Anandtechs much awaited NF4 roundup is out!

[GuitarDaddy]

My thoughts:

Why would they use a 4000+ for the overclocking tests? Why not the obvious 3000+?

A bit misleading on the A8N-SLI, stating that HTT was limited to 255mhz. They should have made it clear that this is a ram @ 1T limit, not HTT. HTT's over 300 are common on this board, I can get 325 and have seen 342 on this board.

Max (CPU only) overclocks where very similar with all the boards, but who the hell can really tell with a 4000+?. The DFI takes the top spot by a measly 50mhz or so, should be more in IMO with the insane voltages available.

Asus wins both the Doom3 and Halflife2 benches, this surprized me.

The nVidia lan port showed surprizing throughput performance, and with Active Armor enable doesn't even have much more CPU overhead than the Marvel solutions. This is directly contradictory to the previous reviews I've read. I think I will be switching from the Marvel port to the nVidia port.

The SB live onboard chip thrashes the AC850 codec's, for those who don't want an addon soundcard this should be a definate consideration.

Not a single mention of the NF4/Diamondmax10 fiasco? And only indirect mention of the buggy bios's and instabilities that have plagued all of the nforce4 boards. Anandtech had to work really hard to be politcally correct on this one and it showed.

And although they state this is an SLI and Ultra review, they left out the Chaintech Ultra?

We finally got the "Roundup" review that we've been waiting for. But testing of the overclocking features that really seperate these boards was extremely lame.

 

[ChicagoPCGuy]

Now they need to do a roundup of the "value" boards that don't have any major issues--like the nForce4 Ultra boards by Chaintech, Foxconn, ECS, EPoX, etc.

Now I know why I have been avoiding the SLI type boards--high prices/stability and compatibility issues = low value.

 

[Bar81]

Yeah, it was quite weak. All the bugs and incompatibilities were simply glossed over. The NF4 isn't ready for prime time and neither is SLI. The SATA controller issues need to get worked out as well as the SLI DVI WS issues. Not to mention the horrid BIOSes wreaking havoc all over the place.

 

[FP]

I have been waiting for this review for a while and it met all my expections. It even changed my mind from an Asus or MSI SLI mobo to the single slot MSI mobo. The advantages of SLI just don't seem to be worth all the trouble and cost at this point.

 

[lotus503]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy
My thoughts:

Why would they use a 4000+ for the overclocking tests? Why not the obvious 3000+?

A bit misleading on the A8N-SLI, stating that HTT was limited to 255mhz. They should have made it clear that this is a ram @ 1T limit, not HTT. HTT's over 300 are common on this board, I can get 325 and have seen 342 on this board.

Max (CPU only) overclocks where very similar with all the boards, but who the hell can really tell with a 4000+?. The DFI takes the top spot by a measly 50mhz or so, should be more in IMO with the insane voltages available.

Asus wins both the Doom3 and Halflife2 benches, this surprized me.

The nVidia lan port showed surprizing throughput performance, and with Active Armor enable doesn't even have much more CPU overhead than the Marvel solutions. This is directly contradictory to the previous reviews I've read. I think I will be swithing from the Marvel port to the nVidia port.

The SB live onboard chip thashes the AC850 codec's, for those who don't want an addon soundcard this should be a definate consideration.

Not a single mention of the NF4/Diamondmax10 fiasco? And only indirect mention of the buggy bios's and instabilities that have plagued all of the nforce4 boards. Anandtech had to work really hard to be politcally correct on this one and it showed.

And although they state this is an SLI and Ultra review, they left out the Chaintech Ultra?

We finally got the "Roundup" review that we've been waiting for. But testing of the overclocking features that really seperate these boards was extremely lame.

Yeah you would think given there is an 80 page thread on thier message board with relation to the Asus, they would at least point out a few of them. I mean the obvious reason they didnt point out the maxtor issue is they didnt use a Maxtor in thier testing

 

[ChicagoPCGuy]

Originally posted by: binister
I have been waiting for this review for a while and it met all my expections. It even changed my mind from an Asus or MSI SLI mobo to the single slot MSI mobo. The advantages of SLI just don't seem to be worth all the trouble and cost at this point.

:thumbsup:

 

[MTSteel]

I am still up in the air about what to buy!! Basically, is the DFI or MSI worth the $40 from my wallet over the Soltek K890? This is what I have been struggling with. On top of that, if I go with the MSI or DFI, I may not be ableto use the Sonata I had my eye on because it comes with a 20 pin PSU with only 18A on the 12V(at the local shop, not sure when they will ever get the 24A, large warehouse to clear out first, DAMN). So, to goto a better PSU and case(with door and lock(have to keep little fingers from powering off and on), TT Tsunami and a Enermax 420), it will cost me another $100. So now we are at $140 more for the MSI or DFI to simply play CS:S, and edit home video with Firewire.

