanNeely - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkAt a guess in addition to all the other integrated stuff itemized, there's a low end amd/nVidia GPU hiding somewhere on the board. Reply
strikeback03 - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkOr the reported name could be incorrect, might be an H67 instead to take advantage of the graphics on the chip Reply
neoflux - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkI think you're right, the image from the techreport article is "p8h67-i.jpg"
http://techreport.com/r.x/asus-sb-mobos/p8h67-i.jp... Reply
Wardrop - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkCan someone explain to me why PCI is still alive and kicking. 6+ years after PCI-e became mainstream, we're still seeing PCI slots on motherboards. Why are Intel so stingy with how many PCI-e lanes their chipsets support?
When will PCI finally rest in peace?
By the way, I realise that legacy support is sometimes required in some industries, but not every mainstream motherboard needs two PCI slots (the vast majority don't need any). Reply
DanNeely - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkProbably because each PCIe lane needs a bit of dedicated hardware and dedicated traces on the mobo to support it, vs legacy PCI daisychaining all its devices on the same bus. In Intel's case this is aggravated by DMIs relatively low bandwidth limiting the number of lanes that the southbridge can support without bottlenecking.
As far as the bus actually dieing completely... Your current mobo almost certainly still implements a variant of ISA in the form of the LPC bus which has the PS2 ports, Floppy controller, and BIOS attached. On server type boards the connector for a TPM device is also wired into LPC. It's possible that the minimal differences between PCI and PCIe (vs ISA and PCI) will result in PCI dieing completely, but since ISA has lingered over a decade after its slots disappeared I wouldn't hold my breath.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Pin_Count Reply
strikeback03 - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkI care more about the slots disappearing than the bus itself. Not so big a deal on full-size ATX boards, but with uATX and only 4 slots it is annoying that an otherwise good board might have 2 PCI and 2 PCIe when you might need/want more PCIe. Someone needs to take the lead in pushing the removal of PCI from the majority of products. Reply
DanNeely - Monday, November 15, 2010 - link3 and 1 does makes more sense on a mATX board, and aside from filling space on the board itself I don't see much need for more than 1 of them. The only thing that would make me hesitate a bit on an all PCIe board is that I can't find a PCIe bios post code reader.
Unfortunately with 1155 though, at least for high end boards there might not be enough lanes available to go all PCIe even on an mATX board. The CPU's 16 lanes power the two 16x slots in 16/0 or 8/8 modes. The southbridge only has 8 1x lanes. USB3 and Sata6GB controllers take 2 lanes each. GigE controllers will take 1 or 2 more, leaving at most 2 or 3 lanes left. IF operating the two 16x physical slots in 16/1 mode is an option there goes another lane. Likewise if PCIe audio or wireless controllers are also shoehorned onboard.
LGA1155 will help on this front somewhat by upping the southbridge lanes to 2.0 speeds, and providing 2 sata6Gb ports on the southbridge. In theory this would allow for a 16(8)/16(8)/4/1 configuration. Although board designers can undo these gains by sticking more than 1 USB3 controller or additional Sata6GB controllers onboard.
Without using NF200 chips to multiplex PCIe lanes though I don't think we'll see any LGA1155 full size ATX boards that completely shed PCI though. LGA2011's 36 (40?) 3.0 + 8 2.0 lanes will probably be able to do it.
I fear that their marketing people might be drawing the wrong conclusions from (presumed) lackluster sales of pricey legacy-free boards.
A final comment I'd like to make is that the people who wrote the PCIe physical spec missed a trick that the original PCI designers did to help the transition from ISA. Because PCI and ISA slots have the physical connection on the opposite side of the case opening you could make PCI/ISA slots that had both connectors side by side. Unlike in the bad old days, PCIe 1x slots barely take any physical space, so fitting them next to the single PCI slot you're keeping for legacy use wouldn't have nearly as much of an impact in figuring out how to cram everything onto the board. Reply
jonup - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkIs socket 1155 would be compatible with scket 1156 coolers? I have a Mugen2 that I pulled out from my P2 machine in anticipation of bulding a new rig. And now that I have my mind set on SB I am really anxious to know. Reply
blowfish - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkSurely it's high time PS2 ports were dropped. With the minimal cost of keyboards and mice, it can be no great hardship to replace old PS2 devices with USB ones. And maybe dropping the PS2 ports might have allowed a second ethernet port. Reply
DanNeely - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkThe cost from the connector is negligible, as is the board space for connecting the PS2 controller; and with the exception of the mITX board they all had enough space to fit a 2nd ethernet port or another bank of USB ports on the back. Even there the mITX board probably could've dropped the VGA connection in favor of a DVI-D plug and a dongle to get the needed space.
The reason PS2 ports still live on in so many mobos is for the benefit of BIOS/low level OS driver developers. Because PS2 is orders of magnitude simpler than USB it's much less vulnerable to a buggy software build leaving the system without a means of user input for troubleshooting/disaster recovery. Reply
Mr Perfect - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkNormally, I'd be right there with you. The BIOS writers and low level driver coders probably aren't using ASUS ROG boards, so why's it on there?
