Nvidia's Nforce chipset

Why are we so late?
BACK AT CEBIT TIME, we learned that Nvidia is going to announce a product that is just something new for their product line and obviously not just a graphic card. At that time, Nvidia was traditionally quiet about new products but as always, there where certain methods that we used to discover that we will be able to see "some kind of chipset or to say board" from Nvidia. Everybody was talking about Crush, a brand new Nvidia chipset that was supposed to have two versions, Crush 11 and Crush 12. One of Nvidia's major partners was proud to tell us that it will be one of the first one that will have Crush on its boards. This turned out to be somewhat ironic. Picture logo.jpg Just by looking at Nvidia and Microsoft's declarations about the Xbox you could tell what the graphics firm was up to. Xbox was everything except just an ordinary game console because it was more PC than console.

Nvidia once said, "We have P3 chipset ready and running now inside of Xbox". Graphzilla learned a thing or two about chipset design and its first adventure into chipset design was stimulated by the $200 million Microsoft shunted its way.

After much speculation, Nvidia finally announced Nforce at Computex in Taiwan, in June. The world reacted mostly positively, but there was a leavening of scepticism - it all seemed too promising and Nvidia's ambitions to run the graphics chipset business seemed somewhat overweening, considering this was really its first foray into uncharted territory.

The design of this product included some ex-3DFX engineers as well as many ex-Aureal engineers, boards were announced for late August and the beginning of September but that is not what happened. To be honest, even right at the beginning of our test Nforce was still late and no one denies it. It took some extra weeks to see a final product that customers spending good money would be satisfied about.

The competition was quite cool about Nvidia's work, satisfying themselves with this faint remark about CRUSH: "It is hard to build a South Bridge".

Crash was likened to CRUSH, the competition was quite late to market and "performance greedy people" who liked the idea about potential performance, chipset, graphic, network and especially audio kept mailing me "where are those boards and how do I buy one". Unfortunately for weeks I expected to see some in retail and that eventually happened just two weeks ago.

Sometime after a series of articles that we ran that Nforce was late we finally received one board to test but as you could read in previous articles we didn't have any drivers for the board. Nvidia wanted to complete the product for the market and the main reason why I waited was to get final product.

A few weeks back in a meeting we had with the chipset manufacturers, we learned that they were not scared of Nforce or even very concerned. Some said that they saw many problems in that chipset and that is not as fast as we all expected.

But since we do not follow rumours and base our stories on facts, we gave Nvidia the benefit of the doubt and wanted to see this product without any prejudice. I actually was able to see some earlier revisions of software and bios that caused some problems while testing, but when I saw the latest BIOS revision and new set of drivers I started to see things in a different light.

With Nforce, Nvidia wanted to offer highly integrated board that will ffer all you need. Plug your Athlon or Duron and one or two memory modules and you will have a board ready for gaming. Plus you will have great audio Dolby digital surround sound and be able to use a modem and network card. Bob will be your uncle, and Fanny will be your aunt, and everything, natch, will be be roses, roses and never thorns, thorns.

Nvidia integrated its well-known Geforce 2 GPU into chipset and at the same time offered us DirectX 8 audio card that is even better than the well-known SB Live series of card. However, Creative will not give up so easily, since while we've had this APU (audio processing unit) on our table, Creative has released SB Audigy, which smokes the competition once again.

Technology
Nvidia does not like people calling Nforce a chipset, and prefers the word platform, mostly because it believes it includes almost everything a user might want including graphics chip, audio card,network adaptor and modem. Chipset is better than platform though - why think locomotives and Kings Cross when they're not really appropriate?

Nvidia based its design on two chips that we usually call North Bridge and South Bridge, but because the company wants to be different, they call these chips the IGP (Integrated Graphic Processor) and MCP (Media Communication Processor). It could be worse - Nvidia could have called them the Up Express to Edinburgh and the Down Express from Edinburgh. But it drew the line at the TLAs.

Nvidia needs to change its name for its chipset division to NDA, as we've suggested before, to follow the TLA trend such as AMD, Via, SiS, or ATi. Still, Nvidia is going to insist on being different, and will probably stick with what it's got.

