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  • bespoke - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Once again, the southbridge chip and fan are right underneath the top video card clot. A large cooling solution on the video card will completely cover the sb chip - possibily preventing the video card from seating correctly and certainly not helping with airflow.

    Please move the SB chip or get rid of the fan! Arrrgh!
  • Gary Key - Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - link

    quote:

    Please move the SB chip or get rid of the fan! Arrrgh!


    Due to the required two chip solution for dual x16 GPU operation, there is not another area on the board to place the chipset and still retain the required trace layouts. Due to the heat generated by the MCP, it requires active cooling or a large passive heatsink (as MSI did on their 570 board). These issues will be solved late this year when NVIDIA goes to a single chip solution for their dual x16 boards. In the meantime, we are not happy either. ;-)
  • Anemone - Thursday, June 29, 2006 - link

    Probably should use DDR2 800 on the Asus and 667 on the 590 as the highest supported on each and recompare. I know that feels unfair but I'm saying that from a "highest supported" basis. Enthusiasts are likely to go beyond that, but you'll be giving the full oc tests a go in the next round.

    Initially however think 533 on both skewed things.
  • Per Hansson - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    "The reference board features an excellent voltage regulator power design along with Rubycon and Sanyo capacitors that yielded superb stability and overclocking results even with our early BIOS and board design."
    Actually those capacitors with a T vent are Panasonic FL, in the 12v input for the VRM and also for the 5v or 12v input for the memory regulators...

    Still very excellent capacitors; if it only where a requirement to also use them on the revised boards by the mainboard manufacturers... Wishful thinking I guess but with continued reporting of what components are used like this by you Anandtech eventually they will listen... (I hope atleast) Again thanks and great work! Hoping you will help to ease the confusion on what chipset to go with that Conroe...
  • Griswold - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    For some reason, pictures of the mobo wont show in Opera (v9) for me. The benchmark charts are there though. What gives? Anyone else experience this?

    Never had any kind of problem with Opera and AT before. :/
  • Per Hansson - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Works fine in Opera 9 here, I think your issue might be that your browser is not set to enable refferer logging (under advanced>network)
  • Griswold - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    That was it. Not sure why that one was off, however, it works now. Thanks a bunch!
  • Gary Key - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    I will load up Opera 9 and test it shortly.
  • Myrandex - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    That eSata port looks a lot like the ieee1394B port, any relation? I heard there was apush once for eSata to use Firewire cables, but I thought only one manufacturer was trying for that (maybe Highpoint?).
  • eskimoe - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    First off, thanks for one of the very few test on the new nforce5 intel edition!
    For a long time now I have built my pcs with amd cpus, next month will be the first time since the first p3s that Ill build another intel pc!
    So at the moment, I am not really sure which chipset to use,
    of course it seems natural to use an intel chipset for an intel cpu..
    but the nforce chipsets have been very nice (at least for amd), and theres more competition than in the intel area...
    The only thing that intel has and nvidia doesnt, is the intel matrix storage
    (btw, a single nvidia card shouldnt have any probs running on an intel board/have disadvantages over a single ati card, should it?),
    which sounds very nice in my opinion.. therefore, I'd love to see
    some comparison in the RAID compartement between nforce5 and intel 975/965,
    especially since I cant find any information how RAID5 performs on
    nforce5 and intel chipsets.. until now, all onboard variants were
    very slow/used alot of cpu (at least when writing)
    So, I'd love to see some tests comparing raid0 performance/cpu utilization
    between the chipsets, as well as raid5 tests...
    and perhaps someone knows of some tests on matrix raid 5?
    The possibility to have 3x200gb drives, using for example 500gb as raid0,
    and 100gb as raid5 seems very promising, as long as the raid5 calculations
    are somewhat supported by chipset hardware, not only the cpu!
    Thanks alot
  • rallyhard - Friday, June 30, 2006 - link

    I, too, would like to see some RAID benchmarks for the motherboards when they're reviewed. Maybe even just reviewing the performance of a particular HD/RAID controller once, when it is tested on the first motherboard that you come across with that controller, would suffice.
    (I don't know how much HD/RAID performance varies from mobo to mobo with the same controller)
    I certainly wouldn't have bought my Gigabyte 7n400 Pro2 socket A board if I had known the performance penalty of running RAID on the ITE 8212 chip as opposed to running a single drive on the nForce2 controller. The IDE raid functionality was the only reason I chose that board over the Abit NF7. The only way I found out that my horrible performance was truly and solely due to that 8212 chip is by doing a search on that chip and reading forums.
    Incredibly, some manufacturers are still using that same chip for their IDE.
    Anyway, I'm sure IDE performace is now a moot point for most, but yeah, RAID performance testing on future mobo (or controller) testing would, to me, be a useful addition to your excellent reviews.