The only reasonable reason I've seen to date to have a PS\2 port is N-Key rollover for keyboards(NKRO). If you have a NKRO keyboard, PS\2 can identify every individual key, even if you somehow manage to mash them all down at once. Even with the best keyboard, USB can only recognize six keys at a time plus modifiers(Alt, Ctrl, Shift, etc). Ever been playing a game, go to hit oooone more key and have it not register? Yep, that wouldn't happen with NKRO. The Geekhack keyboardists explain it much better of course.
I know of no good reason to use a mouse on PS\2 though. Reply
Dimarini - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkPlease forgive me if someone else posted this ... "Obviously, expect the Deluxe to retail at a high price than the Pro." ... Should this read "higher"? Reply
ChuckDriver - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkSince they are including Bluetooth with these motherboards, I wonder if it will be possible to access the BIOS with a Bluetooth keyboard. This has been a drawback with Bluetooth, in my opinion; especially when you consider that a proprietary RF wireless keyboard doesn't have this problem. Few people will care about this, but it has bothered me for a long time. I read that Anycom made a BT dongle (I think the USB-500) where this was possible, but Anycom appears to be out of business. Reply
JessusChristDoOTcom - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkI second this notion. Reply
ClagMaster - Monday, November 15, 2010 - linkThis P67 motherboard looks like a worthy successor to their P55 motherboards.
I noticed the clamping device has a fairly large CPU bearing surface so there is no tilting of the CPU in the socket that can cause pins to melt at high overclock.
But I do not think the quality is there as in the P55 boards released a year ago. Reply


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nForce3-250 - Part 2: Taking Athlon 64 to the Next Levelby Wesley Fink on 3/29/2004 11:00 AM EST
- Posted in
- CPUs
46 Comments
Back to Article
PrinceGaz - Friday, April 02, 2004 - linkI was also staggered by how bothered some people were with SoundStorm -- it was never state-of-the art sound, just like how the onboard GeForce4 MX-like graphics the nForce2 had was something no serious gamer would be happy with. If you want top good quality sound you buy something specifically designed for it as you'll never get it on a motherboard (unless you live in an AOpen fantasy world and think putting valves on a motherboard counts).
The CPU utilisation while using RAID on the nVidia chipset, and also on a straight IDE drive as well, did come as a bit of a surprise to me. I'm into capturing and encoding high-quality video so excessive CPU load from disk-access while doing so would be a real issue to me as it demands both CPU power as well as disk-throughput. Reply
vlor - Friday, April 02, 2004 - linkhummm,
I only saw a few things that bugged me but what amazes me is out of all the people who posted, hafc why sound storm wasn't on the 250... do a little research and you will find that the codec's cause interference, and we as take up significantly more signal processing than most people care to think about. I'd love to see what Nvidia could do with a riser card once the PCI buss isn't so saturated. Oh and the is a board with an realtek850 linked to an nforce2, and DFI doesn't even mention sound storm but the setup is one of the better soundstorms out there including my asus deluxe. Reply
Reflex - Wednesday, March 31, 2004 - linkWow, the hate level here is extreme, especially since it was a pretty good review overall...
Phiro: Go elsewhere. Your not being helpful at all, and your complaints are simply rediculous in many situations. If you really want the level of technical detail you seem to be demanding(but do not appear to have the background to comprehend), go to Ace's Hardware. More knowledge than you'll ever need to know.
As for the nit-pickers: A bit of terminology was off, however overall they were accurate and I think some of these complaints are not concerning any mistake Anandtech made, but simply that they did not include information that you personally felt should be in there(never mind the fact that since you noticed it missing, it apparantly is information you already knew). I also will point out that much of what you are complaining about is already covered in previous articles on the various technologies, and are available for anyone who wants to know exactly what HyperTransport means, etc. Nothing wrong with clicking a few links to find it. I would not mind seeing AT add a 'related articles' link somewhere obvious with all related technologies listed(and possibly even some off site links, Ace's and Ars Technica often have great technology writeups). But its not that big a deal overall...
To the guys about SoundStorm: You are really in the minority, anyone interested in quality sound uses and add-on card already, and as for basic sound the solution they are including is good enough for them. Your essentially begging for a mid-range to low end solution on an already feature rich setup, I'd say spend the $40 on something like that if you really want to, or just drop $20 more and you can have a Santa Cruz and blow it out of the water.... It is not a huge loss, its the first thing I disabled on my NF2 board.