Picture chip.jpg To cut to the chase, Graphzilla realised that today's PC is more than just spreadsheet, documents and E-mail and that there is a market for so called multimedia machines tjay run DVD, have good surround sound, and excellent performance.

Here are some basic capabilities, without running through other material you can find on Nvidia's web site.

The core of Nforce IGP is powered by benefits of the Twin Bank Memory Architecture, memory management thing that Graphzilla patented. You will be able to use 128-bit memory architecture that should provide the highest memory bandwidth possible and with one of the mail goal to maximise memory efficiency.

Following the current trends, Nvidia included dynamic adaptive speculative pre-processor (DASP) that helps boost CPU and system performance. This marchitecture will help also GeForce2 GPU to have enough memory to use for 3D tasks. Basically to have bandwidth of Geforce 2 DDR cards theoretically but in practice to have graphic card that should match the MX400 performance.

Picture IGP.jpg AMD's HyperTransport, a state-of-the-art bus interface, as Nvidia like to call it, has as its main goal to make system and graphics performance as fast as possible.

AMD and Nvidia first tried this marchitecture in the Xbox, which uses Intel processors, ironically.

HyperTransport provides amazing 800 MB/s communication between chips which is actually three times faster than Via's V-link that provides only 266MB/s, but in practice KT266A is very competitive or even faster than Nforce.

SiS' Mutiol technology provides 533 MB/s but it seems it's not even close to two times faster than V-link 266 MB/s. The SiS 735 and its one chip design provides 1.2 GHz communications between North Bridge and South Bridge. Amazingly fast numbers but they are possible since SIS 735 is one chip design.

There's only one thing wrong. These are just theoretical numbers on paper and have little to do with real world performance, such as you buy when you pay for a board in a shop.

Audio
Lets talk a bit about audio. This is one of the features that could get some attention. Nvidia talks about great performance DirectX 8 capable audio that is actually "better that Sound Blaster Live".

This real time processing audio chip that is just one part of North Bridge can actually simultaneously play up to 256 different channels and beside that supports Dolby digitally surround or, more properly Dolby Digital real-time encoder.

This kind of audio is integrated into the Xbox gaming console. Nforce audio can play also 64 3D and 192 simultaneous audio streams. It seams to be standard nowadays to have two, four and six speaker capabilities and Nvidia is no exception here. Nvidia developed this part with the help of ex-Aureal 3D engineers. We also learned that Nforce will support EAX in next revision of drivers. So finally we can talk about great-integrated Audio.

Picture sound1.jpg Nforce Audio and its DirectX 8 support provides following features:

- Downloadable Sounds Version 2 (DLS2) - The APU can perform layering and filtering using stereo waves as the source.

- Effects processing on DirectSound buffers - More sophisticated sound effects as well as higher quality music and sound effects with greater production values and real-time interactive control.

- Interactive 3D Audio Level 2 (I3DL2) - Reverberation and occlusion/obstruction support.

Picture audio.jpg Communication
Beside promising audio, the Nforce MCP also features networking and communications in its chipset, with an integrated 10/100Base-T Ethernet controller onboard. Nvidia claims it developed these parts in house.

In this chipset you get for free inexpensive home networking, with integrated support for HomePNA 1.0/2.0. Additional features include an integrated 56K soft modem and support for up to six USB ports.

One interesting thing is that Nvidia claims in a document that we received that Streamtru technology that it uses in networking is actually faster than Intel and 3Com products. It would be nice to be able to prove or disprove this.

Board
The Nvidia reference Nforce board is a micro- ATX design and has AGP external AGP port, two PCI slots and ACR [Advanced Communication Raiser]: you have three memory slots where the first bank is physically separated from second and third memory slot.

Nvidia told us it made some extra space between slots to be sure that people will plug two DDR modules into two different banks and will use benefits of twin bank. Beside integrated game port and 3 audio connectors we received raiser card that enables some of this nice features. The reference board was made by MSI.

