NVIDIA NFORCE 500 VS ATI CROSSFIRE 3200 CHIPSET REVIEW

NVIDIA NFORCE 500 VS ATI CROSSFIRE 3200 CHIPSET REVIEW
Posted:2006-06-16 By chipset review Number of View:275378
NVIDIA NFORCE 500 VS ATI CROSSFIRE 3200 CHIPSET REVIEW By :chipset review Posted:2006-06-16 xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source Although the new platform of AMD can make perfectly well with the older chipset solutions , ATI and Nvidia released new sets  with current support  of SLI. and crossfire.Today we will check the performance of borth mobo with new amd am2 platform.nvidia and ati still leading the market alwais to first ones to build new mobos.other chipset manuficulter will come maybe later as uli. the chipset of the mobo play big role those day. ecpecially for overclocker and gamer. the motherboard overclocking limition has been reduced especially with nforce 3 mobo . the performance of  nvidia and ati motherboard has been also improved with addition of nvidia sli and cross fire technologie. mobo those day defere a lot due to the future that come with them . the nvidia chipset has the lead in the chipset market since nforce 2 mobo.with k8 amd architecture nvidia chipset has got better boost it has owned the market with about 50%. the nvidia chipset was know as reliable stable fast overclocker chipset It is quite clear that nvdia starting owning the markeet since 2004. the via chipset is going down  this can be explained with many reason. 1) the price the nvidia chipset motherboard have pretyy same price as via one 2)future in nvidia board are better than the one in via chipset based mobo 3)overclocking capability and performance  are in the nvidia side 4)sli technologie that require nvidia based chipset lets start now with crossfire xpress 3200 chipset from ati: ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 review first to all I would like to notice that the new chipset solutin from borth side ati and nvidia do not include any future over the old nforce 4 and crossfire one. the amd am2 still using the same bus . the only deference should be the new implementation of ddr 2 support.old nforce 4 could handle well the am2 cpu (check our news section with abit mobo.builded in old nforce chipset with addition of ddr2 memory ) the new ati chipset is called ati xpress 3200. this chipset are very smilar in structure language to the one used in intel lga.the networking  support function has been removed from the south bridge, ati has also reduced the number of pata connection .only 2 are availble .the south north bridge connection are made via a link xpress2 this connection speed is about 2gb/s.and this somehow could limit the motherboard performance especially when using two pci- e card. Nvidia nForce 500 review The new nvidia chipset is called nforce 500 .it should go in serie nvidia 5xx  chipset. nvidia chipet strucure is new here . There is two : 1)-MCP chip :Media and Communications Processor 2)-SPP chip :System Performance Processor The spp one add support for additional x16 bus used in sli configuration. the new nvidia chipset come rich with future.the nvidia nforce 590 sli is dual chip.the spp one was inserted between cpu and mcp and connection is made via hypertransport bus.The support of additional graphics bus is the only role of the SPP chip. All other functions are implemented in the MCP chip that can also be used as a chipset controller without any additional companion-chips if the platform doesn’t have to support a pair of PCI Express x16 graphics interfaces. there is a second gigabyte network controler plus high definition audio(azalia) he network controller built into the new Nvidia chipset (its driver, to be more exact) supports another technology called FirstPacket . It allows assigning high priority to network packets generated by certain applications. It serves to reduce the network delays during online gaming with nForce500 based platforms as well as to ensure flawless VoIP operation. there is also new serial ata 2 controler it can support now up to six sata connection with bandwidth of 3gbit/s.nvidia like ati new chipset has also reduced the number of pata connection.note that nvidia allow creating raid array 0,1,0+1 from sata and pata This was full list support of deferent nvidia 5xx chipset serie ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 vs NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI   ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Processor interface 16-bit/1GHz HyperTransport 16-bit/1GHz HyperTransport Chipset (bridge chips) North Bridge: RD580 South Bridge: SB600 MCP: MCP55XE SPP: C51XE Internal bus between chips A-Link Xpress II (PCI Express x4) 16-bit/1GHz HyperTransport PCI Express lines 36 (2 x 16, 4 x 1) 46 (2 x 16, 8, 6 x 1) Multi-GPU support CrossFire SLI Serial ATA ports 4 6 Serial ATA 2.0 Yes Yes RAID support RAID 0, 1, 0+1 RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 Parallel ATA channels 1 1 Integrated sound High Definition Audio High Definition Audio USB 2.0 ports 10 10 Integrated network None Dual Gigabit Ethernet Supported PCI devices 6 5 Integrated hardware monitoring Yes None However, despite everything we have just mentioned, Nvidia nForce 590 SLI seems to be a more functional solution with richer features set. It means that in order to design a mainboard with the comparable set of features, the mainboard developer who has selected an ATI chipset will have to integrate more onboard controllers. But it shouldn’t affect the final price of the product. ATI offers its CrossFire Xpress 3200 at a slightly lower cost than Nvidia nForce 590 SLI, so the end-price of the ready solutions levels out. Both mainboards will be selling for over $150, and the price will mostly depend on the manufacturer’s ambitions and accessories bundle. ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 Based Mainboard NVIDIA nForce 590 Based Mainboard ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 and NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Overclock Those two mobo sweem to be more tha ready for overclocking.. high overclocking capability also mean the high quality of those product they can handle well stock and even overclocked setting borth mobo have enough setting  bios setting volatge and memory tweak to get the cpu as high as possible. the chipset cooling was also excellent take a look to the two cpu z screen 340 and 338 for nvidia and ati mobo is already high they was borth capable to max out the cpu.When we set the HyperTransport frequency multiplier to 3x, the maximum clock generator frequency without losing the system stability reached 338MHz for ATI chipset and 340MHz for nvdia chipset. It should be more than enough for successful overclocking of any Socket AM2 CPU out there. Note that when Nvidia mentions special overclocking friendly functions they also imply their LinkBoost technology and SLI-Ready Memory with EPP. However, these technologies cannot really improve overclocking by themselves, and they can only make it easier. The first technology mentioned above offers to automatically increase the performance of the bus between the chipset bridges and the PCI Express x16 bus, while the second technology sets the most optimal memory timings (from the manufacturers standpoint) for the installed memory. So, these opportunities should be of primary interest to commencing overclockers, while real enthusiasts will definitely prefer to adjust all the settings on their own. amd am2 chipset review ati vs nvidia To test the performance of the new Socket AM2 chipsets we used the following hardware: CPU: AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (Socket AM2, 2.8GHz, 2x1MB L2). Mainboards: ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (Socket AM2, NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI); ATI Sturgeon (Socket AM2, ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200). Memory: 1024MB DDR2-800 SDRAM (Corsair CM2X512-8500, 2 x 512 MB, 4-4-4-12). Graphicscard: PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB (PCI-E x16). HDD: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150). OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2 with DirectX 9.0c. Performance General Performance the chipset performance is very similar. nvidia is taking the lead in overall benchmark but the defrence is small. note is case of amd 64 based core the chipset is not playing large role in overall system performance . the memory controler is integreted with the cpu . Serial ATA 2.0 Controller Performance the hard drive used on this test is one of the top end availble those day (raptor x). u can clealy see that nvidia have better overall driver performance .it sweem like the caching algoritme in nvidia driver case is better than the one used with ati Network Controller Performance The performance of the gigabit network controller integrated into Nvidia nForce 590 SLI chipset is almost identical to that of the Marvell Yukon controller on ATI Sturgeon mainboard.borth mobo are showing good performance u can also notice a minimal cpu  usage with nvidia chipset . the driver optimizsation at the networking level still somehow better with nvidia chipset. Power Consumption a very inresing point with power usage . it is clear that the nvidia chipset is more power hugry than ati .we can state that Nvidia nForce 590 SLI chipset is considerably less economical than ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200. and if you are looking for the quiet and cool system, the Nvidia chipset may not be the right choice to make Conclusion of the am2 chipset review borth mobo are providing smilar performance . nvidia has usually been the leader in all benchmark test. The question about which chipset is the best one is appropriate only if you are not going to use SLI or CrossFire graphics configurations and do not even consider the possible upgrade in this direction in the future. However, even in this case it is really hard to give any recommendations about the best chipset choice, because ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 and Nvidia nForce 590 SLI have different strengths and drawbacks, which we have already discussed in great detail today. xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source we would be happy to answer for your question . if you have suggestion or comment regarding this review our support would be glad to help just join our forum and ask u will get the best answer to discuss check our forum section :-) RATE THIS REVIEW 1 2 3 4 5    / 5   View Stat

computer news computer parts review Old Forum Downloads New Forum Login Join Articles terms Hardware blog Sitemap Get Freebies