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NVidia nForce Reviewed
CtrlPhreak writes: "The highly awaited NVidia nForce is finally here. Anandtech has a review of an nForce 420 reference board. This is the one with integrated dolby 5.1 sound, a GF2 MX core at 6x agp, and dual-channel DDR RAM! Go check it out."
The review seems to say that there's too much bandwidth available on the 420 series. Granted, it is used if you stick with the built in video, but won't someone paying a premium for the 420 most likely stick their own AGP card in? Maybe a Radeon 7500 or a GeForce 3...
At any rate, I'm wondering if the nForce is set for a multiprocessor future, especially since it offers so much bandwidth. One Athlon can't take full advantage of all that bandwidth, but I'll bet two could.
With nVidia positioning themselves as the bandwidth gurus on the AMD side, I wonder how long it will be before ServerWorks steps in and showers us with their chipsets (for AMD). My guess is ServerWorks will wait for AMD chips to support 4+ processors in a single box.
It's very interesting to see that chipset out.
;)
Definately not what I would consider a performance motherboard, but I'd rate it better than an i810 or similar in terms of a chipset that has everything integrated. I mean, really, if you look at the benchmarks, your average PC manufacturer can make systems that don't need ethernet, sound, or video cards. And because it's all done by nVidia, you can bet that people who were preprogrammed by the local geek to loathe onboard Intel video will break programming and pick up an nForce based board because nVidia has got to be good, right?
Of course, the much touted dual-bus DDR-SDRAM doesn't net you too much performance over a single-bus DDR-SDRAM motherboard, mostly because it is more bandwidth than the CPU can pump. But it does make an onboard video card suck slightly less than trying to make a video card share a single PC133 SDRAM chanel.
Gentoo Sucks
It is interesting to note that the blitting capabilities of an Amiga can be emulated in software on a 486 and still be significantly faster than the Amiga hardware. It wasn't _that_ fast.
...and so on
The Blitter, yes, that can be emulated in realtime. But the Copper, it's an entirely different story.
The Copper (it stands for CoProcessor) was a very simple processor, that executed simple statements trigged by the SCANLINE POSITION of the monitor!!! With the bang-the-hardware programming model typical of the Amiga, you could do some terrific tricks without ANY main processor overhead:
- at position 10,30 change the background color from black to yellow
- at line 125, change SCREEN RESOLUTION (!!) from low-res to hi-res
It was widely used for graphical demos. I had UAE (an Amiga Emulator) installed on my K6-2 300Mhz, and some scenes of "State of the Art" couldn't go faster than 9 fps (they were 50fps on a 7Mhz Amiga). I didn't try on my 850Mhz Duron...
Does anyone remember Diamond back in the good old days before S3 bought them and immediately turned one of the finest American component companies to shit?
Remember that Diamond specialized in taking reference boards and just tweaking the crap out of them and then crowing it all with rock steady drivers? Whether it was Voodoo, Nvidia, Aureal or whatever. Diamond products where as solid as bank vaults and then raised the bar for everyone else. (The Soundblaster Live! Turned out as good as it did because Diamond was the first company to release a PCI audio card that was not only magnificent, but could be found at your local Best Buy, unlike Turtle Beach products, which were also excellent but not as widely or as well distributed. Since the Soundblaster AWE was Ubiquitous and still an ISA part. This kinds of terrorized them)
Okay my point. Not only am I somewhat excited by the potential of the nForce, but I am kind of giddy to see that NVidia groks audio as well as it does video. I am not happy Soundblaster has a lock on Audio peripherals (though the Hercules Game Theater XP is pretty hot) and would love to see real geeks with solid parts and solid drivers up on those same shelves.
Has anyone heard if NVidia is thinking about releasing the audio end of the nforce as a separate PCI part? Does NVidia have any plans to enter into the aftermarket component market?
No one has yet to fill Diamonds shoes, It would be fun to see Nvidia try.