nForce - The first results

Morphium · Post by **Morphium** » Fri Feb 08, 2002 6:39 am

This is what I read about it on the CW Forum. Thanks to serioussam for this

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ok here are some news for creamware users, related to 2 mainboards with nVidia nForce chipsets:

as i said few days ago, i got MSI K7N420D Pro mainboard - and i finally had chance to do some tests that are relevant for all of us

system info:
MSI K7N420D Pro
Duron MP (with SSE) 1000 MHz with TITAN fan
(FAN is big and it runs at 3300 rpm so its pretty quiet)
(temperature was 47C max at overclocking and loading cpu up to 99%)
2 x 256 DDR PC2100
30 GB IBM ATA100 7200 rpm
10 GB Seagate ATA66 7200 rpm
Tekram SCSI PCI controller
PCI Modem
i also used integrated GForce2MX GPU and integrated LAN Card, but (of course:) disabled APU (integrated audio card:)

this mainboard has some problems when setting it in win98se (which i'm using), but all that can be set using the new bios (v2.3) and a few tricks

problems are - System Timer had exclamation mark, and LAN Card didnt worked .. as i said, BIOS flashing fixed all that, but shutting down windows still lasts like 10 seconds when LAN card is enabled. also, there is no win98se driver installer for these chipsets yet, so you have to manually update driver for like 5-6 devices in device manager.

this board has 5 PCI slots, and slots 1 and 5 are using the same IRQ, but SMBus Controller is using the same IRQ as those 2 slots too. the strange thing is that windows sets different IRQ for SMBus, but everything is working anyways.
i have to say that i dont like when i cant manually set IRQ for each PCI slot, but on the other side this MB BIOS does it without any problems.

so .. i put luna cards in slots 2 and 4 (IRQs = 3 and 4). i know its suggested to use the same IRQ for both creamware cards (i did that with cusl2c), but this is working as good too. since i have only luna 2.5 software, i asked a friend of mine with Luna 3 key to borrow me his card for testing purposes, and here are the results:

luna 3.01 (3 luna cards, irqs 3, 4 and 11 (11 is shared with modem and scsi):
i was able to load 9 (nine) masterverbs

i also run logic (v4.72) with 16 asio outputs and loaded plugins to 90% cpu and everything was fine at 4 ms even

there are some glitches when using midi for playing audio instruments in logic at 4 ms, but there are no glitches if you just play back em. seems like somethings wrong with logic audio engine heh.
the system was very very stable overall, and there were absolutely no glitches when working at 13 ms.

on the other side .. ASUS A7N266-C is a complete dissapointment .. i was able to run ONLY 1 masterverb - and i had the PCI error message when trying to load 2nd one

even without any devices in luna software i got PCI errors when loading many plugins in logic.
i also updated BIOS for that board, set the latest drivers etc (clean win98se install), but i wasnt able to fix this poor PCI performance. i hope its something about BIOS, but so far, DONT BUY ASUS NFORCE MAINBOARDS!

btw, i tried it with ATI Radeon G8500 64 DDR agp card, and that card worked great on my MSI mb.
that board is without GPU and LAN (the famous asus -C series mainboards), which means it has nForce 415D chipset - it should have the same north and south bridges, but only without GPU. unfortunately theres something wrong with this mb.

if you ask me, this is the way to go today! athlon xp cpus are performing better than p4 cpus and now we finally have a good mainboard (with good pci bus) for our card(s) - did someone mentioned that athlon xp cpus are much cheaper than p4?

)

ss

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Fri Feb 08, 2002 9:28 am

I had the board for a little over a week now.. MSI K7N420. The reason I didn't say anything about it, is because of the really disappointing performance.

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Fri Feb 08, 2002 9:32 am

I don't get it... I have the latest MSI bios, latest drivers, clean install of WinXP, no conflicts, CW card not sharing an IRQ (tried all PCI slots), and still only 1 masterverb, error on the second. I can't duplicate these results.

On both CUSL2 and P4TE, I get identical PCI performance under Win98SE/ME/XP!? Could there be a difference with this particular board?

Anyway I guess I will test it more tonight. I really hope this is true but can only think that maybe they didn't have a clock master (sync) or maybe the DSPs weren't actually showing load..

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Fri Feb 08, 2002 9:34 am

Also you can't beat a Northwood 1.8A overclocked to 2400Mhz with stock heatsync fan

Morphium · Post by **Morphium** » Fri Feb 08, 2002 1:19 pm

Hey Subhuman,

strange things are going on. I am confused now. Your results show the same behaviour as those with the A7N266-C. It really seems we cannot rely on the nForce right now. AMD will be and is the best choice it seems (unfortunately no alternatives up to now)

Stay tuned as there is going to be a test on the Asus A7N266 from SS´s friend.