O I hate these decisions. Maybe I should have just went with a NF3, too bad I sold my 9800Pro already
I hate spending $$, call me scrooge, especially $1000 to play a damn game or two... Damn hobbies(time to sell motorcycle, baahaa)

Ok, enough ranting and thinking out loud....

Do I agree or disagree with the review, do not know, I have yet to buy! Wish they could have tossed the Soltek board in the mix just for fun.

 

[ChineseDemocracyGNR]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy
A bit misleading on the A8N-SLI, stating that HTT was limited to 255mhz. They should have made it clear that this is a ram @ 1T limit, not HTT. HTT's over 300 are common on this board, I can get 325 and have seen 342 on this board.

Yeah, they shouldn't use "1:1" when searching for the "Maximum FSB". I posted a comment about it but Wesley apparentely missed it.

 

[housecat]

Originally posted by: Bar81
Yeah, it was quite weak. All the bugs and incompatibilities were simply glossed over. The NF4 isn't ready for prime time and neither is SLI. The SATA controller issues need to get worked out as well as the SLI DVI WS issues. Not to mention the horrid BIOSes wreaking havoc all over the place.

Ok. There is tons of us already with these boards with results that dont back up any of your claims.. yet you arent using on yourself and someone is supposed to take your opinion seriously.

I wouldnt be spreading things that are untrue if I were you. You are ignorant to what you are talking about.

 

[Bar81]

Get a clue. Try going to any forum, including this one, and reading the threads.

 

[Tanclearas]

I know that people like to defend their purchases, but I too found some comments about the Asus board out of line with similar comments about the other boards. When I was first reading about how "ho-hum" the features of the Asus board were, I was expecting to see awesome things with the other boards. For example, they mentioned about the Asus "only" having 1394a when only one of the other boards had 1394b. I know they were making reference to other Asus high-end boards, but the tone of the comments really contrasts to the comments about the other boards.

Although the extra space between the video card slots on the Asus board was mentioned, the reviewer didn't really seem to think that it was that great of an idea. This feature alone was one of the main reasons I wanted to get the Asus board. Hell, I'd rather be able to get great overclocks from my video card(s) than just increase the FSB on a processor that will only show significant benefits in synthetic memory benchmarks.

As for the "stability" of the DFI board at such a high FSB, I wonder what sort of stress testing was actually done, compared to what was reported by HardOCP.

Kyle's comments

Once again we saw a DFI motherboard fail when it comes to long-term stress testing. By ?long-term,? we mean in excess of 24 hours. While most of the latest heavy hitters from the likes of ABIT, ASUS, and MSI will literally run error free for days under 100% load, that is not the experience we have had with DFI motherboards. While this seems to put a really bad spin on the DFI nF4 SLI-DR, in reality it does not at all. Our DFI nF4 SLI-DR would many times run 8 to 16 hours error-free under severe temperature conditions while pulling a heavy workload.

I can't argue about the audio results though. Kudos to MSI for including such a great audio solution. Sadly, there are no additional PCIe slots?!

I know a lot of things come down to someone's personal preference(s). I'll just leave it that I would have weighted certain features differently than in this review.

 

[Sniper82]

Although a dumb reason for most but one of the main reasons I went with DFI is because I liked the looks and it includes UV cables and alot of the board was UV. Would look really nice in a windowed case with dual UV CCFL's. IMO all these boards are gonna give everyone some issue at some point. So for that reason I decided to go by looks and layout of the boards. I don't use half the features these mobos have. I still use a IDE HDD. If the MSI Neo 4 Ultra had onboard soundblaster 24bit like its Sli version I would have probably went with it.

If I wasn't going with a UV theme in my case and didn't have a window I would have probably went with a cheaper Chaintech or ECS mobo and saved about $40. I just hope I don't have many problems with the DFI but we will see.

 

[housecat]

Originally posted by: Bar81
Get a clue. Try going to any forum, including this one, and reading the threads.

Yeah I can read threads all day.

But guess what, most problems are due to user error, or poor choice of parts.

What problems am I supposed to be having?

Just because you dont have a NF4 or SLI, and you've READ some noobs opinions on why they cant get theirs working... doesnt mean squat.

From an experienced user such as myself: it works fine. No stability problems at all, even overclocked.

Sorry! But your ignorant on this issue.

Go buy a NF4, and I'll help you work through your issues you come across.

 

[Bar81]

Yeah, I guess you must be right, those people with all the problems are just imagining them or are "noobs" </sarcasm> Notice how even you admit that "most" problems are due to user error, meaning you are admitting there are problems. Stop trying to defend your purchase, there are well documented problems with the nForce 4 SLI setups. You can bury your head in the sand all you want but it doesn't make you right.

