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NVIDIA’s nForce2 Ultra 400Gb chipset

Geoff Gasior
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ALTHOUGH AMD HASN’T RELEASED a new Athlon XP processor for almost a year, motherboard and chipset makers are still cranking out Socket A hardware. Why? Because even as the prices of Athlon 64 processors fall, a $65 Athlon XP 2500+ is hard to beat. And don’t forget that you can pick up a high-end Socket A mobo for under $100. That’s a pretty enticing bundle for less than the cost of a single Athlon 64 2800+ processor.

Were manufacturers churning out the same Socket A hardware as a year ago, the platform would have significantly less appeal. However, chipset and mobo makers have kept their products up to date, adding new features and functionality to keep Socket A as close to the cutting edge as an Athlon XP can be. Most recently, VIA released a dual-channel KT880 chipset with the same south bridge bells and whistles as VIA’s Athlon 64 offerings.

Now it’s NVIDIA’s turn to update.

To compliment its feature-rich nForce3 250Gb chipset for Athlon 64 processors, NVIDIA is rolling out a new version of its popular nForce2 core logic that brings Serial ATA, Gigabit Ethernet, and a firewall to Socket A motherboards. Read on to see what NVIDIA’s new nForce2 Ultra 400Gb chipset is all about and how it compares with the competition.

The Ultra 400 SPP we all know and love

The new MCP2-Gb south bridge

Introducing a new MCP
As its name implies, the nForce2 Ultra 400Gb is quite similar to the nForce2 Ultra 400. In fact, the two chipsets use the same nForce2 Ultra 400 SPP north bridge, which means they share the same AGP 8X interface, dual-channel DDR400 memory controller, double-pumped 200MHz front-side bus, and bidirectional 8-bit/400MHz HyperTransport chipset interconnect.

The nForce2 Ultra 400Gb finds its disctinctinveness at the south bridge, where NVIDIA’s new MCP2-Gb makes its debut. Here’s a quick rundown of what the MCP2-Gb brings to the table.

  • Serial ATA — It’s been a long time coming, but NVIDIA has finally brought native Serial ATA support to the nForce2 platform. The Ultra 400Gb has two Serial ATA ports integrated right into the MCP2-Gb.

  • RAID — Serial ATA support wouldn’t be complete without a little RAID lovin’, and NVIDIA delivers. In addition to supporting RAID arrays across Serial ATA drives, the Ultra 400Gb also supports “parallel” ATA RAID. You can even spread RAID arrays across both “parallel” and Serial ATA drives, which is a pretty neat trick.

    The Ultra 400Gb’s RAID support covers RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD arrays. NVIDIA also includes a fancy RAID management utility with its ForceWare drivers that makes managing and monitoring arrays a snap.

  • Gigabit Ethernet — This new chipset’s “Gb” signals its Gigabit Ethernet support. A Gigabit MAC is integrated right onto the new nForce2 MCP, which supports TCP and checksum offloads to reduce CPU utilization, and jumbo frames to improve throughput.

    With GigE on-chip, mobo makers won’t have to marry third-party Gigabit chips to the pokey PCI bus. However, because the Ultra 400Gb’s GigE is on the MCP, it will have to share interconnect bandwidth with other south bridge components, including Serial ATA drives and RAID arrays.

  • A “hardware-optimized” firewall — The nForce2 Ultra 400Gb brings NVIDIA’s new firewall feature to Socket A. NVIDIA claims that the firewall leverages hardware inside the MCP2-Gb to achieve lower CPU utilization than software-only firewalls. However, we were unable to pin them down, during repeated questioning, about exactly which firewall functions are accelerated in hardware. One purported benefit of the firewall’s hardware roots is that it’s activated as soon as a machine is powered on, protecting a system before the OS, drivers, and other software even loads. (Currently, there’s a small gap between when Windows XP networking starts and Windows’ built-in firewall begin filtering. However, that gap will apparently be eliminated with Service Pack 2’s new Internet Connection Firewall.)

    NVIDIA says it has put lots of effort into creating an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that is both simple enough for Joe Sixpack to understand and powerful enough to give enthusiasts plenty of tweaking control. For the uninitiated, the firewall’s web interface offers a number of pre-defined security profiles and wizards to walk users through common tasks like opening up ports for IM programs, game servers, and the like. Security enthusiasts who eschew wizards and profiles may appreciate the firewall’s ICSA Labs certification, and its support for stateless and stateful inspections, port blocking and filtering, remote administration, DHCP blocking, and protection against spoofing, sniffing and ARP cache poisoning.

