BOO!! 
OK So none of these boards even have the built-in video that the nforce2 provides? How lame.. this feature can probably be enabled for a few dollars, yet no board out has it!? I guess I'm going to have to wait MORE MONTHS now, but this is really getting to be ridiculous. Also, maybe it was covered in one of the linked articles, but I think it would have been nice to mention that in this review. I mean I read through 20+ pages and ended up totally disappointed with these products. I don't know what a SPP or IGP is, and I'm a regular AT reader. I'm assuming its "with graphics" and "without". I just dont get it. Isn't the point of having an integrated chipset that you can add value by letting the chipset do all the work on the motherboard? It's kind of like one of those boards, Chaintech I *THINK* that bypassed the nforce2's audio APU. haha.. ok whatever guys. Why not just make a really fast VIA board??? Personally I think owning an nforce2 chipset with the video disabled is a waste, but I guess we'll see how these things sell...
OK So none of these boards even have the built-in video that the nforce2 provides? How lame.. this feature can probably be enabled for a few dollars, yet no board out has it!? I guess I'm going to have to wait MORE MONTHS now, but this is really getting to be ridiculous. Also, maybe it was covered in one of the linked articles, but I think it would have been nice to mention that in this review. I mean I read through 20+ pages and ended up totally disappointed with these products. I don't know what a SPP or IGP is, and I'm a regular AT reader. I'm assuming its "with graphics" and "without". I just dont get it. Isn't the point of having an integrated chipset that you can add value by letting the chipset do all the work on the motherboard? It's kind of like one of those boards, Chaintech I *THINK* that bypassed the nforce2's audio APU. haha.. ok whatever guys. Why not just make a really fast VIA board??? Personally I think owning an nforce2 chipset with the video disabled is a waste, but I guess we'll see how these things sell...
Nightmare999:
Yeah, you got me beat barely on your K/6 (300 vs 400) but I have the same C-64 stuff in my basement as well..
Originally posted by: hotstuff2000
BOO!!
OK So none of these boards even have the built-in video that the nforce2 provides? How lame.. this feature can probably be enabled for a few dollars, yet no board out has it!? I guess I'm going to have to wait MORE MONTHS now, but this is really getting to be ridiculous. Also, maybe it was covered in one of the linked articles, but I think it would have been nice to mention that in this review. I mean I read through 20+ pages and ended up totally disappointed with these products. I don't know what a SPP or IGP is, and I'm a regular AT reader. I'm assuming its "with graphics" and "without". I just dont get it. Isn't the point of having an integrated chipset that you can add value by letting the chipset do all the work on the motherboard? It's kind of like one of those boards, Chaintech I *THINK* that bypassed the nforce2's audio APU. haha.. ok whatever guys. Why not just make a really fast VIA board??? Personally I think owning an nforce2 chipset with the video disabled is a waste, but I guess we'll see how these things sell...
nvidia hasn't released the north bridge which has the integrated graphics.
so you can't really blame the mobo manufactuers.
apparently nvidia is tweaking the settings
btw,IGP=integrated graphics processor(meaning to normal human:north bridge with intergrated graphics)
SPP=system platform processor(meaning to normal human:noth bridge without intergrated graphics)
Man, that really stinks.. Any word on when the north bridge will be released? If its not out I can see why they went ahead and released SOMETHING to us, for those who can't afford to wait anymore.. Although I will still wait *sighs*
i thought the main reason nvidia put out a version of the nforce 2 without intergrated graphics was because many people complained that the mobo was too expensive and they didn't want the intergrated graphics.
Im curious what BIOS revision Evan played with on that ASUS board because I dont have multiplier adjustment on mine. I was able to play with the multis on my Tbred on the A7N266C but not the A7N8X. A new BIOS needs to be issued and SOON!
BTW: Good review, especially informative was the OC features and stability.
BTW: Good review, especially informative was the OC features and stability.
would you look at that, all this waiting and i was going to buy the epox anyway. i should have bought it a week ago it would have been here by now
but anyhow, what a great review, man was that thing long. and cudos to newegg for jacking up the price on the epox 10 bucks from 118 to 128
, must be looking at anandtechs site like all of us, good thing mwave was there to save the day. but great work on the review guys
, must be looking at anandtechs site like all of us, good thing mwave was there to save the day. but great work on the review guysSuper review! I really enjoyed it, probably because i was waiting for it for so long (shakes fist) jk... and am happy with the results. I guess its settled, epox will be getting my money
I figure the extra ten bucks is worth it since the board comes wid round cables!! hehe, i was going to go get some myself too wat a sweet deal...
... now deciding a video card....
I figure the extra ten bucks is worth it since the board comes wid round cables!! hehe, i was going to go get some myself too wat a sweet deal...
... now deciding a video card....