    Keep up the good work!
  • Crassus - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this: How much of an real-world impact in contemporary games does SLI 8/8 lanes compared to 16/16 lanes have? I remember reading an article about this issue back in the days when PCI-E was introduced, but I haven't really heared anything about it since. So, did anyone do a test on this?
  • DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    I think X-Bit did a test not so long ago, and concluded there is still no advantage of 16x16 over 8x8.
  • Avalon - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Sheesh, this is a pre-production board.
  • CrystalBay - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Sheesh, look at the size NB fan.
  • nullpointerus - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Just below the big features table on the basic features page, there's a sentence which should read:

    "Intel didn't officially want their 975X chipset to support 533FSB processors, but [a few] motherboard manufacturers disagreed on this point[, and] the end result is that 975X motherboards are able to run Celeron D chips."

    At least I think that's how it's supposed to read.
  • nullpointerus - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Further down:

    "Considering the layout of expansion slots on ATX/BTX motherboards, [this] would be our ideal configuration, and the remaining expansion slots can be filled out with either X1/X2 PCI-E or regular PCI connectors."

    ...and also:

    "There really doesn't see[m to be] much point in including X1 physical slots, particularly on enthusiast level hardware, and ATI at least has already recommended that motherboard manufacturers begin including more X16 physical connectors."
  • Gary Key - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Jarred and I got our wires crossed during the edit process this morning, it was easy to do at 5:30am after being up for about 26 hours with this board and another "new" chipset preview that should be finished shortly. ;-> However, no excuse on my part for not noticing the missing/incorrect text. I have corrected our mistakes and sincerely hope the changes are acceptable. Thank you for the comments and taking time to write. :)
  • PedroDaGr8 - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    I noticed on the compression/decompression page, page 7 I think. Both of the graphs are labeled File compresision - WinRAR 3.60b5 602MB Test Folder - Time In Minutes - Lower Is Better. Shouldn't one of them (the bottom one I guess) be labeled File Decompression, or atleast since you mention it first in the article shouldn't it be on top. That led to a quick bout of confusion for me, hey maybe it is just the painpills (I blew out my knee last week, tore my ACL and LCL (Lateral Colateral Ligament) with possible damage to my PCL and MCL as well. Nothing like playing cricket for the first time and injuring yourself.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    I added a word to the subtitle now. Basically, File Compression is the benchmark category, followed by the benchmark application. The subtitle is for extra information about the particular test. Hopefully that makes sense - I can't say my brain is entirely functional at this hour of the morning. :)
  • PedroDaGr8 - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Looks good to me now.
  • DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Came across this article on The Inquirer - http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32592">link, that states that the 590 SLI Intel chipset is still using the old C19 northbridge from the NF4 Intel boards, and not the C51XE. Unless I'm missing something, the CPU-Z mainboard shot on page 4 confirms this (C19MCP55).
  • eastvillager - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    I'm not buying another motherboard with active cooling on the chipset, much less TWO active cooling systems(MCP and SPP). I'm sick of fans that die within a year, sound like banshees, and are a pain in the ass to replace.
  • Frumious1 - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    NVIDIA's nf% NB runs pretty hot, and I'd rather have a small fan making sure it doesn't overheat. It's amazing what a moderate fan can do for temperatures. Passive cooling sounds great until you live in a house without AC that hits over 100 F in the summer. I've got a passively cooled mobo that I had to juryrig a fan only in order to keep it running in the summer. As for the SB, you can't have just a tiny heatsink ehen you're likely to have two big 7900 cards sitting above it.

    Now, give us the ASUS version with heatpipes and a nice fan on the final VRM radiator, and we'll be fine. This is a reference board, you know? As in, you can't even buy it and few manufacturers will use the exact cooling setup that NVIDIA chose here. My question is: if this is a reference board 1 month before Conroe, when will retail boards show up? Probably still before ATI AM2 boards, but hopefully before Conroe even ships.
  • psychobriggsy - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    The nForce chipsets for the K8 use a lot more power than ATI's chipsets.

