Aside from SLI, whats makes nForce4 better then nForce3 and K8T800 Pro?

H

HDClown

Limp Gawd
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Nov 30, 2004
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Anything?

Yes, I realize nForce4 is built around PCI-E and offers SLI, but if your not interested in SLI, then the AGP vs PCI-E for video card situation is a moot point because there is really not benefit of PCI-E at the current time for video. I've even read, in some cases, PCI-E was slower.

But anyways, aside from PCI-E and SLI, what else is going to make someone wants to buy an nForce4 over an nForce3 MSI Neo2 Platinium, or an K8T800 Pro ASUS A8V Deluxe?

The reason I ask is, I have an AGP Video card now (GeForce4 Ti4400). Now I have NO problems buying a PCI-E video card if I went with a PCI-E based chipset, but AT MOST I'd spend $200 on a new video card. I really don't have a need to buy new video card since I'm not really a gamer. So I could re-use my AGP card if I got an AGP based board. But I don't want to have that reason alone jade my decision. I want good reasons.

So I'm looking for some OTHER compelling reasons to hold out a few more weeks for more nForce4 boards, and have to deal with beta BIOS's and other weird rev1 issues, instead of jsut getting a solid board like A8V Deluxe or Neo2 Platnium.
 
The nForce 4 boards (not sure which versions though I think all of them) have a very strong built in firewall, gigabit ethernet and a very robust Raid system. Most of those only apply to the gamers really but you would have nearly everything you need for a very robust computer built in.
 
revan said:
The nForce 4 boards (not sure which versions though I think all of them) have a very strong built in firewall, gigabit ethernet and a very robust Raid system. Most of those only apply to the gamers really but you would have nearly everything you need for a very robust computer built in.
Click to expand...

So does my nForce3 Ultra board.
 
If you do decide to play games in the future, and you find that your Geforce 4 isn't holding up that well, then you might have a hard time finding an AGP card instores.
That's why I'm planning on purchasing an nForce 4 Ultra, I'll have that mobo for probably 3 or so years and if I want to upgarde the videocard, I can. (If my system isn't too slow, altogethor)
 
in the end the nforce 4 ultra is a good investment, because it allows more freedom to upgrade.....
moreover you could get the best performance (small)
but what do you use your pc for???
either way to have the best chance of upgradeability....
also, maybe if you just want easy upgrade in 3 year time or sthg, maybe go intel as they support ddr2, (nvidia nforce 5 coming out soon for intelprocs, with pci express and ddr2)
my 2 cents
f
 
Ok, so far, people have listed:

-1000 Mhz Hypertransport - This is in both the K8T800 Pro and nForce3 Ultra, unless I am reading something wrong
-Gigabit ethernet - this is in nForce3 Ultra and available on K8T800 Pro mobos (most of them)
-Firewall - the firewall in nForce3 Ultra is the smae as in nForce4 Ultra, just rebadged as "activearmour"
-RAID upgrades - I read the specs, and nForce4 adds command queuing, definiately a wanted feature for RAD use. In addition, the nForce4 adds RAID hot-spare capability, this is not in the nForce3 Ultra, but some motherboards with K8T800 Pro use a Promise RAID chip and the Promise chip offers these features.
-SATA300 (STA-2, etc) - allows 300MB/sec per channel max bandwidth vs the 150MB/sec that current SATA has. In reality, only going to be useful for major RAID operations with the onboard RAID controller, and I'm talking major stuff, most likely things a home user won't see benefits frm, even a hardcore home user.
-NCQ - what is this?

So really, it seems all nForce4 Ultra is adding is the newer SATA bandwidth capabilities, RAID command quening, and RAID hot-spare.

And of course, it's PCI-E based. As for AGP going away, I wouldn't count on it. Look how long it took or PCI video cards to disappear after AGP came out. YEARS. So you will still be seeining AGP cards and PCi-E express cards for the next 2 years solid IMO. And in today's computer age, if you get 1-2 yearsout of your motherboard, you are lucky, if you want to keeup with the modern stuff.

Anyone else have comments? Also, I'd like to hear why one would choose nForce3 Ultra over K8T800 Pro.
 