    NVIDIA says it’s working with developers to make third-party firewall software take advantage of the Gb’s hardware firewall hooks.

  • Extra USB – It’s not as exciting as Serial ATA, RAID, or Gigabit Ethernet, but the Ultra 400Gb also gets an extra two USB 2.0 ports, bumping the total number of ports up to eight. Spicy!

Some of you will no doubt notice that I haven’t said a word about the Ultra 400Gb’s audio implementation. Unfortunately, that’s because there isn’t much to say. The MCP2-Gb has only basic AC’97 audio functionality. Sorry, no SoundStorm. At least by putting Serial ATA and GigE on the south bridge, NVIDIA has freed up the PCI bus for true 24-bit audio cards that can offer higher quality analog output than SoundStorm.

An updated System Utility
To mark the Ultra 400Gb’s release, NVIDIA has rolled out an updated version of its System Utility software. NVIDIA’s System Utility had humble beginnings as an overclocking tool that offered basic BIOS tweaking options, but it’s morphed into a considerably more powerful program.

For new users, the System Utility offers a basic set of overclocking and system monitoring features. The interface makes it easy to adjust memory timings, bus speeds, and voltages while keeping an eye on CPU and system temperatures.

Savvier users can dig a deeper with the System Utility’s “advanced” interface, which offers control over additional overclocking and tweaking options. Of course, it’s up to motherboard makers to implement special BIOS hooks that let the System Utility manipulate BIOS-level variables. Enthusiast-oriented boards are likely to include support for the System Utility’s more advanced features, but low-end boards may not.

Finally, the System Utility will tell you just about everything you might want to know about a system’s processor, memory, motherboard, and driver versions. For enthusiasts who know exactly what they’re running, the info screen probably won’t be of much use. However, it could be a handy tool for remote troubleshooting.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

Processor Athlon XP 3200+ 2.2GHz
Front-side bus 400MHz (2 x 200MHz)
Motherboard NVIDIA reference DFI Lanparty NFII Ultra VIA reference
North bridge nForce2 Ultra 400 SPP KT880
South bridge nForce2 MCP2-Gb nForce2 MCP-T VT8237
Chipset drivers NVIDIA ForceWare 4.24 NVIDIA ForceWare 3.13 VIA Hyperion 4.51
Memory size 512MB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Corsair XMS3200C2 DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
Hard drive

Western Digital Raptor WD360GD Serial ATA hard drive
Maxtor 740X-6L 40GB 7200RPM ATA/133 hard drive

Graphics ATI Radeon 9800 XT with Catalyst 4.3 drivers
OS Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 1, DirectX 9.0b

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing. If you’re looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, Corsair’s RAM is definitely worth considering. We ran all the systems with 2-6-3-2 memory timings.

The test systems’ Windows desktops were set at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

Our tests and methods are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

Memory performance

Neither nForce2 Ultra 400 board can match the KT880’s memory bandwidth, but the NVIDIA Ultra 400Gb reference board is within striking distance.

Our Linpack results don’t show much difference between the chipsets; the KT880 peaks a little higher than the Ultra 400Gb, but NVIDIA’s performance is slightly better with larger matrix sizes.

Cachemem’s latency tests show the nForce2 Ultra 400Gb behind the KT880 again. It’s a little odd that our two Ultra 400 boards, which use the same north bridge memory controller, score differently in our memory bandwidth and latency tests. I suspect that NVIDIA’s reference board uses more aggressive timings than the DFI Lanparty NFII Ultra.

Memory performance (continued)
I’ve color-coded the various cache levels (L1 is yellow, L2 amber, and main memory is orange) to make for easier reading. The graphs are presented in rough order of overall access latency, from highest to lowest.

When we look at the entire latency picture, the Ultra 40Gb and KT880 are closely matched.

Winstones

The Ultra 400Gb’s lead over the KT880 in the Multimedia Content Creation Winstone is slim at best, but it’s interesting to see the nForce2’s Business Winstone performance improve moving to the Gb. The Business Winstone test has traditionally favored faster disk subsystems, and the Ultra 400Gb’s native Serial ATA support may be responsible for the improved performance.

