NVIDIA 680i: The Best Core 2 Chipset?
by Gary Key & Wesley Fink on November 8, 2006 4:45 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
MediaShield
While the networking side has undergone an extensive makeover, the storage side of the nForce 680i has been fine tuned but the features remain the same as the nForce 590SLI. The nForce 680i SLI series offers three separate SATA controllers each with integrated dual PHYs that are capable of operating at 1.5Gb/s or 3.0Gb/s speeds. This results in six Serial ATA devices being available for the user instead of four as in the nForce4, Intel ICH7/ICH8, or ATI SB600. These devices can be configured in RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and 5 arrays. There is no support for RAID 1+0 although the performance numbers with RAID 0+1 are very similar.
Considering the support for six drives, it is now possible to run a massive RAID 5 drive consisting of a pair of three-drive RAID 5 arrays, or running multiple combinations of RAID technology together. NVIDIA also supports the shared spare (or dedicated spare) technique in MediaShield. The spare disk feature, available with MediaShield RAID 5, offers protection with a dedicated spare drive that can take over for a failed disk until the repair is completed. However, the performance results during our RAID testing found no measurable differences between the nForce4, nForce 590SLI, and nForce 680i SLI storage systems. In fact, the "average" write performance of the nForce4 and nForce 590SLI in RAID 5 continues in the 680i SLI chipset although we still find its performance to be 5% better than the Intel ICH8R.
NVIDIA introduced a new twist to improve their SATA controller performance by offering performance profiles for specific hard drive models in the nForce 590SLI MCP. These performance profiles continue in the 680i SLI MCP. Since each hard drive has unique performance characteristics, NVIDIA matched the capabilities of their controller logic to each drive's particular strength. So far, Western Digital's 150GB Raptor has the only performance profile loaded, but there are plans to profile additional performance oriented drives that are popular in the market. In our testing with dual WD1500 Raptors we noticed benchmark results that were on average about 3% better in our IPEAK tests while the synthetic tests realized a 4% gain in some areas.
While NVIDIA has implemented six native SATA ports in their current MCP55 chipset, they reduced the available native PATA ports to one with support for two drives. This is an improvement over the PATA challenged Intel ICH8 series which requires a separate chipset for PATA support. We firmly believe the reduced number of PATA ports is still a mistake for all chipset manufacturers.
Considering the Optical drive manufacturers have been very slow to implement SATA technology in their drives, this decrease in drive support could affect those users who have multiple optical drives for audio/video content creation and manipulation. However, our discussions with the major optical drive manufacturers show an aggressive transition to SATA technology by the third quarter of 2007.
HD Audio
NVIDIA has finally decided that life after SoundStorm no longer means the continual punishment of users by only offering AC-97 based audio support in their chipsets. As with the nForce 500 lineup, the nForce 600 series will offer full support for the various "Azalia" based High Definition Audio codecs. While the choice of which HDA codec along with the associated circuitry can still greatly impact audio quality and performance, any of these options are better than the AC-97 solutions previously offered.
While the networking side has undergone an extensive makeover, the storage side of the nForce 680i has been fine tuned but the features remain the same as the nForce 590SLI. The nForce 680i SLI series offers three separate SATA controllers each with integrated dual PHYs that are capable of operating at 1.5Gb/s or 3.0Gb/s speeds. This results in six Serial ATA devices being available for the user instead of four as in the nForce4, Intel ICH7/ICH8, or ATI SB600. These devices can be configured in RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and 5 arrays. There is no support for RAID 1+0 although the performance numbers with RAID 0+1 are very similar.
Considering the support for six drives, it is now possible to run a massive RAID 5 drive consisting of a pair of three-drive RAID 5 arrays, or running multiple combinations of RAID technology together. NVIDIA also supports the shared spare (or dedicated spare) technique in MediaShield. The spare disk feature, available with MediaShield RAID 5, offers protection with a dedicated spare drive that can take over for a failed disk until the repair is completed. However, the performance results during our RAID testing found no measurable differences between the nForce4, nForce 590SLI, and nForce 680i SLI storage systems. In fact, the "average" write performance of the nForce4 and nForce 590SLI in RAID 5 continues in the 680i SLI chipset although we still find its performance to be 5% better than the Intel ICH8R.