NCQ - is command queing for..well commands to your hard drive. Basically right now, things are a bit inefficient..your hard drive recieves quite a few requests for data that is spread all over the platters..what command queing does is allow the drive to process requests in an orderly fashion that allows for faster access. An analogy would be an elevator without NCQ gets requests from the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 10th, 28th, 13th floors. It proceeds to fulfill those requests by going to the 4th, then the 28th, then the 2nd, the 13th...not very efficient. NCQ basically caches all of the requests and does them in order.


Another bene of the nForce which has been touched upon had been the intergrated Gbit ethernet. Yes other nforce/via/sis chipset have this feature..all of them route it through the PCI bus which as we all know can't handle the throughput...even on a good day. The nForce4 plugs the integrated Gbit ethernet onto the PCIe bus. No problems with bandwidth there.

Lastly,

4>3


Thanks, and good night.
 
One thing that has not been brought up, but bothers me about the nf4 sli in particular is the lack of PCIe x1 slots. From what I understand and have seen running two cards in SLI doesn't really dent the bandwidth on the PCIe bus. I have even seen some say that the bandwidth of a 1x slot isn't really all that bad. So how about one of these manufacturers ditch some of the old 32-bit PCI slots for some new PCIe slots. Who the hell uses their PCI slots anyways...wireless card or a nice sound card but other than that...nada...OK the occasional scsi/sata/IDE controller but that is stretching it as aside from the SCSI, you have SATA and IDE on board.

There has to be a technical reason. As space shouldn't be an issue (bye bye 32-bit PCI)
 
HDClown said:
-Firewall - the firewall in nForce3 Ultra is the smae as in nForce4 Ultra, just rebadged as "activearmour"
Click to expand...

Not quite. The NF3 has a built in firewall, but it still relies on pretty heavy CPU usage to pull it off. If you are running intensive applications (gaming for instance) you will definately take a hit on performance with the NF3 firewall active.

The NF4 on the other hand is a true hardware solution without the CPU usage of the NF3's implementation. It may still need the CPU for very limited usage, but it likely won't be enough to impact performance of your system while it is running.

I won't use the NF3 firewall simply because of it's load on the processor, but I'm very much looking forward to the version implemented on the NF4
 
Ok, lets revise the list:

NCQ - Native Command Queuing - Definately a NICE new feature, however, as far as I know, the ONLY drives to support NCQ are the WDC Raptor 10K RPM drives. I plan to buy one of these, but most people are not shelling out the extra cash for the Raptor's because you get far less space for the money when compared to 7200 RPM Drives. Perhaps the introduction of a consumer chipset for home/power user use with NCQ in it will cause the introduction of NCQ in 7200RPM Drives.
Firewall - I read some tech briefs and it does look like they revised the firewall to be far less CPU dependant, but the features are the same. In the world of 3.0+Ghz 32 bit CPU's and 2.0+Ghz 64 bit CPUs, the amount of CPU even a 100% software firewall chews at is probably 1-2% on average, and maybe 5% if you are being DDoS'd. With that kind of power, it's not a huge draw, but I see the point of having one that draws almost NONE. For me, I have a real hardware firewall already, a Cisco PIX, so it's not really a feature I can about
Gigabit Ethenet through PCI-E - Someone educate me and tell me how many megabits a PCI bus can push for ethernet? I've seen onboasrd 10/100 NIC's push damn close to 100mbit for sure.


And hardwarefreak, your comment on PCI-E x1 slots. The AUS A8N-SLI Deluxe has 2xPCI-E x16, 2xPCI-E x1, and 3xPCI. So that still plenty of slots. I'm sure most other mauf's will offer similar combinations.
 
HDClown said:
Ok, lets revise the list:

NCQ - Native Command Queuing - Definately a NICE new feature, however, as far as I know, the ONLY drives to support NCQ are the WDC Raptor 10K RPM drives.
Click to expand...
Nope. Raptors don't support NCQ. For gamers (aka average desktop power users), NCQ can actually *decrease* performance. It's not needed for gamers, IMO.
 
The WD740GDRTL 74g drive supports command quening, but the 36.7g drive does not.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=65

I will be getting the 74g drive. For me personally, I don't use my computer very intensely. Some video encoding will probably be the highest useage of the power I have an having NCQ available isn't going to give me any major leaps and bound of performance. I don't care about the firewall, and the GigE speed issues don't matter since I have no GigE gear at home otherwise and really have no plan to upgrade to GigE (just no need).

