Author: William Henning
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/m3n-ht_deluxe/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.
Ahhh... I just love it when NDA's expire!
Today NVIDIA unveils its 700a series of motherboard chipsets for Socket AM2. The new chipset supports the best integrated NVIDIA graphics yet, including full support for HDMI and high definition playback - and if that was not enough, you can do up to triple SLI on the 780a!
With the Phenom rev B3's finally out there NVIDIA thinks that people will snap up the new boards - and they could be right. While it is true that at this moment the Core 2 Duo / Core 2 Quad processors do have a definite lead in speed over the Phenoms - and overclock better - the Phenom's are a good bang for the buck, and as our GPU guy Kevin showed in his article, after you reach a certain level of performance, GPU's count - and processors do not influence gaming performance any more.
Okay, but before we give you all the skinny, take a quick peek at the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe / Mempipe Edition motherboard that we are doing this 780a launch with:
And here are the specifications:
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Not exactly short of features, is it?
Okay, now let's take a closer look at what NVIDIA has been up to...
NVIDIA is positioning the 780a as "the" chipset for Socket AM2 enthusiast boards, and is really pushing the "Hybrid SLI" concept, but before we go into more details, let's take a quick look at NVIDIA's other new AMD offerings:
NVIDIA has segmented its vision of the motherboard market into three classes of customers:
The "low end" 730a supports the latest Phenom and X2 AMD processors, supports DDR2-1066MHz (PC8500) memory, DMI, HDMI and VGA outputs, Gigabit Ethernet, 12 USB 2.0 ports, HDA audio, 6 SATA and 2 PATA drives with RAID 0,1,0+1,5 and up to 5 PCI slots, 3 PCIe 1x slots, and a single PCIe 16x slot.
Even though NVIDIA is addressing this chip at the mainstream gamer, I would not at all be surprised if it showed up in a lot of HTPC's.
The "middle of the road" 750a changes little from the 730a described above - instead of a single x16 slot and three 1x slots, it is described as having two PCIe 2.0 8x slots and two PCIe 1x slots.
I'd be VERY surprised if the die was not identical with the 730a, with the only real difference being the BIOS enabling PCIe 2.0, and how the lanes are routed.
Ah, now we get to the crown jewel - the 780a. NVIDIA of course goes on... and on... about their new AMD flagship.
This diagram is fascinating.
Compare it with the 730a and 750a diagrams - carefully.
The only differences are:
The ESA certification really needs no new silicon, so its not a hardware level difference between the 780a and the 730a/750a.
The nForce 200 is not new - its been around for a while on Socket 775 boards to add additional PCIe capabilities; and if you carefully noted the differences in the diagrams, you can easily see that the nForce 200 must use the 16 PCIe 2.0 lanes of the 780a to communicate with the main chip, so even though the nForce 200 "breaks it out" / "switches lanes", there are really only 16 native 2.0 PCIe lanes.
Don't worry though, I'd bet that NVIDIA "overclocked" the "native" lanes, so I imagine there may be some additional bandwidth available when using an nForce 200.
Funny thing is... it does not really matter. When using SLI, even triple SLI (or quad SLI), most of the inter-GPU traffic goes over the SLI bridges, and not over the PCIe lanes.
The "PW Shortcut" mode can be genuinely useful, and it shows that the nForce 200 is more than a silicon replacement for the old SLI "paddles" on motherboards (that switched between single 16x or dual 8x modes). By letting the GPU's talk to each other directly, there is a potential of getting useful transfers happening between the GPU's without involving the CPU.
Broadcast mode is also potentially very useful - imagine using SLI and sending the geometry and texture information to all GPU's at once instead of separately - this can virtually increase the bandwidth significantly.
NVIDIA has been doing its homework.
NVIDIA is also trying to be green(er).
Now an SLI rig can shut off some of those monstrous power hungry GPU's when you are just surfing the net. Excellent idea.
Even more savings can be obtained by only using the on-board IGP video, and totally shutting off the add-on GPU's.
Now that we've digested the slides,let's quickly go through NVIDIA's marketing bullets for the 780a:
Please note that basically all of this applies to the lower end 750a and 730a as noted on the last page.
The NVIDIA nForce 780a chipset was designed from the ground up to support high-end NVIDIA GPU's in up to three way SLI configuration, which for certain applications, can approach a factor of 2.8x speedup over a single GPU according to NVIDIA.