Anandtech: Keep up the good work. I can't wait to see the first PCI Express capable chipset review.. Reply
Da3dalus - Tuesday, March 30, 2004 - linkThere should be tests of the 5950U on a non-nVidia chipset as well, to see how much it gains when coupled with the nf3-250Gb. It just seems a bit lacking in that right now. Reply
agent2099 - Tuesday, March 30, 2004 - link"Apparently you COMPLETLY overlooked the fact that most (all, AFAIK) SoundStorm boards offered digital output which bypassed those codec's completly. Which just happens to be EXACTLY what I use, and was a major selling point, allowing me to send out my DD/DTS signal to my amp for DVD's as I use for regular computer use. VERY handy"
I agree, I think the lack of soundstorm is a huge oversight. I currently use the digital (optical out) from my nforce2 board and couldn't live without it. This is especially important for SFF PCs.
"I do not find it surprising at all that most customers don't care about the sound storm stuff. After all, the vast majority of PC users (outside of the geek market of course) have their PC hooked up to $9.99 basic speakers -- sound storm is not going to make a difference at all, and is simply not a selling point."
Well of course we are talking about the "geek market." If we are talking about the average PC user that has $9.99 speakers, they don't need ½ of the other things on the chipset, including SATA RAID and Gigabit Ethernet. Reply
Foxbat121 - Tuesday, March 30, 2004 - linkI'm a little disappointed and alarmed by the high CPU utilization (up to 35.1%) on this nVidia chipset(or maybe all A64 platform?) compared to Intel's 3.8% CPU utilization. Which means your CPU could spend 1/3 of its time processing disk access during disk intensive operations. Reply
Nighteye2 - Tuesday, March 30, 2004 - linkthe single 10k benchmark is a good addition, but there still isn't any comparison of SATA RAID between 2 Athlon 64 systems - can you add the SATA RAID performance of the integrated RAID of the ASUS K8V MB? The review just isn't complete without a good comparison of RAID performance to a similar platform. (with the same processor)
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, March 30, 2004 - link#38 -
This is not completely accurate. While there is not and will not be a specific dual-channel version of the chipset, as you point out, Ultra is not the same chipset. Ultra for nVidia represents the 1000 HyperTransport bus, while the regular designation of nForce3-250Gb represents 800 HyperTransport. The chipset in the nVidia Reference Board we tested, as we clearly spelled out in the review, is the nForce3-250Gb Ultra used in a socket 754 configuration. Since it is used in Socket 754 it is a single-channel memory configuration, but it does offer 1000 HyperTransport.
It is true than any of the nVidia chipsets can be used in any of the Athlon 64 Socket configurations, but the available HT and features do vary, whether by design or binning. An nForce3-150 on Socket 940 boards was still 600HT.
As you point out, the names will likely be used in confusing ways, and features can be limited by the board manufacturer's design, but nForce3-250 Ultra is 1000HT, nForce3-250 is 800HT, and nForce3-150 is 600HT. The Gb represents the versions with on-chip Gigabit LAN and Firewall.
There are early 800HT versions of the 250 chip floating around, but like Intel's 875/865 the HT frequency will likely result from binning - those that fail 1000HT become 800HT versions.
Cygni - Tuesday, March 30, 2004 - link"", on the dual-channel nForce3-250Gb Ultra version of this chipset."
I want to emphasis that THERE IS NO and WILL BE NO "dual channel CHIPSET version" for A64, S754, S939, S940 or whatever. If Nvidia wants to make us to believe "buy newer and more costly nf3-250 ULTRA boards for S939" this does not mean that we (and mobo makers) should believe them and not use S939 CPUs with non-Ultra nf3s."
If you are using a Nforce3-250 chipset on a S939 board, it automatically becomes an "Ultra". Its not a different chip. AMD has announced that the A64's for Socket 939 will be dual channel, making the Nforce3-250 Ultra the member of this family that will see dual channel. In that sense, the NF3-250-U is tbe dual channel version. Reply
wassup4u2 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkTo clear up a little A64 confusion... Hyper Transport vs. Front Side Bus. The A64, as we all know, has an integrated memory controller. The FSB always has been, and always will be, the link between the processor and the memory. In the K8, I believe, all frequencies are determined based on multipliers of the HTT frequency. Unlike in P4/AXP systems, in which the memory controller is on a separate chip and all frequencies are multipliers of the FSB. So by increasing the FSB, you can increase memory performance. In a 2U or more config, HTT is the bus connecting the CPUs and the chipset. That's why there's not much of a performance difference between NF3-150 (600MHz HTT) and K8T800 (800MHz HTT).
And enough with all the hating! This article did have its flaws, but by the way ppl are talking, you'd think it was in Chinese originally and translated by an online translator. Reply
TrogdorJW - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkAnd for amalinov, lay off the caffeine/Bawls/whatever for a while and take a few chill pills. THG and AT got you down for not spending three pages clearly spelling out every nuance of Hypertransport in every single article that mentions them? OMG, how ever will we survive? If it's that important to you, maybe you should include the correct information rather than just ranting about the problem. For the record:
In AMD Athlon 64/Opteron systems, the Hypertransport bus is clocked at 800 MHz and is double-pumped, yielding a theoretical rate of 1.6 GHz. However, that is both upstream and downstream rates, so if you want to get a bigger number you can call it 3.2 GHz full duplex speed. Normally, the Hypertransport bus is 16-bits wide, which would then give you 51.2 Gbps of bandwidth. Using marketing, you divide that by 8 and come up with 6.4 GBps of bandwidth.