The ACR card gives you digital output for Dolby Digital receivers and sound systems and you also have two SPDIF connectors to be able to plug in four speakers. The card also has a LAN RC45 connector for network and phone line connector. Different manufacturers will implement their designs in their own way.

Picture raiser.jpg Nvidia CNR raiser card. Red square is internal debugging connector. Temperature
Since I don't have any thermal equipment to be able to test temperature on the processor, IGP I use ancient method.

I just put my finger on these semiconductors and pray that I will not burn myself a lot. I obviously cannot talk about any numbers but I can say that the Athlon 1400 MHz was significantly cooler on Nforce than on AMD760 board that I use. The burns were less painful and healed more quickly.

Nvidia reference board hasn't any chip that monitors temperature but the retail boards will have it. On the AMD 760 board temperature sometimes rises above 70 Celsius and the heat sink of cooler was really hot when touched.

I think that with same cooler I got 10-20 degrees Celsius lower temperatures just by changing the chipset.

Overclocking FSB
I tried to overclock the FSB since I haven't been able to change multiplier from BIOS on this reference board and stopped at 143 MHZ or, so to say around 1500 MHz without a system crash.

I managed this with normal cooling on Athlon 1.4 GHz but 150 MHz FSB was too much for this board. I was amazed by stability of this board on this frequency. There are some predefined settings for Overclocking in the BIOS.

Roses, roses. Thorns, thorns
With the 1.22 revision of both drivers and bios I had no problems with audio, network or stability of the system.

I used the board with Windows XP Professional and Windows ME and went crashless during hours of gaming, office work and testing of boards.

So Nvidia did a great job here. Eventually some glitches have cropped up in audio and in some applications, but most of them have since been fixed.

We've had some very good technical support from Nvidia Europe, who listened to our problems and went over and beyond the call of duty.

Drivers
The Nforce driver development team has its own priorities if we are talking about drivers and supported operating systems.

The team's primary focus is on Windows XP, then Windows ME and lastly, Linux. I am still waiting for drivers that officially support Windows 98 SE, although that's promised soon.

Picture network.gif Installation
With a clean XP or ME you just run setup that will install all drivers, AGP, memory controllers, network and audio and it will be quite fast except for registering Windows audio which takes about two minutes.

I installed Nvidia's 22.50 GPU drivers separately but I was able to do if from this setup thing as well. After this you are prompted for restart and your board and features start working.

Picture install.gif Testing
We ran all tests on the following machine:

Athlon Thunderbird 1400 MHz
2 x 128 MB Hyundai PC 2100 CL2.5
Hard drive WDC WD400AB 40 GB UDMA 100
Toshiba SD M-1502 16X 48X DVD
ATI TV-wonder TV tuner card
Nforce reference board

Picture nforce.jpg We did all tests under Windows XP with 1.22 revision of Nforce drivers and 22.50 drivers for graphics.

The two memory modules are used for twin memory architecture. Many of you may spot ATI TV tuner, but in my nice and quiet room I like to watch TV and why not try the ATI tuner in Nvidia board? It actually worked without any problems, so Nvidia and ATi are both singing from the same hymn sheet here, much to my surprise.

I did two sets of benchmarks, one with the Nforce board with integrated graphic and second woth Ti 500 on Nforce vs Ti 500 on AMD 760 to see which was actually faster.

Benchmarketing
Sisoft Sandra 2001 TE even we are not prefer synthetic tests but seams to be that Sandra is becoming some kind of de facto standard. We used the CPU, multimedia CPU test as well as the memory test.

We used 3Dmark 2001 pro to test the IGP GPU. The integrated Nforce graphic part is fastest integrated solution nowadays and it does not use any heat sink which surprised us a lot. We used just a few elements of this test.

Quake 3 Timedemo 1 - de facto OpenGl standard test Symark 2001 is great tool that have two possible scenarios - one is office productivity while the second is Internet productivity. This is a complex set of 14 applications but we were unable to finish this test not even once. It just stopped on Netscape 6.0 each time and refused to give us any results. The only logical solution was to remove it from the list of tests.