    How do they compare on the Intel platform, vs. ATI and Intel chipsets?
  • Gary Key - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    quote:

    How do they compare on the Intel platform, vs. ATI and Intel chipsets?


    We will have power consumption numbers in our next article for Intel and NVIDIA. We need to receive the revised board before publishing the numbers. We do not have the ATI RD600 for Intel yet so those numbers will not be available for a few more weeks.
  • phusg - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Here here, I'd like to see this looked into too! Cheers, Pete
  • Anemone - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    The Nvidia board does not have better memory performance than the 975x. All of the tests where the Nvidia board lost were memory related. And moreover, it is already known that the same memory controller from the NF4 is being used on the NF5. Run a couple of memory bandwidth tests and you'll see that the NF5 only has about 2/3-3/4 of the memory bandwidth of the 975x. What the NF5 does have is SLI and a very good disk subsystem. But the disk subsystem has its ups and downs as you started to see. Give that a more thorough workout and you'll see it's not all roses either.

    There are a handful of tests ongoing on the NF5 boards around the web and they aren't favorable vs the 975x. The overall conclusing about the NF4 was that you buy an Intel chipset for an Intel chip if you wanted the most stable environment. Maybe, and only maybe, they manage to dress this horse up to run a bit, but after the disk corruption issues of the NF4, the memory stability issues while overclocking on the Intel version, and the heavy possibility that all those things are still around for us in this new version, I'm doubtful a lot of folks are going to spend a few hundred dollars to find out things we already knew about the NF4.

    And if Nvidia wants to continue to fool itself and its shareholders that they "can't run SLI on Intel" and cut off that sales avenue, well that's going to make ATI very well off indeed over the next year. Because the reviews of the 975x are fantastic, and Conroe flies, and sooner or later a lot of folks are going to say what kind of dual DX10 gpu can I put in this board and if it's not possible to be Nvidia, that will leave one answer come Vista time when everyone thinks about graphics horsepower.

    Don't think the NF5 is going to be the runner some hoped it would be. And I don't think after a few more weeks quite a few folks are going to "take a chance" after the fiasco that was the NF4, and try the NF5.
  • Frumious1 - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Tried? What do you mean "nice try"!? Seems to me you're basing all of your criticisms off of past experience on nF4. The AT crew reported that drive corruption issues were never experienced in their nF5 testing. (Personally, I've never seen it anyway, but I guess I just don't do as much weird stuff as some people. I'm quite happy without the NVIDIA firewall and RAID.)

    Anyway, this is a preview of a chipset that supports - actually, truly SUPPORTS! - Core 2 Duo. No guessing this time. Yay! It also supports SLI, and while 975X support CF, don't even get me started about the BS driver wars between ATI and NVIDIA. The reason ATI supports CF on 975X is because they don't have a freaking Intel chipset that works worth shit! Hmm... those ATI AM2 chipsets sound nice in theory, but they're still not on the market. If ATI were smart, they's support the superior NVIDIA chipsets with CrossFire - not superior in temperatures, perhaps, but at least the damn things are available!

    Anyway, I don't know what "fiasco" you're talking about with nF4. If by "fiasco" you mean "clearly the best AMD 939 chipset on the market, with stellar sales, great performance, and nice features - with a few odd exceptions experienced by people that probably wanted to use extreme overclocks, run RAID 0, run the Firewall, and do all this with a questionable power supply" then I suppose it was a fiasco. For 99.9% of the market, nF4 worked and continues to work great. Nforce3 was perhaps a "fiasco", as was GeForce 5xxx; nForce4 has a few minor flaws that fucking nitpicks can't get over.

    Meanwhile, let's not even talk about the bullshit 915/925 to 945/955 to 975 upgrade path that Intel chipsets have taken. You want a real fiasco? Let's talk about the fact that some 975X motherboards won't support Conroe. Let's talk about the lack of shipping 965 motherboards. Let's talk about the forced upgrades to "dual core capable" chipsets that appear to be as marketing driven as NetBurst. Or let's talk about ATI's complete lack of compelling Intel chipsets, their frequently delayed AMD chipsets, and their lame-duck DVI dongle cable for CrossFire.