PS:I really start to like Those Northwoods

The 3GHz barrier has already been broken and it seems the bottlenecks arent the CPUs anymore. The busses speed and RAMs have to be pumped up.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Morphium on 2002-02-08 13:22 ]</font>

Morphium · Post by **Morphium** » Sat Feb 09, 2002 7:30 am

Update:

Same bad results also with Asus A7N266. It seems Nforce is not a choice for now. It seems they have to tweak it like VIA. Plattforms for gamers...no comment

serioussam · Post by **serioussam** » Sun Feb 10, 2002 4:36 pm

hello there ppl

unfortunately i dont have much time these days to spend online, but somehow i managed to come to this forum. anyways, i'm very interested to see whats going on with nForce chipset boards, because this one i have in my computer is running great:))

i got xp1600+ in the meanwhile, and i managed to overclock it to 1653 mhz (xp2000+ runs at 1667), and my FSB is running at 157.50/315 mhz, and its totally stable - running logic with 90% cpu usage for hours, playing quake for hours etc

i think this is very very good board - the overclocking results show it, and on this very mainboard PCI bus is almost the same on the best P4 boards (as i said before, i can run 9 masterverbs).

its also totally strange why those ASUS mainboards are running so bad - i just cant believe it there is so much difference. i will go and try that board again, maybe theres something i could tweak (at least i hope there is something like that).

subhuman: i just cant believe it you had so bad performance with MSI K7N420 - please tell me or ask me anything related to that so we could solve that weird situation

ss

Neutron · Post by **Neutron** » Sun Feb 10, 2002 7:27 pm

I have read somewhere you should not use one of the ram slots with an nforce board or it takes a performance hit. it was a while back though. cant find the link

Morphium · Post by **Morphium** » Tue Feb 12, 2002 1:26 am

I think Sub is aware of that, arent´t you Sub?

You can only run 2 double sided dimms in slot 1 and 3 I think or 1 and 2. 3 double sided dimms reduce performance down to 200MHz

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Tue Feb 12, 2002 9:06 am

Yes, I am aware of "SuperStability Mode."

Sunshine · Post by **Sunshine** » Sun Feb 24, 2002 8:51 am

No new results....??

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Mon Feb 25, 2002 10:12 am

Nope, I still have the machine here, but I'm done testing. This is not a motherboard that I would personally choose to run my CW. I might torture myself and spend a few hours swapping cards around, but why when my cards give 3 or 4 times amount the performance in any slot & combination in other motherboards?

I will probably try the i415 sometime in the distant future, but until then, unless someone can convince me otherwise, I'm probably done here.

Kohl · Post by **Kohl** » Thu Feb 28, 2002 3:49 am

Could a bios update change the results for nForce?

It looks like I'm going for the ASUS P4B266.

Or is there any new tests coming.....?

B3n · Post by **B3n** » Thu May 23, 2002 7:25 am

I'm in the process of building a new pc with this mobo and should have a Luna 2 arriving tommorrow...

I hope its ok :S

I'm new here, I can't seem to find a Luna forum ,is there one?

Cheers

Ben

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Thu May 23, 2002 8:46 am

They are all SCOPE FUSION cards....

B3n · Post by **B3n** » Thu May 23, 2002 9:44 am

On 2002-05-23 09:46, subhuman wrote:
They are all SCOPE FUSION cards....

but there don't seem to be any scope fusion forums...they are all pulsar (please forgive my ignorance)

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Thu May 23, 2002 10:06 am

It is all "ONE." All Creamware DSP cards now run the same base OS, the only difference is with the amount of plugins, DSP, and IO. So all the forums are for Luna->SCOPE.

B3n · Post by **B3n** » Thu May 23, 2002 10:13 am

thanks very much subhuman =)

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Wed Jun 05, 2002 8:34 am

http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/3675/
<i>
Since I purchased the MSI K7N420 Pro motherboard late last year, I've participated in one form or another in the MSI nForce forum. During that time, there has been a complaint or two about low write performance from hard drives, in particular with IDE RAID. The nForce boards' peak write speeds on drive benchmarks using PCI disk controllers would never crest over 20MB/s, while read scores have hit as high as 113MB/s. Due to a relative lack of complaints and the fact that most users were using Windows XP, which has its own hard drive writes performance problems, the issue was largely ignored.
</i>

Well I did find issues running "normal" amounts of reverbs on this chipset... there was definitely something going on with the nForce when I tested it (for weeks!)

Interesting...

B3n · Post by **B3n** » Thu Jun 06, 2002 2:12 am

Forgive my ignorance, but what does that mean exactly?