I used one more synthetic test called Streamd that shows you how fast memory runs. It runs from a DOS box.

We used Adobe Photoshop and I took a picture with a digital camera and it was picture of ATI Radeon 8500 that was 254 KB JPEG on my carpet and did the following thing.

I chose one performance killing procedure: I took Filter called Radial blur, set amount to 100 and chose best quality settings. I measured how fast Photoshop finished on each chipset and got some interesting numbers.

Picture blur.gif If you ask why I chose to do this, I remembered that to hell with numbers, people want to know how fast these things are in the real world with real applications such as Photoshop.

Some time ago I used this in one of my processor review for some other magazines. As a warning his test took more than 300 seconds on Athlon 1400. More than 5 minutes to apply one effect on picture make us wonder how fast processors need to be to do this in real time. Maybe 300 times who knows?

I used SPECviewperf6_1_2 professional graphic test to see which "platform" is fastest for this kind of job. Choo choo.

The rest of my job was based on playing games or playing demos that are called benchmarks that do the job for you and show how many FPS they can achieve with your Board and graphic card.

We used the Dronez game demo that includes a benchmark and which measures frames per seconds. Dronez was set to 512 pixel textures and 24 bit Z buffer.

Serious Sam is a great 3D game which supports ATI Truform. We set the game to quality mode during testing.

Return To Castle Wolfenstein is a great Quake 3 engine based game and I used the demo with benchmark options. I used two demos where one is CPU and the other one is graphic card intensive.

Last but not least is Aquamark, a hard to get benchmark here in Bosnia.

All graphic game test were run in two modes 640x480 in 16 bit color and 1024x768 in 16 bit colour where the first one tests CPUs more and the second graphics power.

Lets talk about numbers:

AMD Sandra CPU test is the same as Nforce CPU test. Same thing offered with Multimedia benchmark but there where some differences at memory test Picture AMD_memory.gif AMD 760 Board Picture TI_memory.gif Ti 500 on Nforce result. We can see on this numbers that Nforce memory is significantly faster than AMD 760 one. If we take the fact that on paper this memory as dual channel marchitecture should be twice faster we don't find it so drastically but this sure counts.

Here are results for CPU and memory test that are almost identical.

Picture multimed.gif Picture cpu.gif Picture 3dmark.gif In 3Dmark you can see that Nforce can show its potential. Even with 2233 for its Geforce 2 integrated it is just about enough to be able to play it with most of games in resolutions up to 1024x768x16. We some nice lead on Nforce with Ti 500 where 400 points just with changing your motherboard sure counts.

Picture quake6.gif We can see the potential of integrated graphic from this chart. 135 FPS in 640x480 are enough for this 3d shutter and they actually show you that this game will be playable on higher resolutions as well. On Ti 500 on Nforce we saw some incredible performance gain and 209 was fastest score for me so far. Ti 500 is almost 11 percent faster than AMD 760 and additional 22,6 FPS always count.

Picture quake10.gif With 70 FPS Nforce is still playable while Ti 500 on Nforce still takes the lead. 22 FPS more with just new chipset is nice advantage.

StreAMD Picture streamd.gif We got some nice theoretical number with this test. We got that Nforce has roughly 30 to 35 per cent faster memory than AMD 760. We got these results during tests as well but these numbers are far from always 30 percent faster. You will be able to see that in some tests depends on conditions AMD 760 is just few percent slower. You might be surprised that I run this test on Nforce and Nforce with Ti 500 but I will just remind you that Nforce integrated graphic uses 32 of your system memory. That explains why this non-graphic card test has better performance if you use APG card.

Picture photoshop.gif My only real time non-game application on this test showed really tight battle. While Nforce was faster on all other tests here we saw that AMD 760 was few seconds faster but in percentages it was just less than 1 per cent. Judge decided that there is no winner here.

Picture spec.gif In this professional test we saw some nice numbers again. While Nforce integrated Geforce 2 is competitive here in almost all tests. There are quite absurd results here since in some cases like light 04 Geforce 2 is faster than Geforce 3 Ti 500. Ti 500 on Nforce is performance leader in all tests.