    Personally, I found this to be a nice article looking at an interesting CPU. How AnandTech managed to get a 3940 MHz overclock out of the 305, I'd like to know. Mine craps out at about 3.6 GHz. Still damn nice for a CPU that can be purchased with a motherboard for about $125 (Frye's sale). I just wish there were some OC performance results posted, and perhaps COD2 numbers. (COD2 with the "SLI Optimization" enabled, as that's really what enables SMP support. Stupid Activision/Grey Matter - and the damn setting isn't even saved between game runs. You have to manually reenable every time!)

    Anyway, pay no heed to this whiner, AnadnTech - I thought this was a cool article.
  • Anemone - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Ok if you read the comment below you'll note they used the NF4 memory controller. Since that was subject to a lot of problems on the NF4 for Intel (not the AMD version) it's a more than decent bet there are still going to be issues. You want to run at stock then by all means the NF5 should be fine. I don't know too many folks running SLI who insist on running at stock however, so I'll take a decent bet that many purchasers of the NF5 are not running stock.

    Article 1: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Preview...">http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Preview...
    "corrupted the registry twice while fiddling with the FSB"

    Hmm, I've managed to corrupt the registry once on an Intel board and that was an old one from years ago. I'm thinking an experienced tester stumbling on that twice might be pushing the envelope or might have a crummy board. Read the conclusions for more fun.

    Article 2: http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articl...">http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articl...
    This is a newer article seemingly after the board has had a chance to get a bit more up to speed. Read the conclusing and you'll find they think you probably want to let the board mature a bit.

    Article 3: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/07/29/p4n_ga...">http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/07/29/p4n_ga...
    "Unfortunately we found the NVIDIA chipset didn’t enjoy overclocking as much as we’d have hoped"

    Article 4: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTAyOSw3LC...">http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTAyOSw3LC...
    "yet to see a real reason to purchase an Intel processor based motherboard without an Intel chipset at the heart of the machine"

    Perhaps there might be an issue or two with the Intel variety of the NF4 and then realize that the very same memory controller, which is at the heart of most of the issues with the NF4, is also on the NF5.

    Go to Xtremesystems forums or the H forums if you like and read up. Many folks have had issues, much like the reviewers. Why those and then Anand gets a wonderful review? I've no idea. But another tester of an early board never got above 227mhz fsb. So it's pretty certain the same issues that plagued the NF4 are here in a new wrapper to plague us again.
  • Frumious1 - Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - link

    The problem is determining whether theres really a problem or the reviewers just need to learn how to use the motherboard and BIOS options properly. Wes, Gary, and most of the rest of the AnandTech crew seem to know how to really get results out of motherboards. I saw an article a few days ago that was an absolute joke when it comes to OCing. They took a 4200+ and were crowing about a 240 MHz HTT bus overclock or something. I don't think they ever even tried the other memory ratios.

    Anyway, registry corruption? Yeah, I've lost the registry a few times on Intel and AMD systems when pushing the OC a bit too far in the wrong way. Bad memory timings for an OC can be just as harmful as a bad CPU or chipset OC - probably even worse. OC'ing is not really that easy if you don't know what you're doing. Too many people want to just increase everything 25% and then tehy wonder why the system won't POST.

    Someone on AT did some OCing articles last year about the topic that really provided some good details, showing 2.6 GHz or so with an X2 3800+ using everything from POS value RAM up through top quality TCCD and CH5 modules. Probably took a hell of a long time to complete all the testing as well! If you want to do a motherboard review right and you want to look at overclocking, you simply can't do that without spending a good month or more with the board. Sometimes a seemingly small change will stabilize what appeared to be a hopeless OC.

    Bottom line: if you want SLI (and honestly, for dual GPUs it's far better than CrossFire right now - maybe not in performance, but the ATI CF drivers are still crap!) for Conroe, you'll need an nVidia chipset. Unless they suddenly get with the program and start supporting SLI on any dual X16 slot board? God, wouldn't that be nice? Stupid political bullshit... from nVidia and ATI!
  • Frumious1 - Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - link

    Dammit... I did it again and used an H in brackets... which turns on white text for reasons unknown. Repost so people can read the text without highlighing:
    --------------
    The problem is determining whether theres really a problem or the reviewers just need to learn how to use the motherboard and BIOS options properly. Wes, Gary, and most of the rest of the AnandTech crew seem to know how to really get results out of motherboards. I saw a HardOCP article a few days ago that was an absolute joke when it comes to OCing. They took a 4200+ and were crowing about a 240 MHz HTT bus overclock or something. I don't think they ever even tried the other memory ratios.