LAME MP3 encoding
We used LAME 3.92 to encode a 101MB 16-bit, 44KHz audio file into a very high quality MP3. The exact command-line options we used were:

lame –alt-preset extreme file.wav file.mp3

DivX video encoding

There’s not much to see in our encoding tests. The Ultra 400Gb is just behind the KT880 with DivX , and things are pretty even with MP3s.

Sphinx speech recognition
Ricky Houghton first brought us the Sphinx benchmark through his association with speech recognition efforts at Carnegie Mellon University. Sphinx is a high-quality speech recognition routine that needs the latest computer hardware to run at speeds close to real-time processing. We use two different versions, built with two different compilers, in an attempt to ensure we’re getting the best possible performance.

There are two goals with Sphinx. The first is to run it faster than real time, so real-time speech recognition is possible. The second, more ambitious goal is to run it at about 0.8 times real time, where additional CPU overhead is available for other sorts of processing, enabling Sphinx-driven real-time applications.

Scores are close in Sphinx, too. The Ultra 400Gb squeaks out a win here, but just barely.

Cinebench 2003 rendering and shading
Cinebench is based on Maxon’s Cinema 4D modeling, rendering, and animation app. This revision of Cinebench measures performance in a number of ways, including 3D rendering, software shading, and OpenGL shading with and without hardware acceleration.

Cinebench scores are pretty even until we get to the OpenGL hardware shading test, where the Ultra 400Gb again just trails the KT880.

SPECviewperf workstation graphics
SPECviewperf simulates the graphics loads generated by various professional design, modeling, and engineering applications.

The nForce2s lose to the KT880 in four of six viewperf tests, but scores are pretty close overall.

ScienceMark
ScienceMark measures performance with several common scientific computing type algorithms, including single-precision and double-precision floating-point matrix math using the popular BLAS routines. First up are some physics problems.

The Ultra 400Gb is faster in ScienceMark’s Primordia test, but slower in Cipher AES encryption and the Molecular Dynamics test.

Not much to see here; ScienceMark’s Blas matrix tests show roughly equivalent performance for all three chipsets.

picCOLOR image analysis
We thank Dr. Reinert Muller with the FIBUS Institute for pointing us toward his picCOLOR benchmark. This image analysis and processing tool shows us the results of a number of simple image manipulation calculations.

picCOLOR is close, but NVIDIA loses this one by a hair.

Results are consistent across the board, with only a handful of tests barely spreading the field.

Quake III Arena

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

Serious Sam SE

Unreal Tournament 2003

Comanche 4

3DMark03

The KT880 comes out on top in most of our gaming tests, but frame rates are don’t vary much from chipset to chipset. The Ultra 400Gb does manage to steal a couple of wins.

USB 2.0 transfer rates
Our USB transfer rate tests use HD Tach 2.61 and a USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure to measure performance.

The Ultra 400Gb’s USB read speeds are much lower than the KT880’s, but…

The KT880’s CPU utilization is more than twice as high as the Ultra 400Gb. Given that VIA’s USB read speeds aren’t anywhere close to twice as fast as NVIDIA’s, and that write speeds are pretty even, I personally prefer the Ultra 400Gb’s combination of transfer rates and CPU utilization.

Ethernet performance
We evaluated Ethernet performance using the NTttcp tool from the Microsoft’s Windows DDK. The docs say this program “provides the customer with a multi-threaded, asynchronous performance benchmark for measuring achievable data transfer rate”. Sounds like what we’re after.

We used the following command line options on the server machine:

ntttcps -m 4,0,192.168.1.25 -a

..and the same basic thing on each of our test systems acting as clients:

ntttcpr -m 4,0,192.168.1.25 -a

Our server was a Windows XP Pro system based on a Chaintech Zenith 9CJS motherboard with a Pentium 4 2.4GHz (800MHz front-side bus, Hyper-Threading enabled) and CSA-attached Gigabit Ethernet. A crossover CAT6 cable was used to connect the server to each system.

Unfortunately, our KT880 reference board’s Ethernet doesn’t work, so it couldn’t participate in this test. The KT880’s VT8237 south bridge only supports 10/100 Ethernet, anyway, so it wouldn’t stand a chance against the Ultra 400Gb’s GigE.