Now, of course, is a great time to get your pants in a bind about the lack of proper conversion between GHz and GBps. 1 GHz is 1 billion cycles per second, of course, while 1 GB is 1024*1024*1024 bytes. So in reality, the 6.4 GBps speed is inflated, and the real value is 5.96 GBps. But that requires more math skill and technical knowledge than most people possess, and so it's easier to just "fudge" the result. Intel, of course, has the same problem with their 800 FSB providing 6.4 GBps of bandwidth. Notice how in benchmarks, none of the current chipsets for any platform ever surpass 6 GBps of bandwidth? That's because they *can't*. Realistically, anything in the neighborhood of 5.5 GBps or so is "maxed out".
Then of course we have the problem with the original Nforce3 150 only providing 800 MHz and 16-bit upstream with 600 MHz and 8-bit downstream (or vice versa if you prefer - me, I call going from RAM to CPU "up" and CPU to RAM "down", but others, like THG, differ). So on the Nforce3 150, your maximum upstream bandwidth (i.e. from the RAM to the CPU) was 3.2 GBps (really only 2.98 GBps because of the 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 "fudge"). Your downstream bandwidth (i.e. from the CPU to RAM) was only 1.2 GBps (once again, only 1.11 GBps really), with the total aggregate memory bandwidth being 4.4 GBps (4.09 GBps true speed).
There. Do you feel better now? Is everyone enlightened? Probably not. Adding such a lengthy explanation to every fraggin' article that discusses chipsets would just be redundant bloat. Those who really care probably already know, and those who don't care will just get tired of hearing about it. You might as well dredge out the old hard drive manufacturer claim where 1,000,000 bytes = 1 MB and 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1 GB. But hey! There's a class action lawsuit on that already, so maybe we can get something done about Hypertransport and FSB bandwidth claims as well? Reply
TrogdorJW - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkWow... lot's of hate in the comments today!
Overall, the major change with NF250 seems to be the working PCI/AGP lock, plus some features that were often included via other chips on the high-end boards. I do like Nvidia's answer to Intel's CSA, even though I'm still running 100 Mbit. Maybe in the near future I'll upgrade to a GbE switch, but for now I only have one PC with a GbE port, so it's pointless. I'm a little surprised at the RAID CPU usage... almost looks like software RAID to me! 25%-35% CPU usage is way higher than I would consider acceptable!
Anyway, here's my one big complaint: You show how NF250 + FX5950U was in general faster than NF250 + R9800XT. Big whoop. Since the only other comparison that isn't NF250-based is running on the SiS chipset with a 9800XT, we don't know whether the performance boost is due solely to the graphics card, solely to the chipset, or a combination of both. It's most likely a combination, but it would have been much better to include the FX5950U on the SiS motherboard as well. We have the baseline measurement for the 9800XT, but we don't have a baseline measurement for the FX5950U. Reply
notoriousformula - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkStupid Anandtech Flash graphs, can't even copy and paste on word :-(..
Overall Great review!
PS: i don't have internet at home, i was trying to save the article to floppy disk. Reply
PrinceGaz - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkA little more investigation into the slight performance-increase nVidia cards gain on an nVidia mobo (or possibly a deliberate penalty non-nVidia cards receive?) would be interesting.
I trust that no graphics-card reviews will even consider using nVidia chipset mobos (or other major gfx-card manufacturer) as the testing platform now it looks like they give their own cards an advantage, even if they offer the best performance overall on any card. It would be better to use a lower-performing platform than a biased one. Reply
Phiro - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkIn ALL comparisons? You mean the ONE comparison, the mysterious 67 versus the INTEL 13 versus the NVIDIA 6, locked in a titanic struggle over the fate of the world's supply of Crayola magic markers! Who will win, and what doom awaits the survivors on Earth?
Wait until the next exciting episode of AnandTech Z, where we'll spend 30 minutes of your time showing you 3 minutes of data! Reply
Wesley Fink - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link#28 -
It was an INTEL PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter in all comparisons to PCI Ethernet.
#26 and #27 -
I will add 10,000 rpm single drive benchmarks to the Sandra and PCMark2004 charts. As soon as the benchmarks are complete the charts on page 2 will be updated. Reply
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkregarding Wesley Fink's #22:
I understand the point about SiS755/FX, nf3-250Gb/Ultra, K8T800/Pro. If the difference between these models is "the smaller chipset supports max email@example.com, the bigger - HT@2GHz" (here I intentiosly use data frequency of HT, and not clock frequency - witch is half: 800MHz and 1GHz. This is becouse elsewere - for FSBs, and for Memory speeds all we use data frequency "800MHz P4 bus", "1000MHz GeforceFX memory", "550MHz DDR SDRAM").