Originally posted by: bgeh
the review is up
I'm going with hotstuff about the Chaintech board. I don't see how Lieb even considered it for a Silver award, seeing as that it DROPS the single most valuable feature (aside from the memory controller) of nForce2: the APU!
Oh well.
As for integrated video, it'll come soon enough. For most of us, though, we want the whole shebang MINUS video, because we're making power computers.
Saw the Epox 8RDA+ for $111.00 at Cnetpc.com (shipped, linked through PW). Looks to me like the Epox is the best deal by far.....never tried one before but I think I'll press that order button.
Well as I originally suspected the Asus A7N8X looks to be a damn nice board!!
My only concerns are the 3'phase power (remember I'm buying this to put a Barton in it, in 3-12 months time)
Unfortunately, I think I'll just cross my fingers and risk it.
Also is the Serial ATA connector -> direct to the chipset???
OR is it like this
serial ATA -> direct to PCI then -> chipset
OR is it serial ATA -> parrallel -> pci -> chipset (like some where it's not even a true serial ATA link)
This means if you buy a REAL serial ata hard disk, and plug it all up, it still translates it back to parallel ata before it's processed
(so it's pointless really, only good for cabling)
The price is also an issue, 140$ US is around 249$ AUD, but they retail for 320$ here (OUCH) - I'm hoping to see them as low as 270$ though early next year.
My final problem is HOW to unlock a t-bred A???
Overclockers AU unlock link for T-bred [b
That cool article is on T-Bred B's - I'd love to know if it's applicable to A's - anyone know?
OR do I have to do the close 4 whole bridges / super glue thing?
P.S here's my plan - incase anyone wants to copy it
A7N8X Deluxe
T-Bred A (or B, I wish!) 1700+ unlocked
DDR 400 cas 2 ram (for a barton remember...)
Run it around 1800 true mhz (9x200 or 166.666x11) then in 6 - 9 months pick up a 2400 (true) mhz barton 512k cache.
total initial cost, 140+58+160 (80$ DDR400 256mb Cas 2 from samsung x2)
360$ for a pretty quick machine, and no more need for a NIC or Soundcard.
My only concerns are the 3'phase power (remember I'm buying this to put a Barton in it, in 3-12 months time)
Unfortunately, I think I'll just cross my fingers and risk it.
Also is the Serial ATA connector -> direct to the chipset???
OR is it like this
serial ATA -> direct to PCI then -> chipset
OR is it serial ATA -> parrallel -> pci -> chipset (like some where it's not even a true serial ATA link)
This means if you buy a REAL serial ata hard disk, and plug it all up, it still translates it back to parallel ata before it's processed
(so it's pointless really, only good for cabling)
The price is also an issue, 140$ US is around 249$ AUD, but they retail for 320$ here (OUCH) - I'm hoping to see them as low as 270$ though early next year.
My final problem is HOW to unlock a t-bred A???
Overclockers AU unlock link for T-bred [b
That cool article is on T-Bred B's - I'd love to know if it's applicable to A's - anyone know?
OR do I have to do the close 4 whole bridges / super glue thing?
P.S here's my plan - incase anyone wants to copy it
A7N8X Deluxe
T-Bred A (or B, I wish!) 1700+ unlocked
DDR 400 cas 2 ram (for a barton remember...)
Run it around 1800 true mhz (9x200 or 166.666x11) then in 6 - 9 months pick up a 2400 (true) mhz barton 512k cache.
total initial cost, 140+58+160 (80$ DDR400 256mb Cas 2 from samsung x2)
360$ for a pretty quick machine, and no more need for a NIC or Soundcard.
the serial ata is serial ata-->pci-->chipset
i'm waiting for serial ata to be directly intergrated into the southbridge like intel's upcoming ICH5
i'm waiting for serial ata to be directly intergrated into the southbridge like intel's upcoming ICH5
aug! none of these boards have IDE raid onboard? <sigh> Really was looking foward to the ASUS too..
How come tom's hardware lists the ASUS as having an IDE raid controller? Did they mean Serial ATA raid controller?
apparently it will be released to mobo manufacturers by late december
expect it to be on retail shelves by january-february
Well it's still better than routing through parallel!
Max of 133mb a second cause of PCI, but at least you're not getting extra slow down from the translation.
Plus those funky cables.
Several things are wrong with this statement:
1) EAX provides for increased ambience in various gaming environments. Your DD receiver will not automatically switch between the different types of rooms specified by EAX. Also, it won't do HRTF's, which are pretty vital for gaming audio. (HRTF's = Head-Related Transfer Functions. Instead of just "this sound is coming from the right, so use right front and right rear speaker and this sound is coming from the front so let's use the right front and left front speaker", it models the way your ears will actually hear the sound, and provides crosstalk cancellation (i.e. it minimizes the amount of the "right channel" your left ear hears, which it's not meant to, and vice versa. The sound you get from the speakers already includes all the information that ear needs to hear, so mixing the speaker output is unnecessary.
