Will there be any 754 nForce 4 boards?

[SniperWulf]

Looking to upgrade soon for more features, but don't wanna fork out for a new CPU. Anyone have any info?

 

[Mykal Starclem]

I asked earlier this month and people pointed me to news article that claimed there will be nforce 4 for the s754 platform. At this point I'm not holding my breath. s939 CPUs are practically that same price of s754 cpus.

 

[gobucks]

yes they will have socket 754 NF4s, but no you won't want them. Socket 754 will be strictly vanilla NF4. That means no SATA-II, no Activearmor (hardware firewall), and ABSOLUTELY NO OVERCLOCKING!!!!! NF4 vanilla has locked multipliers and locked busses, so you can't tweak anything. My advice is to hang tight, enjoy the system you have for a while, and when it gets pretty slow, jump to a dual core CPU on either socket 939 or 900, depending on the situation when the time comes. (socket 900 is what the DDR2 socket will be, i believe). Basically, if you're upgrading your 754, it's not for an upgradeable platform, since 754 is already dead-end, so the only other reason would be performance and features. The only new feature on the vanilla NF4 is PCIe, so for it to be worth it, PCIe would have to hold a huge benefit in and of itself, which is obviously not the case yet.

 

[Peter]

754 is far from being dead end. While the planned demise of socket A is ongoing, 754 will step in as the new "value" platform. Sure, you won't get high-end processors for it, but what's the point? At the other end of the scale, socket-754 lets you enter AMD64 technology for about 80 dollars less than socket-939 - because lower cost mainboards and processors are available for the former.

Guess what kind of reasoning made me buy an A64 2800+ and an ECS socket-754 board last week.

Besides, NVidia isn't the only company making A64 chipsets. There's ULi, VIA and SiS just as well. Plenty of options to choose from.

 

[Megatomic]

I agree with what Peter said. The same reasoning led me to upgrade to a S754 system last month.

 

[gobucks]

you're right, I'm sure there will be non-worthless PCIe chipsets from other companies, but nvidia is not one of them. They have stated that NF4 vanilla will be the only 754 chipset, and that's it. As for the other chipsets, I've heard absolutely nothing at all from the ULi and SiS camps in about 9 months, so I doubt they are just gonna have boards available any time soon. As for VIA, they paperlaunched their K8T890 months ago, but they've been silent since then. Even when K8T890 boards come out, the first ones will be no better than NF3 or K8T800 boards, since they still use an old southbridge (VT8237), and they don't even have a ballpark idea for when the VT8251 can be expected. ATI's solution is okay, but most boards that have been announced are low end. It's not fair, but AMD and the chipset mobos are pretty much hanging the early adopters of A64 out to dry.

And as far as dead-end is concerned, I don't really see how 754 is not dead-end for A64. Sure, faster semprons will be on the socket, but guess what, they are 32-bit only. The fact is, if you have a socket 754, you'll never get a 64-bit processor faster than a 3700+. That is not much of an upgrade path, considering most people in the upgrade mode have 3200+ chips, since they have been around since the beginning.

 

[o1die]

Maybe socket 754 is a dead end, but I say go for value. By the time you get your next cpu, you'll want a new board for it anyway. I never reuse boards for a cpu upgrade. And the socket 939 boards have been less than stable. They still need to get the bugs out of them with a few more bios updates. Nforce4 boards are already listed at one vender, and average $200. Not a good deal, unless you already have a good pci-e card. Wait until after xmas if you can, when prices will go down on some items.

 

[slurmsmackenzie]

why would you want an nforce4?

anyone who can afford a sli configuration would be able to get a new processor, and damnit that's what you gotta do! (they want your money lol) so go with a tried and true chipset. get the lanparty and have fun with it.

 

[jterrell]

I would actually NOT get a s754.
Right now its not enough of a difference in price to warrant going "old school".
If you wanna go cheap get a socketA then wait 8 or 9 months and upgrade.

If you go with the nf4 ultra s939 you will get a cooler running proc at faster speeds, more as well as updated features and pci-E.
The PCI-E 6600 GT card is about 50 bucks less than the AGP version.

Combine the need for more expensive heatsink/fan option and the more expensive vid cards and you are gonna spend the same money to get older technology.

I realize the companies are slimeballs that wanna cause frequent upgrades but they do add features so that it makes it generally worthwhile to do so.

All that said, if you've got an xp-90 and a bad mofo agp card on hand of course go s754.

 

[Zebo]

Originally posted by: Peter
754 is far from being dead end. While the planned demise of socket A is ongoing, 754 will step in as the new "value" platform. Sure, you won't get high-end processors for it, but what's the point? At the other end of the scale, socket-754 lets you enter AMD64 technology for about 80 dollars less than socket-939 - because lower cost mainboards and processors are available for the former.