HybridPower is actually a neat concept - let's face it, running the Windows desktop, even Aero, does NOT need a massive GPU these days. With HybridPower, NVIDIA will use the integrated graphics on the motherboard for Windows, and simply turn off the power hungry GPU's in the PCIe slots - this could potentially save hundreds of watts while surfing the net or other desktop uses.
GeForce Boost as nearly as I can tell is simply some form of minimal automatic overclocking of the PCIe bus, and ESA support allows ESA aware applications to get more information about motherboard and power supply voltages and temperatures (assumign ESA capable power supplies). The NVIDIA control panel allows a fair bit of tweaking of the GPU's installed in the system, and lets you tweak the GPU to your heart's content.
PCIe 2.0 support doubles the bandwidth of each PCIe lane compared to PCIe 1.0 - a good thing, as in SLI systems now a PCIe 2.0 8x slot will have the same bandwidth as a previous PCIe 1.0 16 slot - mind you, SLI does not seem to need a lot of PCIe bandwidth due no doubt to the SLI connectors providing direct connection between the GPU's.
MediaShield is basically NVIDIA's RAID solution, supporting RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5 on up to six SATA2 drives. The 780a chipset also supports native Gigabit Ethernet, and the driver supports NVIDIA's "FirstPacket" TCP/IP scheduling by type of traffic - basically a way of setting quality of service for VOIP, downloading, surfing and streaming video.
The 780a also supports High Definition Audio with up to eight channels of 192KHz sampling rate 32 bit sound - frankly, its an overkill, but hey, it will sound good -- and the PureVido HD technology in the integrated graphics should assure smooth HD playback; and it even includes the required evil HDCP chip.
Well, after examining the material made available to me by NVIDIA, it seems pretty clear that all the 700 series chips are actually based on the same die.
Okay, now back to looking at the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe...
The Board
Asus includes a fairly large pile of stuff with the M3N-HT Deluxe:
Now I will freely admit that I did not even try the memory heat pipes. No point to it, as you will read later in the review, the memory timing options are ... limited.
The motherboard looks good, and the three GPU slots certainly look impressive - two of them are PCIe 2.0 8x slots, and one is a PCIe 16x slot, which should be enough for even rabid SLI fans. But in case you do want quad SLI, you always get two 9800GX2's if you feel so inclined. I also liked the large number of USB2 headers on the motherboard, and the firewire headers did not hurt either.
The small card you see between one of the two PCI slots and the black GPU slots is a small SSD, apparently used to store the Express Gate Linux based web browsing that comes with the board.
There appear to be plenty of solid state capacitors for smooth power.
I really like the possibility of six-way RAID 5. Let's see... six 1TB drives... 5TB RAID5 storage. Nice....
And here is the featurefull back I/O panel.... four USB2.0's, PS/2 keyboard, SP-DIFF, optical out, eSATA, analog audio, and HDMI and VGA.
The BIOS
I really like the Linux based Express Gate. In this its latest incarnation, you can browse the web, use instant messenger or Skype without booting into Windows (or a full Linux distribution). Unfortunately I don't have time to cover this version in this review.
We have a standard, boring Main Menu, with all the standard options.
I found the "Advanced" menu dissapointingly simple - this is a nice board, it deserves better. Ok, the basics are there, but I found the memory configuration to be missing. There was NO way of specifying memory speed or timings, and as such, the BIOS defaulted to a horrible 5-5-5-18 timing.
The Power menu was bog standard - what else would we expect?
More BIOS
The APM configuration and Hardware Monitor under the Power menu were also pretty standard.
Very standard boot menu.
I like Asus' Tools menu - the EZ Flash 2 is a great time saver, and the OC profiles are very useful - especially now that you can save and load them from USB sticks.
That's all for the BIOS folks...
In order to keep the testing as fair as possible, we will use the following test platforms:
Socket AM2:
Software used during testing consisted of the following:
Please note that we are showing overclocked results in all the charts - we are not holding you in suspense until the end of the article. The chart labels incorporate a lot of information about the test configuration. The first line shows the socket type and the model of the processor. Since all the processors shown -- beside the Phenom X3 8750 -- are dual-core devices, we did not specify that on the charts.
The second line shows the "FSB/HT clock rate" x "CPU multiplier" followed by the effective memory speed. All DDR2 tests were run at 4-4-4-12 timings unless otherwise specified.