2) DD Quality is a non-phrase. The bitrate for DD is 448kb/sec MAX. Subtract some bandwidth you need for the LFE, and then you have about 400-odd K/sec for FIVE speakers. Roughly the equivalent of 160K/sec stereo mp3, far from even CD quality sound. Then again, we are talking about heavily compressed, processed, DSP'ed game audio here, designed to sound okay on $5 Office Depot Specials.
Would you care to show a link with objective measurements of sound quality? I can certainly dig some up from actual sound card reviews, but I haven't ever seen a measurement of the ALC650
Right. Just keep in mind that the "encoding" is a fairly new technology, and it's mp3 quality at _best_.
You're right about the perfect board bit.. so far every nForce board I see has a STUPID layout where the IDE ports are obscuring the video card and PCI slots, instead of being up at the DIMM slot level. This prevents you from using half the IDE cables out there, since the connectors are often too "tall" so a 3/4 length of a full-length card can't fit over them. (Most recent example of a card like that is a GF4 Ti4400/4600).
Lately, the only PERFECT mobo layout-wise I've seen has been the Gigabyte GA-7VAXP. Four parallel IDE ports all over the midpoint of the motherboard, I haven't seen that since the Soyo SY-6BA+IV. All the "big" connectors (floppy, parallel IDE, ATX) are near the top, away from the airflow path, while the small connectors (Firewire, USB 2.0, Serial ATA) are at the bottom. Beautiful.
10% CPU utilization = $150 in the case of an Athlon or $380 in case of a Pentium 4. The pricewatch price of an XP2700+ (2.17ghz) is $150 higher than the 2400+ (1.93ghz), the Intel P4 3.06 is $380 more expensive than the 2.8ghz model.
A3D2 protocol is actually _fantastic_, since it uses reflection/occlusion. Instead of just using straight distance for determining how something sounds far away, it mimics the properties of the material the sound waves are bouncing off. If you're in a metal chamber and someone around the corner fires a gun, you hear the echoes and reverberation for a while. If the room is covered in carpet, the sound will be appropriately muffled. If half the corridor is metal and the other half is tile, while the room at the end of the corridor is covered in carpet... you catch my drift.
A3D2 is supported using the drivers provided by Nvidia according to that APU review. It's just that nVidia is not allowed to expose the functionality, but I wouldn't put it past the community efforts to install those DLL's into the driver distribution. Unfortunately, they still won't be encoded into the DD stream.
So every time you switch environments in the game, you'll hit a button on your receiver? It's not like the receiver will know you've stepped out into an open area, or into a certain building via USB, y'know.
No idea,...... intel sucks!
[/quote]You won't see that until mid next year when the standard has taken off a little more.
Personally I don't care if I can ditch a couple of ribbon cables.
Will Serial Attached SCSI hard disks have the same power lead, or will we need ANOTHER molex -> serial ata OR serial scsi adapter?
Will Serial ATA CDroms / burners / dvd's run the same power lead / data cable and will they come out soon.
mystery mystery.......
but I don't CARE about the pretty sounding cavern sound vs the interesting hall sound (EAX)
crosstalk cancellation be damned- this is dolby digital, read carefully .... six INDEPENDANT channels of audio so directional problems = nil, it's a case of send the signal where it needs to go, you have SIX places to send audio........
dolby digital is 24bit 96khz (compressed) audio it's pretty much a known fact it's better quality than CD audio - hence the move to DVD audio cd's.
assuming the compression is lossless or the algorithm/codec / whatever does the job properly, it's moot - it's basically "fact" DD = better than CD audio quality wise - not just feature wise.
I could've sworn I saw it mentioned here digit life thingo
but looking again I can't find anything :\
It's mixing X audio streams / stuff into a DD signal which as discussed earlier is DEFINATELY better than mp3 quality.
You're the first person I've come across to dispute DD quality as "mp3 only" just because it's compressed.
as for the encoding being new, who cares? it does it - makes a dolby signal live on the fly - great technlogy.
You realise Dolby is a standard, and this is MAKING a dolby signal.
Not just any signal an OFFICIAL Dolby labs signal.
Therefore you are implying the sound on a DVD disk is of lower quality than an MP3 when you say that right?
You might be claiming that the "nforce implimentation" of DD is lower quality than the official dolby spec due to chip / software issues - is that the case, or are you merely and honestly saying "DD = g0atse cause it's compressed" ???
It's dolby my good man - it's what they use in theatres and dvd disks and the new dvd - audio cd's for AUDIOPHILE MORONS!
trust me, it's good stuff.
use the serial ATA
don't use rounded cables with those bigass plugs on them!