Guess what kind of reasoning made me buy an A64 2800+ and an ECS socket-754 board last week.

Besides, NVidia isn't the only company making A64 chipsets. There's ULi, VIA and SiS just as well. Plenty of options to choose from.

Exactly these fools think dual channel is all that like Intel systems or something. We're talking 1-5% here folks as proven by anand and countless review sites Then you add in the fact it's more difficult to overclcok in DC I feel it's a wash on performance when overclocking. Then there are much better 754 mobos. Nothing like the DFI UI in 939 world

Edit: don;t forget about the very promising ATi chipset.

 

[Peter]

Chipsets don't make much of a difference - they're just the I/O appendix. The main business is all done in the CPU itself. New architecture!

Dual channel RAM isn't only about speed, but also about being able to stick twice as many DIMMs into the system without having to step back in frequency or timing.

Yes, P4 benefits more from dual channel RAM. That's because P4's frequency-obsessed design HATES pipeline stalls. AMD's CPU designs have been much less dependant on fast RAM, and the current A64 line is no exception. The 1-5% number is too low though - for tasks that actually use datasets large enough to exercise the RAM. In most cases of "normal" computing and games, it doesn't matter.

 

[eagle101]

Originally posted by: gobucks
yes they will have socket 754 NF4s, but no you won't want them. Socket 754 will be strictly vanilla NF4. That means no SATA-II, no Activearmor (hardware firewall), and ABSOLUTELY NO OVERCLOCKING!!!!! NF4 vanilla has locked multipliers and locked busses, so you can't tweak anything. My advice is to hang tight, enjoy the system you have for a while, and when it gets pretty slow, jump to a dual core CPU on either socket 939 or 900, depending on the situation when the time comes. (socket 900 is what the DDR2 socket will be, i believe). Basically, if you're upgrading your 754, it's not for an upgradeable platform, since 754 is already dead-end, so the only other reason would be performance and features. The only new feature on the vanilla NF4 is PCIe, so for it to be worth it, PCIe would have to hold a huge benefit in and of itself, which is obviously not the case yet.

hello gobuckslease tell me about the dual core just the basics if its handy ....thanks

 

[SniperWulf]

Originally posted by: slurmsmackenzie
why would you want an nforce4?

anyone who can afford a sli configuration would be able to get a new processor, and damnit that's what you gotta do! (they want your money lol) so go with a tried and true chipset. get the lanparty and have fun with it.

Well I was thinking more specifically about the Ultra. I can't see myself going SLI unless I hit the Lotto or something....

I have been looking at the Neo Platinum and the Lanparty UT. Although I would love to have ActiveArmor and NCQ, I don't think anything on 939 will be feasable for my poor budget in the coming months

 

[gobucks]

eagle101, the dual core processors are on track to be released in H2 05. They will be chips made of 2 complete CPU cores on 1 die. They will share a 128-bit dual channel memory bus, but will have separate caches. It's hard to say how much performance will increase, but AMD estimates that a dual core running 3-5 speed grades below the fastest processor, i.e. 600MHz-1GHz slower, will have roughly 30% better performance than a single core. Whether the 30% is for a 3-step-down or 5-step-down is unclear at the moment. Anyways, there will be several dual core CPUs on socket 939, and AMD has said that they will be compatible with current mobos, although they may need a bios upgrade. They may also release DDR2 versions on socket 900, but that's up to speculation, especially considering the rumors that Intel plans to move to DDR3 starting at 800MHz. The point is, if you move to socket 939, you have an upgrade path of 3000+->4400+ AT LEAST, and that's just single core. With dual core, ratings are likely to go up all the way to 6000+ or something like that. With 754, you have 2800+->3700+, not quite as appealing, especially if you're sitting at 3200+ now.

 

[ChineseDemocracyGNR]

MSI K8N Neo3 (nForce4 non-Ultra chipset)
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...9&threadid=1451323

Socket 754 is not dead, AMD will be releasing lower-end Semprons on it next year.

 

[gobucks]

you're right, there will be semprons, but those aren't A64s. They are 32-bit only. People are saying it's a good idea to buy a low end 754 and get an upgrade later, and my point is you can't do that past 3700+, because anything faster on that will be sempron, and you'll be taking a downgrade by losing cache and 64-bit support. Also, don't forget, the fastest sempron currently is the 3100+, which is actually a 32-bit 2800+ with less cache, so it's slower than the current slowest A64. AMD needs about 4 more speed bumps before it can compete with the 3700+, so anyone waiting for something faster is going to be waiting for while.

 

[ChineseDemocracyGNR]

What I mean by that is that the socket 754 platform is not dead, the Semprons will need PCI-E motherboards to go with them.