BUT if you add to this REAL difference the imaginary "smaller chipset supports S754, bigger supports S939" - this IS WRONG!!!
but that is not my point. Here it is:
in the article was written:
", on the dual-channel nForce3-250Gb Ultra version of this chipset."
I want to emphasis that THERE IS NO and WILL BE NO "dual channel CHIPSET version" for A64, S754, S939, S940 or whatever. If Nvidia wants to make us to believe "buy newer and more costly nf3-250 ULTRA boards for S939" this does not mean that we (and mobo makers) should believe them and not use S939 CPUs with non-Ultra nf3s. HT2GHz will not bring any performance benefits anyway (it will be advantage to chipsets with integrated video. It will be advantage to 2-way, 4-way, 8-way Opteron systems. It will be advantage to chipsets with multiple PCI Express x16 and/or chipset with 8-drive RAID-array with SATA/300. But for normal use HT@2GHz will bring nothing over current firstname.lastname@example.com).
regarding #29:
I don't want to flame. I THINK that I make only a "constructive criticism". Before I have sended some emails to a motherboard reviewer at AnandTech and later (after 1-2-3 reviews) they taked into account my remarks and changed the wrong sounding of a minor thing (about the space between the AGP and DIMMs). So I can only congratulate them! Here again Wesley Fink answers my "flames" and I am gratefull. I also so hope that the quality of writing will improve becouse of such critic/flames.
Ilmater - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link"Also, another topic not well understood at Anandtech, Tom's, etc.: A64/Opteron FSB speed, HyperTransport speed, etc. - they (the writers) are mixing up clock frequency in MHz, data frequency in DDR and MHz, bandwith in GB/s. They think FSB and HyperTransport is the same thing. They think that HyperTransport is 800MHz (or maybe 200MHz "quadrupelt") - maybe becouse of similarity with P4. They think that their nf3-250Gb has a "250MHz FSB". They don't explain to the users on what depends the memory clock in a A64 system."
Easy trigger. amalinov, I think you're jumping the gun here a bit. What TRULY makes or breaks a review, IMHO, is the conclusions drawn from the given data and the suite of tests performed. You people are psychotic, and I feel bad for those at AT. CALM DOWN!
First off, 90% of all online hardware review sites mix up the bus rate, the data throughput, and the bandwidth. Yes, they should establish a standard, but to come in here flaming about it is ridiculous. Voice your opinions calmly on a board and I'm sure they'll address them. I'm very impressed with their response to criticism here. If you find that they don't address your concerns, then post in the forums and concensus about it. That's a much better means to an end.
Secondly, the reason I left Tom's was because they seemed to grab RIDICULOUS conclusions from given data. There would be two benchmarks right next to each other and they'd claim statistical insignificance, but then there would be another with less of a difference and they'd claim that one was STOMPING the other. They seemed to favor certain manufacturers.
However, I do not feel that AT falls victim to that.
So, amalinov, while I feel that some of your criticisms are valid, I feel that you should voice them differently and ease off the flames.
Now I get to voice my opinion, and I agree with jeremyk442 in #26, and I feel these were glaring omissions. IMO, those SATA/RAID benchmarks are mostly worthless. Just some (hopefully) helpful criticism, I think you should think about what you really want the benchmarks to show before you run them. While it's nice as a side note to show people looking to possibly upgrade to a RAID array how two WD Raptor 10k drives (a very likely upgrade choice) in RAID 0 compare to a single 7200 RPM drive (a common starting point for those looking to upgrade), that's a different article. These benches should be to show the benefit of this RAID array vs. others, or at least a single drive (drive x) vs. two of the same drives (two drive x's).
For the most part, I thought it was a pretty good article and very interesting, but there were some glaring problems. Reply
Phiro - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkWesley Fink:
"We showed some benchmarks of Gigabit LAN in Part 1, Page 6 of the nForce3-250 review."
You call those benchmarks? #1, it ain't plural. You put one crummy graph up. #2, a first grader would be ashamed of a bar graph like that. What is it a benchmark of, how long it took you to color it in with your Crayola marker? 67 to 13 to 6? Of what? To what? Doing what? "PCI Gigabit Ethernet" - what brand? It's no brand - all that is, is a drawing of THEORETICAL speeds!
"We also discussed throughput benchmarks in Part 1 of the article and in front page comments in reply to questions. "
Geez, I'm sorry, I didn't wade through 70 comments looking for it. Also, I apologize for thinking that part 2 of your review, you know, the part you said "will contain benchmarks", might actually.. contain a benchmark!
"We chose NOT to publish these benchmarks in a splashier way because you will actually see the doubling of performance only in somewhat rare situations on today's systems."
First off, you can quit thinking you know how we use our computers. You don't. Benchmark the shit, take our feedback, improve your process, rinse, repeat. With a fat banner ad or two around the frame, you make your money. The moment you start thinking for us = the wrong moment.
"You will not, for instance, see any difference today in broad-band network connections available to most users."
Just post the goddamned numbers flyboy, and read your editorial to your dog, who gives a much bigger crap than the rest of us.