NVIDIA introduced a new twist to improve their SATA controller performance by offering performance profiles for specific hard drive models in the nForce 590SLI MCP. These performance profiles continue in the 680i SLI MCP. Since each hard drive has unique performance characteristics, NVIDIA matched the capabilities of their controller logic to each drive's particular strength. So far, Western Digital's 150GB Raptor has the only performance profile loaded, but there are plans to profile additional performance oriented drives that are popular in the market. In our testing with dual WD1500 Raptors we noticed benchmark results that were on average about 3% better in our IPEAK tests while the synthetic tests realized a 4% gain in some areas.
While NVIDIA has implemented six native SATA ports in their current MCP55 chipset, they reduced the available native PATA ports to one with support for two drives. This is an improvement over the PATA challenged Intel ICH8 series which requires a separate chipset for PATA support. We firmly believe the reduced number of PATA ports is still a mistake for all chipset manufacturers.
Considering the Optical drive manufacturers have been very slow to implement SATA technology in their drives, this decrease in drive support could affect those users who have multiple optical drives for audio/video content creation and manipulation. However, our discussions with the major optical drive manufacturers show an aggressive transition to SATA technology by the third quarter of 2007.
HD Audio
NVIDIA has finally decided that life after SoundStorm no longer means the continual punishment of users by only offering AC-97 based audio support in their chipsets. As with the nForce 500 lineup, the nForce 600 series will offer full support for the various "Azalia" based High Definition Audio codecs. While the choice of which HDA codec along with the associated circuitry can still greatly impact audio quality and performance, any of these options are better than the AC-97 solutions previously offered.
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Wesley Fink - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
The other time you might need a fan on the northbrdige is when using water cooling or phase-change cooling. There is no air-flow spillover from water-cooling the CPU like there is with the usual fan heatsink on the CPU, so the auxillary fan might be needed in that situation.Wesley Fink - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
The 680i Does NOT require active notrthbridge cooling and is shipped as a passive heatpipe design. At 80nm it is much cooler than the 130nm nVdia chipsets. The fan you see in the pictures is an included accessory for massive overclocking, much like Asus includes auxillary fans in their top boards.In our testing we really did not find the stock fanless board much of a limitation in overclocking as the northbridge did not get particularly hot at any time. We installed the fan when we were trying to set the OC record and left it on for our 3 days at 2100 FSB. Since it is a clip and 3 screws to install we left it on.
IntelUser2000 - Monday, November 13, 2006 - link
That's funny. A cooler running one consuming more power. Must be the die size is much larger :D.
yacoub - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
ah okay thanks for that clarification! =)yacoub - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
NTune would be a lot more interesting if it wasn't so slow to respond to page changes, cumbersome, and a gigantic UI realestate hog.The same functionality in a slimmer, more configurable, and efficient UI design would be highly desireable.
yacoub - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
and actually, that goes for the entire NVidia display/GPU settings configuration panel.Khato - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
Each CPU is going to have a max FSB clock that it'll run stably at for the same reason that it has a max core logic frequency. The main difference here is that you have two possible barriers: signal degredation due to the analog buffers not being designed for such high speed and then whatever buffer logic there is in the CPU to clock cross from FSB to core not liking the higher frequency. I'm kinda leaning towards the buffer logic being the limiting factor, since I'd expect the manufacturing variance in the analog buffers to be minimal. That and the described 75MHz variance in top FSB frequency between various processors sounds reasonable for non-optimized logic.Staples - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
I have no need for SLI. Makes the board more expensive and an SLI setup is just not worth it to me. I was about to buy a P965 chipset but now I am interested in a the 650i Ultra. Will we see a review of this chipset in the future? Most of it seems to be exactly the same as the 680i however it does lack some features and I am afraid that those missing features may affect performance. As it stands now, do you expect the performance of the 650i Ultra to perform identical to the 680i SLI?Gary Key - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
We do not, we do expect the 650i SLI to perform closely to it. We will have 650i boards in early December for review. :)
Pirks - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
is this functionality where you can overclock your CPU and FSB and memory on the fly without rebooting Windows available only on nForce mobos? I'm a stability freak and I want to be able to raise and lower my clocks and voltage on the fly, similar to the way Macs do this - they spin their fans under load and become totally quiet when idle - I wanna do the same so that my rig is dead quiet when idle/doing word/inet/email/etc and becomes noisy and fast OCed beast when firing up Crysis or something. and I want this Mac-style WITHOUT rebooting Windowsso do I have to buy nVidia mobo for that?
600i series only or earlier nForce 4 or 5 series will do as well?
I still can't dig what's up with these "dynamic BIOS updates that _require_ reboot to work" - so can you OC without rebooting or not? if yes - what are these BIOS options that nTune changes that DOES require reboot?
could you happy nTune owners enlighten me on that stuff? thanks ;)