So, I don't see much benefit to get an nForce4 aside from just having the latest and greatest stuff. I guess it's more an issue of having my system built by next weekend, or having it built by 2-4 more weekends. Hrmm.
 
HDClown said:
The WD740GDRTL 74g drive supports command quening, but the 36.7g drive does not.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=65
Click to expand...
Where does it say 74Gb version supports NCQ ??
I've been using two WD740GD 74GB Raptors since early this year. Raptors (be it 36GB or 74GB version) don't support NCQ.

EDIT : Here, from Xbit lab review of 74GB Raptor.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/wd740gd_15.html
Of course, Western Digital will also introduce new HDDs with NCQ support. But we do not know yet if this is going to be the “new old Raptor” or a completely new generation of HDDs with NCQ support. Especially since most SCSI HDD makers usually announce new products in winter.
Click to expand...

Learn to do some research before making a bold statement next time. :p
 
Seagate has 7200 rpm 120GB and
160GB SATA drives with NCQ available now.

From what I've seen, NCQ provides improvements for multitasking. So, as someone stated, you won't see any improvement for games (or any single process situation).

I think the benefit of PCIe goes well beyond video cards. I'm not sure how long you plan on keeping your motherboard, but could you imagine having purchased a system with only ISA slots when PCI was either available, or just about to become available? I'm sort of looking at PCI like the modern equivalent of ISA slots, and AGP like VLB. I know it's not exactly the same, but hopefully you get the idea.

I'm not sure why I see so many comments about anticipated bugs in the nF4. Just to clarify so no one comes back to this thread saying "I told you so", it is possible that there may be some nasty hardware bug in the first shipping revision of nF4. I just don't think it's likely. I'd rather take a (small) risk on new technology than choose a dying one.
 
From the WDC Link I read:

"Enterprise-class throughput – includes Western Digital's Ultra/150 Command Queuing technology that optimizes the sequence of data transfers to the hard drive from the host, providing increased data transfer efficiency resulting in higher performance for enterprise applications"

I didn't know there was a difference in CQ and NCQ, but I just read up some more and see that CQ (also known as LCQ) is different. So I stand corrected.


ShePearl said:
Where does it say 74Gb version supports NCQ ??
I've been using two WD740GD 74GB Raptors since early this year. Raptors (be it 36GB or 74GB version) don't support NCQ.

EDIT : Here, from Xbit lab review of 74GB Raptor.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/wd740gd_15.html


Learn to do some research before making a bold statement next time. :p
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for those links on the Seagate drives. I see your points on the bus system. You can look at PCI/AGP in the way you are, but you also need to remember that ISA/VLB didn't just go away in 6 months. It took about 2 years for them to be completely gone from any modern mainboards. Someone was always throwing in an ISA or a VLB slot, although the higher end boards a power user would use was the first to drop them. A standard like PCI that has been around for almost 13 years is simply NOT going to drop off from the industry radar in a short period of time.

Sure, PCI-E is the future, but how long to most average power users keep a motherboard? 2 years tops probably. You'll still have plenty to choose from in PCI/AGP cards. The one potential I see coming is that as they tweak PCI-E, the hardcore $500 video cards may no longer come out in AGP form, and for a hardcore gamer, that could be an issue.

As for bugs, I think there will be LESS bugs then with previous nForce chipsets since nForce4 is really just an evolution of nForce3, not something entirely new. Everything except PCI-E and SLI is jsut being tweaked up from nForce3. The biggest concern I have is that the issues are motherboard related, not chipset, and you end up with rev1.0 and then rev1.1, or 2.0 comes out which solves some major issue you may have been dealing with, and you have to deal with sending it back to get the new revision or your issues fixed.

Tanclearas said:
Seagate has 7200 rpm 120GB and
160GB SATA drives with NCQ available now.

From what I've seen, NCQ provides improvements for multitasking. So, as someone stated, you won't see any improvement for games (or any single process situation).

I think the benefit of PCIe goes well beyond video cards. I'm not sure how long you plan on keeping your motherboard, but could you imagine having purchased a system with only ISA slots when PCI was either available, or just about to become available? I'm sort of looking at PCI like the modern equivalent of ISA slots, and AGP like VLB. I know it's not exactly the same, but hopefully you get the idea.