Look, I tried to ask nice - I even said "jeebus" up there instead of worse word. But all you want to do is make excuses and explain how it's not really your fault.
It's really your fault. Reply
Nighteye2 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkWhy is the RAID comparison against an Intel solution? That's throws in too many variables...
The ASUS K8V also has SATA RAID, so why not compare it to that? That'll also be more useful for people looking to buy an Athlon 64 system...
jeremyk442 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkI was disappointed to see a comparison of the 10k RAID to a single 7200 drive. How does that show us the benefits of RAID when the 10K vs 7200 variable is in the mix. Also, performance tests of mixing SATA and IDE in RAID setups would be nice.
Also, in comparison of the NVIDIA vs ATI graphics cards, the NVIDIA card was not tested on the other platforms (or at least it wasn't graphed) making it difficult to determine the benefit that the 250Gb chipset gives it. Also, I wanted some more commentary on why the chipset gives the NVIDIA card a performance advantage. It seems a little suspicious to me. Reply
Reflex - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link#24 beat me to the punch. Even the digital output capabilities of SoundStorm are rather inferior compared to other solutions. Its not a great sound chip, but then I covered this territory in part one.
Honestly, this chipset seems lacking to me. The best part of it is the gigabit ethernet, but even that is overkill for most setups. If it had included PCI-Ex I woulda considered it a better solution, but as it is I'd rather just wait... Reply
Odeen - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link"Apparently you COMPLETLY overlooked the fact that most (all, AFAIK) SoundStorm boards offered digital output which bypassed those codec's completly. Which just happens to be EXACTLY what I use, and was a major selling point, allowing me to send out my DD/DTS signal to my amp for DVD's as I use for regular computer use. VERY handy."
It's a nice solution, but a flawed one. It's not DTS, it's just a 640K/second 6-channel Dolby Digital stream that, because it's generated in real-time, doesn't use any "tricks" to boost effective bandwidth, just six independent channels occupying a little over 100K each, 5-to-1 compression ratio or so.
As 3dsoundsurge.com tests of the nVidia Soundstorm show, the compression essentially nukes ALL frequencies over 18,000hz. I would think that, as a sound purist, you'd object to listening to compressed audio, especially quick-and-dirty compressed audio, day in and day out.
I'd be much happier if Soundstorm either used firewire audio out for compatible receivers, which has enough bandwidth for a DVD-Audio stream(6 channel uncompressed 24/96 or stereo 24/192), or some sort of multiple digital outputs, each carrying a straight SPDIF stereo stream. Reply
Wesley Fink - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link#21 -
We showed some benchmarks of Gigabit LAN in Part 1, Page 6 of the nForce3-250 review. We also discussed throughput benchmarks in Part 1 of the article and in front page comments in reply to questions.
With a benchmark that could actually supply 2Gb/sec to test on-chip Gb LAN, throughput for a PCI-based Gb card was around 840kb/sec, while the on-chip LAN was about 1870kb/sec - more than double the throughput.
We chose NOT to publish these benchmarks in a splashier way because you will actually see the doubling of performance only in somewhat rare situations on today's systems. Instead, we talked about where the on-chip Gb LAN would make a big difference - LAN gaming with Gigabit switches, Corporate Gigabit LAN, file-sharing on Gigabit home network. You will not, for instance, see any difference today in broad-band network connections available to most users. nVidia's on-chip LAN is a great idea that will become even more useful in the future. Reply
Wesley Fink - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link#19 -
nVidia calls their version for Socket 939 'nForce3-250Gb Ultra', much as VIA calls K8T800 for Socket 940 the 'K8T800 Pro', and SiS calls their 939 version 755FX and not 755. Ultra, in the case of nVidia, means 1000 HT capable. I mention in the review that any of the chipsets can be used on 754 boards if the manufacturer chooses. It is also clear that the review board is based on the nForce3-250GB Ultra with 1000 HT that will be used in Socket 939 boards in the future. Reply
Phiro - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkOne comment, one demand/request.
Comment: I like nvidia's onboard sound, but if really want to decouple it from the motherboard and sell them as stand-alone cards, that's fine with me too.
Demand/Request: You had a gigabit ethernet nforce3 and you never even benchmarked the damn thing? WTF is wrong with you people? Holy jeebus - even if you don't have the hardware from other manufactors to do some good benchmarks, you could at least show us what your reference board gets talking to card X or whatever, or better yet two 250gb's xfering files to each other over a crossover cable.
Regs - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkI want to see the K8T vs Nforce 250GB at their highest stable over clocks. I think the K8T can maybe reach 220 HTT with some difficulties, while the 250 can reach 240HTT. Then lets see some benchmarks. Reply
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkOK. Nvidia have not included SoundStorm in nf3, becouse it is cheaper to manufacture (and design) this way.
Also I see that you have corrected the 6.1 to 6-channel.
what about the "dual channel Ultra-version"?
