64bit Athlon- the major differences

[Lee H]

Basically their performance "should" be nearly identical as the old cpu's with 1 Mb cache have a slower hypertransport (1600 MHz) while the newer CPU's have 512 Kb Cache and a faster hypertransport (2000 MHz)

As stoo said - as soon as sockets 754/940 are killed off then it will make life easier.

I personally would go for the 939 chips as they are going to be round a lot longer than the 754 range and the 939 is the future socket for the forthcoming processors.

[Zak33]

you cant use the word "Die" it confuses me...I thought you ment something was Off Die.....ie not on the core...just spent 3 minutes even more puzzled until I realised you meant its gonna be null and void .

My 'ead 'urts

[Zak33]

Right...now why do I see nForce 250 in certain reviews....whats THAT?

[Stoo]

lol

Sorry

[Lee H]

Right...now why do I see nForce 250 in certain reviews....whats THAT?

http://www.bit-tech.net/feature/35/

This should give you a little pain relief from the headaches

[Stoo]

Right...now why do I see nForce 250 in certain reviews....whats THAT?

A faster and better specced version of the NF3 150 chipset..

*But*, this is also going to get confusing..

There's NF3 and NF3 Pro..

and NF3 Ultra..

and NF3 250..

and NF3 250gb..

[Zak33]

oh no you dont...I want it in HERE for other people to read in one thread

Got this from a review

"NVIDIA nForce3 250
CPU Support :All Athlon 64 and Opteron variants, on all sockets, including Socket 940, Socket 939 and Socket 754. Only nForce3 250Gb supports Athlon FX and Socket 939, plain 250 is Socket 754 only."

and

"VIA K8T800 Pro:
All Athlon 64 and Opteron variants, on all sockets, including Socket 940, Socket 939 and Socket 754"

So the chipset is vital to the chip in Nforce 3

[Stoo]

oh yes, and there's also NF3 Pro 250..

Lets break all these down a bit..

[SilentDeath]

I havent been paying much attention to the Amd64 stuff...tooo confusing...

going back to this:

Codenames
Clawhammer - socket 754 - 1 Mb Cache supports DDR 400 and ECC
Newcastle - Socket 939 - 512 Kb Cache supports DDR 400 and ECC
Sledgehammer(939) -1 Mb Cache supports DDR 400 and ECC
sledgehammer(940) - 1 Mb Cache - supports EEC and Registered memory only

Is the Sledgehammer(939) -1 Mb good? same socket as newcastle, more cache... is it slower? or just cost a lot more?

[Stoo]

Here's a nice big tech sheet for starters..

NVIDIA NFORCE3 SPECIFICATIONS

NETWORKING
• NVIDIA IEEE 802.3 Media Access Control (MAC)
° Supports 10/100/1000Base-T
Ethernet/Fast Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet*
- Supports HomePNA 2.0 PHYs
- Advanced Communication Riser (ACR) and Communications and Networking Riser (CNR) interface support
• High performance networking features
° TCP segmentation offloads*
° Jumbo frames*
° Checksum offloads*
• NVIDIA StreamThru technology
° Isochronous controller paired with HyperTransport results in fastest networking performance

SECURITY
• NVIDIA Firewall technology*
° Industry’s only native firewall solution
° Unmatched performance and protection
° Advanced management features
- Remote access, configuration, monitoring
- Command line interface (CLI)
- WMI scripts

STORAGE
• RAID 0 disk striping support for highest system and application performance
• RAID 1 disk mirroring support for fault tolerance
• RAID 0 +1 disk striping and mirroring support for highest performance with fault tolerance
• Support for both SATA and ATA-133 disk controller standards
• Dual independent SATA controllers**
° Supports up to 4 SATA disk drives simultaneously
• Integrated SATA PHY with support for two drives**
• Digital SATA interface for external PHY with support for two drives**
• Fast Ultra ATA-133 Disk Drive Controllers
° Each interface supports two devices, for support for up to six devices
° Supports UltraDMA modes 6-0 (UltraDMA 33/66/100/133)
° Industry-standard PCI bus master IDE register set
° Separate independent IDE connections for 5V-tolerant primary and secondary interfaces