I'm not sure why I see so many comments about anticipated bugs in the nF4. Just to clarify so no one comes back to this thread saying "I told you so", it is possible that there may be some nasty hardware bug in the first shipping revision of nF4. I just don't think it's likely. I'd rather take a (small) risk on new technology than choose a dying one.
Click to expand...
 
First things first: here's a link that illustrates what NCQ does.

Tanclearas said:
From what I've seen, NCQ provides improvements for multitasking. So, as someone stated, you won't see any improvement for games (or any single process situation).
Click to expand...

Ok I've read a lot of conflicting comments on the usefullness of NCQ. Plenty of people said it'll help a lot, plenty have said that I won't help at all. Now I know Tanclearas and ShePearl were talking specifically about gaming and single-threaded processes and I hope those who have read so far take that in consideration and not just label NCQ = Non-Important period.

Here's Damage's (from TechReport) take on NCQ:
Damage said:
SR tested TCQ, a quasi-proprietary implementation on a WD Raptor drive that doesn't have even a native SATA controller onboard (it's bridged from ATA).

Dueling links! We tested NCQ, the apparent emerging standard, here.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q2/intel-9xx/index.x?pg=20

Althought SR's results aren't terribly relevant, I would also point out the difference between single-user workloads and single-task workloads. As with many things in computers, performance bottlenecks matter most when systems are slowest, and storage I/O subsystems are generally slowest under heavy loads, with multiple requests pending. NCQ addresses these difficult situations pretty effectively, as our tests with IOMeter's workstation access pattern (from SR, no less) show.

Long story short: You want NCQ. Anyone who says otherwise is a !!!!!! with an agenda.
Click to expand...

This was taken from the comments section of their ATI chipset article (X200 I believe) and took some time to hunt down. I bolded and underlined that last part. (Edit: Seems [H] filtered out the !!!!!! part)

Now as to how usefull it actually is for the casual user and/or gamer, I don't have all the details as to when/where NCQ kicks it up but if we're talking about threads I'm running 37 of them at this very moment. I know games only take 1 process 99% of the time, but most/all of those 37 processes aren't going anywhere when I launch WoW.

Add to that the introduction of multi-core computing sometime in the near future and consequently (and hopefully) the emergence of multi-threaded gaming, and you end up with some confirmed decent use for the feature.

In brief, I don't know exactly how much NCQ will help nor if it requires some significant overhead, and will sit on the fence until some benches of NF4 with and without NCQ enabled crops up. However, do I want a feature that can improve my computing at least some of the time without significant consequences? Yes I do.
 
The soon to be available Seagate 7200.8 SATA drives will also support NCQ. I was going to get a Intel MB/Proc but I'm now going to get a 939 system and I'm waiting on the Nforce4 boards to be available. I agree with some of the others, I do not upgrade that often so I want to get all the features I can when I jump. I want NCQ, PCIe, and the new low overhead firewall. The only thing I currently do not want is DDR2 but that too will change with time I'm sure.

I'm thinking that when the dual core CPUs come out that NCQ would be a nice speed boost on the drive access, multitasking should be much improved. We'll see...
 
Decelerate said:
Isn't the firewall on the NF3 software-based, versus on-chip for NF4?

Also, NF4 has Sata2, NCQ
Click to expand...
No, the NF3 Ultra has an on-chip firewall, administered through a web browser. The NForce4 ActiveArmor firewall is supposed to take even less system resources though. I don't know what that means, I'd need a comparison, as I have the NF3 Ultra firewall enabled, and it takes nothing off my system performance that I can measure. The NF3's firewall is extremely comprehensive in its features and online help too.
 
LoneWolf said:
No, the NF3 Ultra has an on-chip firewall, administered through a web browser. The NForce4 ActiveArmor firewall is supposed to take even less system resources though. I don't know what that means, I'd need a comparison, as I have the NF3 Ultra firewall enabled, and it takes nothing off my system performance that I can measure. The NF3's firewall is extremely comprehensive in its features and online help too.
Click to expand...

Yeah my bad, I noticed the hardware firewall for NF3 upon research. It's the NF4 vanilla that has software firewall. A step backwards imo.
 
I don't know if this was listed, but the nforce4 will be utilized by 939 socket CPU's only from what it looks like right now. That can always change so put your flame throwers away. From the looks of it, if you upgrade to a n4 board, you will have a PCIe card and 939 which will have some legs that will carry you into the coming years.
 
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