#16, It is posible to make a S939 dual-channel board with current nf3-250 (and also with nf3-150, SiS760, K8M800, K8T800, SiS755, ALi, AMD, etc. - ALL Opteron/A64 chipsets). Regarding PCI Express and PCI-X - they can be added to such board (based on existing chipset) too. for PCI-X - AMD8131 chip, for PCI Express - some not-yet-announced chip. Becouse of HyperTransport it is possible to combine nf3-250 with any other HT-tunnel controller supporting PCI-X, PCI Express and other interfaces.
Another question is if some mobo manufacturer will do that. Becouse of cost reasons mobo manufacturers tend to make crimpled products not utilizing all chipset functions (nf3 with only 2 UATA channels instead of 3, etc.), so wanting even more than this seems unrealistic. Reply
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkOK. Nvidia have not included SoundStorm in nf3, becouse it is cheaper to manufacture (and design) this way.
Also I see that you have corrected the 6.1 to 6-channel.
what about the "dual channel Ultra-version"?
#16, It is posible to make a S939 dual-channel board with current nf3-250 (and also with nf3-150, SiS760, K8M800, K8T800, SiS755, ALi, AMD, etc. - ALL Opteron/A64 chipsets). Regarding PCI Express and PCI-X - they can be added to such board (based on existing chipset) too. for PCI-X - AMD8131 chip, for PCI Express - some not-yet-announced chip. Becouse of HyperTransport it is possible to combine nf3-250 with any other HT-tunnel controller supporting PCI-X, PCI Express and other interfaces.
Another question is if some mobo manufacturer will do that. Becouse of cost reasons mobo manufacturers tend to make crimpled products not utilizing all chipset functions (nf3 with only 2 UATA channels instead of 3, etc.), so wanting even more than this seems unrealistic. Reply
Wesley Fink - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link#12 -
We did not say Sound Storm could not be included on a single-chip, we said there was only so much real-estate PRACTICALLY available on a single chip. As complexity goes up, yields generally go down - raising the price of a chipset. This is a competetive market.
The next line in the review mentioned that nVidia is working on other sound solutions which may be included in a future chipset or separate card. This may be the most important reason why we did not see Sound Storm in nF3-250. Reply
Brickster - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkCan one expect the following from nf3-250?
-939 Mobo
Any other chipsets for this? Reply
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link"Certainly, we will see 4 DIMMs, or two matched pairs, on the dual-channel nForce3-250Gb Ultra version of this chipset."
again totaly unconnected with reality.
in A64/Opteron the chipset has nothing to do with memory support. How much DIMMs are supported depends on CPU, mainboard and BIOS ONLY!
There will be NO DUAL CHANNEL nf3-250Gb-Ultra. Just like nf3-250Gb IS NOT SINGLE CHANNEL.
There will be DUAL CHANNEL S939 Athlon64 CPU.
Also, another topic not well understood at Anandtech, Tom's, etc.: A64/Opteron FSB speed, HyperTransport speed, etc. - they (the writers) are mixing up clock frequency in MHz, data frequency in DDR and MHz, bandwith in GB/s. They think FSB and HyperTransport is the same thing. They think that HyperTransport is 800MHz (or maybe 200MHz "quadrupelt") - maybe becouse of similarity with P4. They think that their nf3-250Gb has a "250MHz FSB". They don't explain to the users on what depends the memory clock in a A64 system. They think that "Dual CPU support" is a feature of the chipset.
Shame on you!
Diogenes2 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkI remain puzzled about the continuing declaration by Anandtech about the lack of AGP locks on NF3-150 boards..
I have no way to confirm it ( with O-Scope, etc. )at this time, but I am running 265 FSB on my Gigabyte GA-K8NPRO, and having no problems with my Saphire 9800 Pro.. This was not the case with the KT800 board I experimented with for a while, which would not tolerate an FSB above 225, as far as AGP was concerned..
I recommend that when the NF3-250 boards hit the shelves, buyers take advantage of price drops on NF3-150 offerings.. I don't see the modest performance gains of the NF3-250 as anything to get excited about.. Reply
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkjust 2 lines below, another error:
"nVidia includes the hooks for AC '97 6.1 audio in nForce3-250"
6.1? Don't you mean 5+1 ("6-channel 5.1")????
OK. This can be a typo-mistake, but when you add all typos, totaly wrong infos, etc. - it is too much to bear! Reply
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link"Even with the memory controller on the chip, there is only so much real estate practically available on a single-chip chipset. "
What???? This is not true! Where did you get such information?
SiS745, anyone? Single Chip: AGP+DDR memroy+PCI+UATA+AC97+...
also, current 0.13um, 0.15um is more advanced than SiS745.
Other single chip: ALi M1689, SiS630, SiS540
There IS enough real estate for a SoundStorm APU.
The problem can be pin-count, but is not.
Give us the area in mm2 and production technology in um of nforce3, nforce2 IGP, nforce2 MCP-T.... then can we speak.
Also give for comparation other chipsets - north&south&singlechip, other CPUs, other GPUs... give numbers for total transistors, total pins...
