nForce4 and SATA II

[AMDPwred]

I've been trying to do as much research as possible so I can be informed when I build my next machine. Anyway, I've pretty much decided to wait for the nForce 4 SLI board to get the PCIe and SATA 2 features. Can anyone tell me when SATA 2 drives will be coming out? Also, I know with SLI I can run 2 videos, but I want to make sure I am able to only run 1 as well. Thanks. 🙂

 

[FishTankX]

SATA II as far as I can understand it is really quite pointless as no drives can saturate an SATA channel, much less an SATA II one. By the time drives were able to achieve 300MB/s solo your CPU will probably have died of old age.

 

[AMDPwred]

Interesting. In the same line of thought, is it worth it to get PCIe? I don't see the boards costing too much more and I'm looking at a GeForce 6600 GT for ~$180.

 

[Rike]

Originally posted by: AMDPwred
Interesting. In the same line of thought, is it worth it to get PCIe? I don't see the boards costing too much more and I'm looking at a GeForce 6600 GT for ~$180.

PCIe isn't really doing anything for video other than making SLI possible. It's more interesting for what it can do for bandwidth for all of the other types of peripherals people like to hook to their systems. It's not hard to fill the current PCI spec, but it will be a long time before PCIe will be saturated.

 

[imported_composer]

Not 100% sure on this, but I have been reading that the newer nforce4 boards, may or may NOT be good for audio video work.

I am unclear as the exact specifics, but the story goes something like this.....

POSTER 1 WROTE:

(((....................."our experiance with the PCI-E single bus boards is they such the life out of the bus so bad making them worthless for Audio. maybe using a PCI tweak utility and lowering the priority might help..

to the Gigabyte board, your are correct that it shares the "Physical" PCI bus which has 33mhz PCI slots, however the bus is 133MHZ bandwidth.
regardless i agree that is the issue! with the Madi being such a Bus hog to begin with
and the silicon image wanting high priority on the bus as well it made for a bad thing.

it also explains why we finally ran across this with the SI Sata.
i dont think the other boards we use has the SI on the "Physical" PCI bus.
now you got me digging again...arrghh...........)))


ANOTHER POSTER 2


(((................"from what i see everything new is coming with a PCI-E vid slot, this might be really bad for audio guys looking for a single chip solution... sheesh i hate new stuff it seems like we just get to where we are prefectly content and have tested, know what works and here comes new stuff......."

This was at the NUENDO FORUM which software for audio work.

 

[GprophetB]

Originally posted by: Rike

Originally posted by: AMDPwred
Interesting. In the same line of thought, is it worth it to get PCIe? I don't see the boards costing too much more and I'm looking at a GeForce 6600 GT for ~$180.

PCIe isn't really doing anything for video other than making SLI possible.

6600Gt is a great card.

 

[FishTankX]

I think PCIe becomes much more interesting once you factor in the turbo cache tech for lower end cards, don't you? A 6600GT might do well to be able to be able to offload low load parts of the memory to the system RAM.

 

[FishTankX]

Originally posted by: AMDPwred
Interesting. In the same line of thought, is it worth it to get PCIe? I don't see the boards costing too much more and I'm looking at a GeForce 6600 GT for ~$180.

You want PCIe for a different reason. You want PCIe so that you can still upgrade to *a* videocard 2 years later, when AGP boards are no longer produced. It's no rare sight for a video upgrade to breathe another year or two of life into an old, aging system.

PCIe is ultimatley a good advance, because it allows SLi as well as giving infinitley more headroom. Even a PCIe 8x slot has as much bandwidth as an AGP 8x slot, thus we have much more room to expand into the future. Not now, but I guarantee you 10 years later we're going to be running into some 'Issues' and having this scalable architecture (Where you can easily up the pins/frequencies without creating major issues for backwards compatibility) will allow for much more headroom.

 

[Bernoulli]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
SATA II as far as I can understand it is really quite pointless as no drives can saturate an SATA channel, much less an SATA II one. By the time drives were able to achieve 300MB/s solo your CPU will probably have died of old age.

Bandwidth isn't the only difference... hot swapping, native command queueing (which is also available on some S-ATA drives now), etc...