nForce2 vs KT880

[hartz]

Having read the KT880 reference board review, (and having futilely commented there ) ... maybe I can post here :-)

Also since we now have some KT880 production boards maybe Rys can make good his promise to do more reviews.

In the first corner we have the nVidia nForce2 Ultra 400GB chipset (the one that promises to provide built-in firewall, SATA RAID controller and Gigabit Ethernet). The Via KT880 chipset also supporting Gigabit Ethernet and built-in SATA raid is standing in the opposite corner. :-)

Here are some questions I would like to see answered!

Does the Via DualStream64 technology use addresses interleaving between channels, or is all the memory accessible via each controller? (Request round-robin as opposed to address interleaving)

What happens with 3 DIMMs installed on nForce2? Is Dual-channel DDR still possible?

How does the GA7N400 Pro2 manage to provide 4 DIMMs with extra possible workable DIMM combinations? (Documented 2, 3 and 4-dimm combinations which support dual-channel DDR)

Compare memory bandwidth performance of max configurations between nForce2 and KT880. I suspect that up to 2GB, these two chipsets are equal, but KT880 may prove faster with 4x 1GB compared to 3GB on nForce2?

Test and analyse performance of the two chipsets while other IO is taking place, eg Disk-IO, Graphics, and CPU-memory access taking place simultaneously.

Example: Simultaneously play several Mpeg movies in separate windows with something that allows you to measure the performance. Maybe frames being dropped or rendered incompletely, streams freezing for x% of time, etc., with the test set up to force reading of the streams from disk (not cached). With tests like these it is the level of the failure that is measured, e.g. the software needs to report how well it managed to render the video stream...

Or simultaneously convert several large WAV files to MP3, reading and writing from separate disks, measuring the time for all the individual jobs to complete.

The one other thing I am curious about is to test/compare performance of the two chipsets' "other features", especially SATA raid, Gigabit Ethernet, and the CPU overhead of the sound/APU built into each chipset.

Where all other things are equal, the CPU overhead to produce sound through the onboard ALU may well make or break a game's playability!

Any thoughts? Anybody up to the challenge of testing these things and posting a review/article on the results?

Thanx,
_Hartz

[hartz]

I must add - I notice a number of reviews of the KT880 chipset claims it is inferior to the nForce2 chipset. But it seems nobody tests anything other than basic graphics and memory throughput with a small amount of ram configured. The question is how does things turn out when using 4x1GB dimms, or when doing IO and memory and CPU work at the same time, or when having some RAID configuration in use?

Does the KT880 support dual channel DDR with 3GB ram configured by having 2x1Gb and 2x512Mb dimms installed? (On the nForce2 to get 3GB ram you would install 3 DIMMs, which generally disables dual channel DDR on all boards I've seen except the GA-7N400 PRO2)

[BUFF]

which generally disables dual channel DDR on all boards I've seen except the GA-7N400 PRO2

I'm not sure about that - I'll check when I've got more time.
I'm not particularly familiar with the Gigabyte but I have read threads from people who obviously have/had them where they were saying that the Gigabyte's memory handling is not quite what you might expect & could possibly be construed as being misrepresented.

I don't know about S.A. but KT880 boards are still few & far between in the UK (mind you 400Gb boards are even scarcer but the chipset is newer) - it appears that the ASUS A7V880 is about the only one available.

Btw, it's rumoured that ABIT may have scrapped their KT880 board.