Generaly I think that the quality of articles in Anandtech and Tom's Hardware has declined VERY MUCH and is below acceptable now. Once these two were my favorite sites. Now I visit them only becouse they are big and so get the newest stuff and make MANY benchmarks. But if you need information about internals of a component and not its speed - they will most likely give you WRONG information. There are many other mistakes in mainboard and chipsets and other articles that start to annoy me... Reply
tagej - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkI do not find it surprising at all that most customers don't care about the sound storm stuff. After all, the vast majority of PC users (outside of the geek market of course) have their PC hooked up to $9.99 basic speakers -- sound storm is not going to make a difference at all, and is simply not a selling point.
The 250Gb certainly looks sweet at this point... I'll be watching closely to see how the first retail boards do. Reply
aak97 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkJust wanna know, did the nForce3-250Gb ref board comes with any WinXP 64bits drivers? I'm sure a lot of people (including myself) will be interested in some benchmarks on the Preview version of WinXP 64bits. Reply
Foxbat121 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link#4,
The "customer" in the survey probably refers to nVidia's largest OEM like HP, eMachine etc. These companies only care about save a few $$ and probably only chose nForce2 without SoundStorm.
The whole point of SoundStorm is to use Dolby Digital encoding and output everything throught digital sound output where analog codec chip does not get in to the play. If you use analog ouput, you will be better of with a sound card. Reply
KHysiek - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkNow with Intel adding Azalia high lever audio to it's boards NVidia looks clearly dumb with it's chipset w/o Soundstorm. Reply
clemedia - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link"On the other hand, Soundstorm offers high quality 3d audio rendering, but it is _ALWAYS_ paired with that SAME crappy Realtek ALC650 chip, which offers lousy analog output quality"
Apparently you COMPLETLY overlooked the fact that most (all, AFAIK) SoundStorm boards offered digital output which bypassed those codec's completly. Which just happens to be EXACTLY what I use, and was a major selling point, allowing me to send out my DD/DTS signal to my amp for DVD's as I use for regular computer use. VERY handy.
I would have no problem switching to something else if they offed a good DICE solution. (I think C-media makes a software DICE chip, but I would rather go with something better) Reply
Odeen - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkQuote:
"the best audio Intel offered (on-board) at the time was the crappy Realtek Codec"
Intel offered a software audio solution. I.E. the chipset basically offloaded audio calculations to the CPU. Thus, the 3d audio rendering was crappy, true.
However, Realtek is not the only manufacturer of codec chips, just the cheapest. Boards from Intel and Asus have very nice ADI Soundmax chips with pretty good audio output quality.
On the other hand, Soundstorm offers high quality 3d audio rendering, but it is _ALWAYS_ paired with that SAME crappy Realtek ALC650 chip, which offers lousy analog output quality. I'd personally love to see Soundstorm coupled with a higher-end analog stage, such as a Sigmatel codec chip on an outboard card (ACR form factor, for instance).
And RAID-5 will be in-chipset when chipsets become as powerful as CPU's and average consumers will be taught to buy three or more drives. That is, never - RAID-5 is not for benchmarkers, and anyone with a "Type R" sticker, it's slower than RAID-0, but is obviouly far more secure, and wastes less disk than RAID1. It's a specialized feature for people who realize its value and want to spend the money to implement it.. it'd raise the chipset price by quite a bit, and is thus better off to left to an add-on card.
The other thing is, due to sensitive nature of RAID-5 (i.e. it's harder to implement than a software RAID-0 or RAID-1 that cheap PCI add-on cards and southbridges now offer) people who have the money to spend on RAID-5 will want a solution from people they trust, i.e. Adaptec or the likes.. They wouldn't accept trusting their precious data to a company that makes their son's gee-whiz video card :) Reply
mkruer - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkI want to know when we are going to see RAID-5 in a chipset, for average consumers. Reply
Sahrin - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link<i>Customer surveys by nVidia found that most buyers did not use Sound Storm</i>
I just can't believe that. I remember Soundstorm being a *huge* selling point for all kinds of people. When it came down to Intel v. AMD (especially when there were only "b" rev chips) Soundstorm was often the deciding factor; the best audio Intel offered (on-board) at the time was the crappy Realtek Codec. A lot of people made decisions to go with AXP-nForce 2 MCP-T boards over a comparable Intel package because of Soundstorm. (I know the Enthusiast market is still just a tiny sliver of sales, even for a chipset company like nVidia but I can't be convinced that this wasn't because Soundstorm is as good or better than products from Creative and/or M-Audio). Reply
Cygni - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link^^ btw, there are only 3 boards offered with the 755 on newegg... ECS 755 A1 and A2, and the ASrock k8s8x. Reply
Cygni - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkLooks better than the 150... but SiS is really kickin a$$. I wish the market would embrace the 755 more so we could see a better range of solutions based on it. Reply
wicktron - Monday, March 29, 2004 - linkany clue as to when production boards will hit the market? Reply


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