    Anyway, registry corruption? Yeah, I've lost the registry a few times on Intel and AMD systems when pushing the OC a bit too far in the wrong way. Bad memory timings for an OC can be just as harmful as a bad CPU or chipset OC - probably even worse. OC'ing is not really that easy if you don't know what you're doing. Too many people want to just increase everything 25% and then tehy wonder why the system won't POST.

    Someone on AT did some OCing articles last year about the topic that really provided some good details, showing 2.6 GHz or so with an X2 3800+ using everything from POS value RAM up through top quality TCCD and CH5 modules. Probably took a hell of a long time to complete all the testing as well! If you want to do a motherboard review right and you want to look at overclocking, you simply can't do that without spending a good month or more with the board. Sometimes a seemingly small change will stabilize what appeared to be a hopeless OC.

    Bottom line: if you want SLI (and honestly, for dual GPUs it's far better than CrossFire right now - maybe not in performance, but the ATI CF drivers are still crap!) for Conroe, you'll need an nVidia chipset. Unless they suddenly get with the program and start supporting SLI on any dual X16 slot board? God, wouldn't that be nice? Stupid political bullshit... from nVidia and ATI!
  • Anemone - Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - link

    You certainly make good points. However one review of "good" and many, many of "bad" doesn't lead me to think the "good" just knew what they were doing. In fact it's quite the opposite. It leads me to think they didn't dig deep enough.
  • Gary Key - Friday, June 30, 2006 - link

    quote:

    You certainly make good points. However one review of "good" and many, many of "bad" doesn't lead me to think the "good" just knew what they were doing. In fact it's quite the opposite. It leads me to think they didn't dig deep enough.


    I will take a different path on this one. We were allowed a first look at the board with Conroe back in early May, in fact if we could have stayed an extra day we would have had significant hands-on time with the setup. We were also one of the first sites to receive a board from NVIDIA for the specific purpose of testing the board to provide specific feedback regarding Conroe compatibility and performance. I easily have over 200 hours of test time on this board along with a couple of pages of issues/improvements/suggestions we would like to see before the design goes into production. As far as not digging deep enough, I doubt we would have had this early of an opportunity if it were not for our work (and that of several AT readers) with NVIDIA over the past several months in assisting them and the board suppliers to get their Intel performance up to speed. We are still very disappointed with the FSB overclocking results with the NVIDIA Intel designs but our initial board had no issue running up to 304FSB with an early Conroe sample. I am personally disappointed with the entire FSB issue since last fall as I had a couple of boards that easily did over 320FSB only to see this capability whacked when the product was released.

    Yes, the board will use the nF4 SLI SPP for the "Northbridge" but it is now at a C1 stepping after several months of tuning due to the issues found last fall in the first release. Are we disappointed that we will not get the newer C51XE SPP, yes, but the time to develop it along with the switch to a single dual x16 chipset this winter made it impractical for NVIDIA at this time. The good news is the NV590SLI boards should cost around $150 at launch with a feature set that will not be matched by Intel or ATI along with using the new MCP55PXE so drive and network performance is greatly improved from a stability viewpoint.

    We did not post the actual memory scores as we are waiting on a new board revision and production level bios before making any final statements on this subject and FSB overclocking. However, even with the 805D the base unbuffered Sandra scores were about 2% better than the i975x. When overclocked, this margin flipped in favor of the Intel board. The margin was even greater during our Conroe testing. I am still concerned with the FSB overclocking capability. I stated this at the end of the article, it is a concern and will remain a concern until we see production level boards. I think it will improve compared to today's products but I doubt we will see anything near what the i975x and now P965 chipsets will be capable of in the high end boards from Asus, DFI, Abit, MSI, and Gigabyte. However, getting over 300FSB is a requirement we have placed on NVIDIA at this time. It will be interesting to see if they can get there now.

    We appreciate the comments and please keep them coming. Our final review on the reference board will be available shortly and we should have boards from DFI and Asus around Core 2 Duo launch time. However, we do not expect ATI review samples until sometime in August along with some interesting information about their design choice that will be discussed at that time.
  • mino - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    Almost every p$ chipset capable of 10066 FSB since i865 tiems DOES support Conroes. Just crippled Intel 915/925 series do NOT bute even this is caused by intel marketing decision not the capability of chipset design on itself.
    What is most important is the board/VRM support. Otherwise every not-crippled chipset should work.
  • mino - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    P4 meant :)
  • mino - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link

    hell, I should get some sleep apparently ;-\

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