FIRST LOOK - nForce4: Gigabyte K8NXP-9
by Wesley Fink on November 12, 2004 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Performance Tests (Continued)
DirectX 8 & OpenGL Gaming
The pattern continues on DX8 and Open GL, with the K8NXP-9 topping the charts in every game benchmark. This is what we would expect in shipping boards compared to the Reference boards on which they are based. More often than not, however, the Reference Board retains the performance lead. Gigabyte did a very good job of tweaking the performance of this nForce4 board.
General Performance
Intel normally tops the PCMark 2004 benchmarks, as they do in Sysmark, which is also produced by Future Mark. This is one of the few remaining benchmarks where Intel is the usual winner. This is likely the result of code optimizations for Intel features, and even this advantage may change when the Rev. E Athlon 64 chips appear with SSE3 code. The Gigabyte is still a bit better in performance than the nForce4 Reference board.
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arswihart - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
quote by Wesley Fink:"#6 - Full performance comparisons of nForce3 Ultra and nForce4 were run at nF4 launch at http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?... Performance of nF3 and nF4 is basically the same - the only real difference is PCIe instead of AGP."
but you are showing here that the production board from Gigabyte is a little different than the reference nf4 boards. I think it would be helpful to at least include one good nf3-250gb board in some future nf4 round-up or review, for comparison's sake, as i think its more practical at this point to compare nf3 to nf4, rather than reference nf4 to production nf4.
Thanks for the review though, and I'm also interested in the price of these nf4 boards. I've seen somewhere quoting these boards on average at like $180
Whizzmo - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
Possible Typo:Page 2, below the second mobo pic, the following:
Four ports are 3Gb/s ports provided by the nForce3 chip, and
should probably be:
Four ports are 3Gb/s ports provided by the nForce4 chip, and
Danke :)
johnsonx - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
oh, ok... 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps signalling rates, which translate down to 150MB/s and 300MB/s data rates, respectively. The SATA uses 8b/10b encoding, so 10 bits of signalling are need for each 8 bits of data.Anyway, nevermind.
johnsonx - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
ok, it's late, so I may be tired and crazy....but what's all this about 1.5Gb SATA and 3Gb SATA? I thought standard SATA is 150MB/s (SATA-150), while the new SATA 2.0 spec runs at 300MB/s. Even converting those speeds to Gigabits per second, you get 1.2Gbs and 2.4Gbps.
Jalf - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
Would be nice to see it compared to ATI's A64 board. That looked like a pretty good performer as wellstelleg151 - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
Any clues as to when we will be able to get our hands on one?RyanVM - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
Too bad the secondary SATA controller isn't on the PCIe bus.xtknight - Saturday, November 13, 2004 - link
wow, very interesting. looks like the gigabyte mobo is a winner. by the way, doom 3 belongs under OpenGL benchmarks.PorBleemo - Friday, November 12, 2004 - link
So much for that "Fatal1ty". :PProviaFan - Friday, November 12, 2004 - link
Page 2 "Four ports are 3Gb/s ports provided by the nForce3 chip"Oops?