Slashdot Mirror
Shortcomings Revealed in nForce4 SLI Redux
EconolineCrush writes "Slashdot recently covered the launch of NVIDIA's nForce 4 SLI chipset for Intel processors, and although early reviews fawned over the chipset's performance, closer examination reveals several shortcomings that the initial wave of coverage failed to document. Problems with stability, drivers, and the chipset's oft-praised hardware-accelerated firewall and Gigabit Ethernet controller escaped the scrutiny of many reviews."
Their brand of in-depth, hard-hitting coverage is probably why Intel conveniently passed them over for the first round of Dual Core reviews; can't have any bad press at release time.
AMD certainly has the most interesting x86 technology out there. From a PC gamer's perspective, AMD probably is the most important chip maker out there. The jury's still out on businesses' opinions, however, the Opteron certainly smokes everything intel has except itanium2, which it also might smoke but I'm withholding judgement until I read better comparisons than I've seen to date.
As for cutting edge tech, AMD wins hands down in the x86 world. They did a nice edge run around Intel's GHz GHz GHz mantra, and they're beginning to reap the rewards. The dual and multi-core chips coming soon should finish the job once they're out and in tester's hands. Intel's dual core will either burn eggs or perform sluggishly, and they're still regrouping from their P4 mistakes and trying to come up with a new tech. Their size and brand is the only thing keeping them alive at the moment IMNSHO.
If you want to see cutting edge technology, look towards things like the Power5 (that's not a G5 btw;) and the Cell processors. One's a multi-core powerhouse, the other, well, it's an interesting amalgam of a core with multiple DSP chips to speed things up. I'm looking forward to the PS3 and its capabilities. (There are others too, but these may be the most likely to be seen by average consumers in some form or another)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Anyone who jumped on the 939 bandwagon at the start of its release will see this for what it is, teething problems.
:)
This is not a fault of nVidia chipsets (they are very good imho) and its not a fault of intel chips (again, very good, just showing their age a bit now).
The stabillity problem smells heavily of the same sort of goings on gigabyte had with their initial flagship nf3-250 board, the k8nsnxp. Between bad temp sniffing (minor read error causeing the cpu fan to shut down because it thought the cpu was 20C below what it really was) and a huge problem getting the dual channel memory working, these boards were shunned. After much patching of bios' code they are rock stable and burning up memory benchmarks.
Lets give these things 3 months on the market to get the bugs out then see what they can do
...