Differences between chipsets

[metallicafan]

Is there much of a difference between the Nforce4 chipset and the Nforce4 Ultra chipset? I looked at various motherboards of both types and the main difference I have found it the Ultra seems to use SATA II, which by the way is 300MBps right? Sometimes Ultra boards also have dual Gig Ethernet ports but other than that I havent found much differences. Any other differences i should know about before buying? Thanks

 

[HighTest]

Here's a great link to the chipset feature differences themselves:

http://www.nvidia.com/page/nforce4_family.html

You'll see that the primary difference between the two is the 3Gb/s bandwith for SATA (mistakenly called SATA II) on the nForce4 ultra versus the 1.5Gb/s bandwith of the nForce4. The other primary difference is the absence of the ActiveArmor™ Secure Networking Engine hardware based firewall from the nForce4 chipset as well (ultra's and up have this feature, software is available on the lower end).

One last difference, between the non-ultra, the ultra and the SLI chipsets are the two other items.

SLI chipset is the only one that can:

1. Redistribute the channels (SLI mode for dual GPU).

2. Boot off of RAID5. Both the Ultra and the non-Ultra cannot boot off of RAID 5.

Here's a link to the SATA standards organization http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp so that you can see that SATA II is not a correct term any longer and is mistakenly used to indicate 3Gb/s capability. Some motherboard and other vendors still accidentally use the SATA II name.

 

[metallicafan]

Thanks for the info and the link. Is will older SATA 150 drives work with the newer SATA 300 controller? Will a SATA 300 drive work on an older SATA 150 controller just with slower speeds?

I am looking at these two motherboards:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813152049

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813130491

If anyone has any recomendations on which one to buy that would be great. The Chaintech board is a Nforce 4 Ultra board and is cheaper than the MSI nForce4 board but I'm not sure how good Chaintech's boards are. Seems to have good reviews on newegg. Thanks

 

[anarchy2465]

i LOVE my MSI. i upgraded and have all new mobo, cpu, memory, gfx card and i had no problems at all.

but if you go dual channel, put the memory modules in the FIRST two DIMMS (1 & 2)

 

[metallicafan]

bump


anyone?

 

[WhyYouLoveMe]

Yes, SATA 150 drives will work on SATA 300 ports. I don't know if it works the other way around.

I've had a Chaintech NF3 board for over a year with no problems. It overclocked a little bit but it's been very stable. I don't think you'll be unhappy with it.