Picture dronez6.gif This fancy looking DirectX 7 game show us that integrated graphic on this board can be used for gaming. Few frames less than AMD 760 board is really good result for non-cooler integrated graphic. Ti 500 on Nforce takes a lead with 25 per cent increase of performance. We are again speaking about more than 20 FPS incensement in performance.

Picture dronez10.gif On this higher resolution game is still playable with is symbolic number 43.43 Ti 500 on Nforce once again show it's potential and gives us some impressive numbers. This game have benefits from fast Nforce architecture. Imagine that you can get this just with new chipset.

Picture sam6.gif This nice Egypt based game can be played on Nforce graphics. More than 60 FPS is enough for everyone and Ti 500 on Nforce beat AMD 760 chipset with same card. I believe that 11 percent increase in performance you can reconsider changing your board.

Picture sam10.gif Nforce is still compatible with its 40 FPS that gives you idea that you will be able to lay this nice looking game as well on this integrated graphic. Nforce is still few frames faster than AMD 760.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein Picture wolf6.gif This with this first demo that is as we said CPU intensive again show us miracle. 0.2 FPS counts when Integrated Geforce 2 beats Ti 500 card. We can say that this is tight and if we run this test few times we would get different numbers in this zero point something domain. ADM 760 with TI 500 fall behind here for significant 3 FPS.

Picture wolf10.gif As you could expect Nforce graphic is not so good performer in higher resolutions and AMD 750 and Nforce have same numbers as they had on 6x4. 10x7 is just not enough to give these cards hard time. If you consider 60 FPS as limit of playability that this is not playable even on this platform.

Picture wolf8.gif Nforce graphic is 10 FPS faster than AMD 750 with Ti 500. Ti 500 on Nforce is just few frames faster and here we can see the real value of this chipset. 4.2 GB/s counts here and they make this board so fast.

Picture wolf8a.gif On this resolution Ti 500 with AMD gets its dignity and performance back while Nforce fall behind but is still playable.

Picture Aqua6.gif Aquanox is just released game that uses DirectX 8 and runs quite fast on Geforce 3 series of cards. Here we can see drastic performance hit on Nforce graphic but still more than magical 24 FS barrier. Nforce with Ti is 35 percent faster then same card with AMD 760. This was largest performance increase we saw on test by just changing the motherboard.

Picture Aqua10.gif On higher resolution where card has more job to do situation dramatically changes since this is not chipset job. Nforce is not playable but I must add that this is the only test that we used that was unplayable for Nforce graphic on this resolution.

Conclusion
In these four weeks that we spent with this board we learned quite a lot about it. We learned that older software revisions had some issues that Nvidia was solving one by one.

Another fact is that Nforce was late and there is no doubt about it. My review is just as late but the two facts are unconnected.

The delay is justifiable to produce a stable board and the OEMs and system integrators won't ship defective kit but obviously Nvidia has missed the Yuletide boat, big time.

In game mode, I wanted to relax and play some of my favorite FPS games and believe or not I was able to run all games in 800x600 or even more modes and to play them well.

From the other point of view, I enjoyed the audio which had some glitches but actually works nicely, and especially I like the fact that board and APU is Dolby digital ready.

The network adapter also runs just fine and it was funny to think that I now have an Nvidia network card. Even though we were unable to try the modem, since this reference board did not include one, I believe that Nvidia will have few problems with that.

This board can be described as all you need in one place. Just plug in your Athlon or Duron and some memory in the slots and you are ready to rock.

It is fast - although maybe not the fastest one - but still a very nice performer. At DM 400 this board is not too expensive, given all the integrated features which add up to a good multimedia package.

If we consider Nforce as Nvidia's first board chipset, then we have to say it did a great job.

There are very few companies that make products which shine from the start and Nforce is one of them. Some problems with audio still remain to be solved but Nvidia and its driver team are on the case so we're sure these will be fixed in most of the retail boards.