Business Winstone
The Asus M3N-HT Deluxe turned in okay results here at stock, and somewhat better when overclocked - it was really being limited by the poor memory timings.
Content Creation
The Asus M3N-HT Deluxe did better for Content creation; scoring average at stock speeds, and taking top place when overclocked!
WinRAR
Sorry about the old single threaded results... but it does not really matter; the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe was at the bottom of the multi-threaded stock and overclocked results thanks to its poor memory timings.
HDTach
The Asus M3N-HT Deluxe redeemed itself with HDTach - it had simply the best results at stock and overclocked here.
LAME MP3
The Asus M3N-HT Deluxe did very well at LAME, both at stock and when overclocked.
TMPGEnc
Again, the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe got impressive results for video encoding.
Call of Duty
Very good results for the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe here, both at stock and overclocked - taking top spot in both cases.
Commanche 4
The less we say about the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe's Commanche performance, the better.
Doom 3
Asus really has to do something about the memory settings in the BIOS - Doom 3 has always been very sensitive to memory speed and latency, and it shows here. The Asus M3N-HT Deluxe gets slaughtered.
Quake 4
Same story here. The Asus M3N-HT Deluxe gets destroyed at Quake 4.
Halo
The poor memory timings also affected the Halo scores, with the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe scoring below average.
Jedi Knight
For Jedi, the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe turns in an average result.
UT2K4
Same story for UT. The Asus M3N-HT Deluxe was less then stellar here, but not as bad as in some of the other memory sensitive apps.
Sandra CPU
The crippled memory timings of the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe also badly hurt Sandra CPU tests.
Sandra Memory Bandwidth
Ouch. The Asus M3N-HT Deluxe does not get great bandwidth results.
Sandra Latency
Nor does it get good latency results.
RightMark Read
Okay, but not great results for the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe for RightMark Read.
RightMark Write
Finally a ray of hope - decent stock write performance, and great overclocked write performance for the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe.
RightMark Latency
The latency results are okay, but not very impressive for the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe - those memory timings hurt.
RightMark Bandwidth
To be blunt, bandwidth was not good. Asus fix the BIOS please!
Overclocking
First, I was really dissapointed by the absolutely terrible support for setting memory dividers (no support) and memory timings (no support).
That is simply inexcusable these days, especially since the memory controller is on the processor, and can easily be tweaked. Asus needs to fix this ASAP, as the board is currently crippled by its memory performance.
See update below, the problem may have been unique to the BIOS I was using!
The best overclock I was able to achieve was 13x240MHz, which is actually quite a decent score for a Socket AM2 processor.
In order to run at 3.12GHz, I set:
I was able to POST at 13x245, but it would NOT run - not even at 12x245.
Power Consumption
I don't know why I took the readings - anyone contemplating SLI is not really worried about being green - but for those readers out there that care, yes, thats you two, here are the results:
At stock speeds, when idling, the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe based system uses 107 Watts, and 146 Watts when loaded. At overclocked speeds, idling the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe uses 114 Watts, and 192 Watts when loaded.
Conclusion
I like what I read of the 780a chipset in the materials NVIDIA sent to us. It seems like an excellent IGP, with potential for building gaming rigs around it.
I was less than impressed by the memory performance on this board - fortunately I know it must be a BIOS issue, as another high end 780a board I am currently testing has far better memory performance. The options here are so limited, that I almost wonder if I did not turn off the integrated graphics (I am sure I did) or perhaps the memory performance is being deliberately limited for marketing reasons - which would be a damn shame, as otherwise I really like this board.
I really like the Hybrid SLI concept for totally turning off the gaming GPU's when not needed. It is kind of ridiculous to use monstrously powerful GPU's - single, SLI or triple SLI - for mere web surfing or watching a DVD - and in the summer we definitely do not need the extra heat and noise they produce.
Overall, other than the memory issue (which I am sure they will fix after reading this review), Asus did a really nice job making the M3N-HT Deluxe.
UPDATE: I have a number of reports of people being able to access the DRAM configuration under the CPU Configuration menu; perhaps the BIOS I loaded was corrupted? The benchmarks would have showed a marked improvement. Perhaps after I finish the three other motherboards I have in queue right now I will try a newer BIOS.
And I like what NVIDIA did - 730a based boards may just be ideal for high end HTPC systems.
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