The Ultra 400Gb’s Gigabit Ethernet delivers very impressive throughput, especially when compared with the nForce2 Ultra 400’s pokey 10/100 Fast Ethernet. Unfortunately, the Ultra 400Gb doesn’t quite reach the Ethernet throughput performance levels set by NVIDIA’s nForce3 250Gb chipset, which we’ve seen hit speeds of over 860MBps. I suspect the nForce2’s relatively low-bandwidth 8-bit/400MHz north-to-south-bridge interconnect may be holding back performance here.

Update 6/13/2005 — We recently discovered that the ntttcp CPU utilization results included in this review were incorrect. The CPU utilization results have been removed, but they didn’t factor prominently into our overall conclusion, so that remains unchanged. A full explanation can be found here.

Disk I/0 performance
Our disk controller performance tests use a Maxtor 740X-6L 7,200RPM hard drive for “parallel” ATA (PATA) and a Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 10,000RPM hard drive for Serial ATA (SATA). Because we use different drives for PATA and SATA, scores aren’t comparable between the two. PATA scores should only be compared with each other. The same goes for SATA scores.

Because the nForce2 doesn’t feature an integrated Serial ATA controller, its results were obtained using the Lanparty NFII Ultra motherboard’s bridged Serial ATA port, which hooks Serial ATA drives into the nForce2’s ATA/133 controller.

When it comes to disk reads and writes, the Ultra 400Gb’s integrated Serial ATA controller is at the top of our class. NVIDIA’s new south bridge Serial ATA isn’t much faster than VIA’s VT8237 SATA, but its burst performance is much improved over our bridged nForce2 Ultra 400 SATA.

In the disk access time department, things are pretty even. However, the nForce2 Ultra 400Gb scores points with lower CPU utilization than the KT880. In fact, VIA has apparently been downright negligent with driver development for the KT880’s ATA disk controller—either that, or the hardware is outright broken. VIA has gotten much better about this kind of thing over time, and it’s a shame to see them slipping here.

Audio performance
We chose to test audio CPU overhead and leave sound quality testing for our individual motherboard reviews. Output quality depends so much on the codec chips paired up with the south bridge audio controllers, we can’t really evaluate south bridge audio quality alone.

Because the nForce2 Ultra 400Gb’s basic AC’97 audio implementation lacks even driver-emulated hardware acceleration, it only appears in RightMark’s “software” DirectSound tests. Unfortunately, our KT880 reference board’s audio was also non-functional, so it has to sit out another test.

The Ultra 400Gb’s basic AC’97 can’t touch SoundStorm’s CPU utilization scores, even in our software audio tests.

Conclusions
From an application performance standpoint, the nForce2 Ultra 400Gb doesn’t bring anything particularly new or exciting to the table. The chipset was slower than VIA’s KT880 in most of our application tests, but scores were nearly even across the board. However, the field wasn’t nearly as tight in our peripheral performance tests, where the Ultra 400Gb demonstrated spectacular Gigabit Ethernet throughput, low CPU utilization for USB transfers, and impressive Serial ATA performance. The Ultra 400Gb’s peripheral performance wasn’t perfect; the chipset was plagued by high CPU utilization for GigE transfers and audio playback.

It would be easy to over-emphasize the typically minute performance differences we observed, but chipsets are about much more than benchmark scores these days. Features and software matter, too, and in that department the Ultra 400Gb can’t be beaten. For starters, its flexible RAID implementation can handle “parallel” ATA drives and even span arrays across Serial and “parallel” ATA disks. The Gb’s firewall is pretty nifty, too, though WinXP SP2’s updated firewall may diminish its freebie value. Finally, there’s the ForceWare driver suite and System Utility, which make managing and tweaking the Ultra 400Gb’s various features and capabilities easy for newbies and enthusiasts alike. I don’t know about you, but when I see two products with similar performance, I’m going with the one that has better software and drivers.

NVIDIA is positioning the Ultra 400Gb as a business platform, which makes sense given the chipset’s Serial ATA, RAID, GigE and firewall support. Business users aren’t likely to miss the SoundStorm APU, which NVIDIA still makes available in the original MCP-T for gaming and digital media platforms. Personally, I’d rather pair the Ultra 400Gb with a high-end 24-bit audio card for gaming and digital media applications, but that’s just me. What can I say? I’m a sucker for Serial ATA and RAID.

At the end of the day, the nForce2 Ultra 400Gb’s fresh array of features breathes new life into Socket A. Who’d have thought that, a year after AMD stopped ramping Athlon XP clock speeds, Socket A would have a chipset that’s this cutting edge?

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