I don't give a damn, 58$ US for a 1700+ with a 9700 even 10% less cpu time still means hella fast games and nice audio.
besides it's basically proven the nforce has one of the lowest cpu utilisations ever vs creative and their shitty eax kicking in sucking everything up like a 2$ wh0re.
(i KNOW I've seen that in a review or two!)
I was under the impression EAX also did this.
Personally it's all nice and dandy, but boy does it chew cpu time - I saw it myself with 33% loss on a C450 in h/life.
so we can go round in circles and use the analog ports...............................
it is a dolby encoder / decoder after all.
nvidia will release the drivers sooner or later.
but again i don't really care for it - environmental sound < true directional sound in my opinion.
I want to ehar that damn imp behind me.
I really don't care if the sound of the imp is like it's walking on metal or carpet.....
As an Asus owner of 4 motherboards, I really have to agree with Evan that Asus is not one of the best technical supporting company. Sometimes, making great product is not everything.
Directional problems are NOT nil, for this reason:
Let's reduce, without the loss of generality, the problem to just two speakers. Speaker A is supposed to play sound X that your right ear is supposed to hear. Speaker B is supposed to play sound Y that your left ear is supposed to hear.
Since the speakers are in the same room, your left ear will hear X + f(Y), whereas the right ear will hear Y + f(X). As you can see, this is not optimal.
HRTF's are f'(x) functions, that ensure that your left ear only hears the information intended for it, and your right ear only hears its own information. You have have as many channels of audio as you WANT, but if they're all blasting the sound into both your ears, you lose the pinpoint directionality of sound.
Check out this. DD is not 24/96. DVD Audio is lossless 24/96 (actually, there's even a 24/192 for those of us with golden ears). The encoding on the nforce is still 16/44 or 16/48, and lossy.
Incidentally, DTS, which is "better" than DD, provides a maximum data rate of 1411k/sec, three times more bandwidth.
No.
DTS mix on a DVD movie is on par with CD audio
DD mix on a DVD is on par with a decent mp3. Generally, though, you don't hear it, since both speech and gunfire don't call your attention to encoding shortcomings. If you listen to music, though, it's far easier to notice the compression artifacts.
24/96 or 24/192 sound on special DVD audio discs is far superior to CD audio, due to the wider dynamic range. DVD audio disks are NOT compressed.
use the serial ATA
don't use rounded cables with those bigass plugs on them![/quote]
Considering that there are no serial ATA optical drives and no serial ATA hard drives, there are only two Serial ATA plugs on any motherboard, and the performance hit of those parallel-to-serial adapters is unknown still, there's no viable alternative to parallel ATA right now.
I don't give a damn, 58$ US for a 1700+ with a 9700 even 10% less cpu time still means hella fast games and nice audio.
besides it's basically proven the nforce has one of the lowest cpu utilisations ever vs creative and their shitty eax kicking in sucking everything up like a 2$ wh0re.
[/quote]
<sigh>
If you don't care about performance... why bother spending the money for faster chipsets, faster DDR memory, etc? If all you want are FAST games, you don't even need a 9700, just turn down the detail settings. If you want REALISTIC graphics, though, why would you not also want realistic audio?
No.
DS3D = positional audio
EAX = Positional audio with environmental reverb options
EAX3 = Positional audio with smooth transitions between different environmental reverb options and HRTF's
A3D2 = Reflection and occlusion calculations, environmental reverb and HRTF's.
Which brings us back to the fact that analog out may very well suck due to the crappy codec chips.... Nvidia doesn't have a license to include the A3D2 dll's with their sound drivers, since Creative owns Aureal's IP.
<shrug>
Why bother with the best gaming video card, and the highest performance chipset, and expensive DDR memory if you're not going to compliment it with the highest performance audio?
Anyone know how to disable the auto-raid check on the Asus A7N8X Deluxe? Normally you can disable the bios autoscan if you are not using a RAID setup... It's a pain to wait 10 seconds evry time I reboot...
"This was made possible by a great feature the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe affords (as do all nForce2 motherboards), and that's the ability to adjust the CPU multiplier in the BIOS without having to do physical modification to the CPU. Therefore, all you have to do is install your multiplier-locked Athlon XP CPU into your nForce2 motherboard and voila; you can adjust all the available multipliers to your heart's content. However, make sure you purchase the right type of Athlon XP; only Thoroughbred-B processors have this capability on nForce2 motherboards. You cannot change the multiplier of a locked Palomino or Thoroughbred-A processor in any of the six nForce2 motherboards being reviewed today"
Not true my A7N8X can unlock the Tbred 1700+ "A" - I can use 9.5, 10, 10.5, 11 (of course) 11.5. This is with BIOS 1001C.
Not true my A7N8X can unlock the Tbred 1700+ "A" - I can use 9.5, 10, 10.5, 11 (of course) 11.5. This is with BIOS 1001C.
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