CONNECTIVITY
• AGP interface
° Supports AGP3.0 - 0.8 V signaling for 8x and 4x with Fast Writes data transfers
° Supports AGP2.0 - 1.5 V signaling for 4x, 2x, and 1x modes with 4x and 2x Fast Writes data transfers
° Supports graphics address remapping table (GART) features
° The AGP3.0 8x 533 MT/s. (million transfers per second) interface provides
the user with the ability to upgrade the external graphics card, thus avoiding
obsolescence. An external AGP add-in card achieves higher performance than
it would on existing platforms.
° AGP interface is backward compatible with the AGP2.0 specification.
• USB 2.0
° Single USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI)/Dual USB 1.1 Open Host Controller Interface (OHCI)
° Support for up to 8 ports
° Supports transfer rates at high speed (480 Mbps), full speed (12 Mbps), and
low speed (1.2 Mbps)
° Dynamically configures slower devices for best utilization of bandwidth
° Allows USB concurrency
• PCI interface
° Integrates a fast PCI-to-PCI bridge running at 33 MHz. It includes an
arbiter that supports six external master PCI slots.
Features of the PCI interface include:
- PCI 2.3-compliant, 5 V tolerant
- Supports six external PCI slots at 33 MHz
- Supports six bus master arbitration
- PCI master and slave interfaces
- Supports both master-initiated and slave-initiated terminations
- Bidirectional write posting support for concurrency
- Flexible routing of all four PCI interrupts
- Supports read ahead: memory read line (MRL) and memory read multiple (MRM)

PERFORMANCE
• HyperTransport technology
° High throughput (8.0GB/sec)***
° Low voltage
° Differential
AUDIO
• AC ’97 2.1 compliant interface
• 7.1 surround sound audio
• Supports 2, 4, 6, or 8-channel audio
• Dual AC-Link – supports up to two codecs
• 16-bit or 20-bit stereo output and 16-bit input streams
• Supports input, output, and general purpose input/output (GPIO) channels for host-based modems
• Separate independent functions for audio and modem
• Supports ACR and CNR interface
• S/PDIF output (stereo or AC-3 output)

MOBILITY
• Power management
• Full support for AMD PowerNow! technology
• ACPI 2.0 compliant
• Support for ACPI C3 state
• Low power 0.15 µ process
• Maximizing real estate efficiency enabling small form factor designs
° Single chip solution
° Lower latency for higher performance


* NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra and 250Gb only.
** NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra, 250Gb, and 250 only.
*** NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra only.

[Zak33]

I havent been paying much attention to the Amd64 stuff...tooo confusing...

I know...its why I thought it was time to br brave and admit my ignorance..so everyone else can grasp it. These guys are doing a good job of sorting me out....others will then benefit, no doubt

Is the Sledgehammer(939) -1 Mb good? same socket as newcastle, more cache... is it slower? or just cost a lot more?

I don't have a CLUE....it doesnt make much sense at the mo....we'll get there

[Stoo]

Is the Sledgehammer(939) -1 Mb good? same socket as newcastle, more cache... is it slower? or just cost a lot more?

A bit faster in some applications due to the larger cache, but costs more.

[menthel]

AAAAH! Blood is coming from my ears! Tech sheets at this time on a saturday. Some people will have hangovers you know! My personal opinion would be to let the dust settle on all of these current changes in format and see what happens. I know some people say that the pc market is always moving, but there is a big a change happenning at the moment as when atx was introduced.

[Zak33]

in theory, we are seeing the death nell of the 940, the 939 can now replace it totally, and therefore the 754 will go really soon.

Meantime, it SEEMS that the 754 has been quick, but the new Nforce250 (standard) only supports it on a slower chipset, and the quicker Nforce250 Gb supports only the 939.

Is that it?

[Stoo]

yup, 940 is dead, 754 will go for A64 and Clawhammer, but it's going to live on with the Sempron chips apparently..

[Stoo]

aha, the Pro version also supports 1000MHz HT bus, where the others only support 800Mhz..