 

[housecat]

Originally posted by: Bar81
Yeah, I guess you must be right, those people with all the problems are just imagining them or are "noobs" </sarcasm> Notice how even you admit that "most" problems are due to user error, meaning you are admitting there are problems. Stop trying to defend your purchase, there are well documented problems with the nForce 4 SLI setups. You can bury your head in the sand all you want but it doesn't make you right.

So it makes you right to sit there, with NO NF4 and tell me how bad they are???

"Notice how even you admit that "most" problems are due to user error, meaning you are admitting there are problems. "

Yeah, but no more REAL problems than exist on your rig.

Quit defending your buying choices, by attempting to degrade the new stuff.

I dont know why people like you exist, why do you troll on forums bashing hardware you have no idea about, and dont own?

 

[Bar81]

Denial, beautiful, isn't it

 

[housecat]

Sure. I'm waiting for my next system crash too.

Err. FIRST system crash.. even powered up the first time in SLI mode.

Now go find some other piece of hardware to troll on about.

 

[mooncancook]

SLI is a new technology and it is for hardcore gamers. at this stage it is not mature enough for everyone. What I like to see is that SLI setup will not require games to be optimized for it. I don't i think I remember anything like that with Voodoo2 SLI. I think Voodoo2 SLI worked with any game (i may be wrong).

With that said, I'm completely satisfied with my DFI NF4-Ultra. I've not had a single issue with this board. For those who think NF4 is not ready for prime time, you always have the choice of NF3 and NF2. But for me, NF4 is the best choice for AMD system now.

 

[housecat]

You are right mooncancook. Hes just bitter he stuck with old tech. I'm glad someone else stepped up to expose this.

All I can say is: enjoy yer NF3. But I kinda like my NF4 SLI rig. Its hard to accept people who have no clue or idea what they are talking about, telling me my hardware is "not ready for primetime".

 

[FastEddie]

Not a single mention of the NF4/Diamondmax10 fiasco?

This is a well known problem with NF3/939 based boards as well. But aside from this ongoing problem, I've yet to see any stability issues with the chipset that driver/bios updates didn't correct, (6800Ultras with nVidia's 66.93 Final Forceware issue).

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: Bar81
Get a clue. Try going to any forum, including this one, and reading the threads.

What clue do I need to get? I'm using an Asus A8N and SLI without any problems, what other clue is there to get?

I'm sorry some other guys are having trouble, but I'm not?

 

[akugami]

The few crashes I've had I knew what they were. A couple was trying to overclock higher than what it would go at certain voltages for either the ram or cpu. A couple of them were due to overclocking the video card. In each case it was the user that was at fault. I can say that I had a flawless install even with the 1002 bios that shipped with the drive. Everything worked fine out of the box and I didn't encounter anything unusual.

Most of the initial problems were a crap shipping bios on the Asus board as well as a more power hungry than usual mobo coupled with higher power requirements of people using dual video cards. Mobos from other companies were actually tested longer and had more complete bios's. The additional testing meant a lot of the initial wave of problems on the Asus boards weren't on them. Other than that, what major problems have there been on the NF4 based motherboards other than the Maxter Diamondmax 9 and 10 HD's. Updating the bios for your new mobos and getting a better power supply solved 90% of the problems that I've read about.

You gotta love people bashing a whole line of products because of a few problems that have mostly been solved. The only really outstanding issues concerning NF4 based mobos are the Maxtor HD problems which didn't get mentioned in the SLI roundup and the fact that SLI (not NF4 but SLI) is not quite ready for prime time. Every single review in every single web site I've read has come up with the same thing, NF4 based mobos are rock solid at stock and one video card.

I saw how they trashed the Asus A8N but it's performance (aside from the onboard audio using 3d audio) was similar enough to every other single board that it didn't matter. I was expecting the other mobos to blow the Asus out of the water which was not the case. The only real negative of the board from personal use is the northbridge fan being a POS and the fact that most people can't seem to get higher than about 250mhz on their memory using 1:1 and 1T. This might just be a bios issue that will be solved later, who knows. This isn't really an issue with me since I'm using value RAM and my future possible ram upgrades for this board is more in the line of using two 1GB modules for a total of 2GB.

Overall I'm really happy with how my A8N SLI Deluxe performed. It may not be the best but it's far from bad. The only real flaw is the loud as heck northbridge fan that seems to be failing cause it occasionally emits this high pitched screetching sound that sounds like it's rubbing against something. Getting it changed soon. That's not to say there isn't room for improvements. Fix the darn memory issue. This will only affect a tiny tiny percentage of people as most people do not overclock their memory much past about 250 which this board can do. Firewire 800 woulda been nice and I was completely confused on why this was not put in on an abvious enthusiast board. I can always add a Firewire 800 board later but it woulda been nice out of the box. Get an onboard sound solution that doesn't utilize the cpu as much on 3d sound. This was the only true area where this board got killed.

 

[lotus503]

Yeah aside from my maxtor storage drive not working I dont have any issues. I fully expected to have some hiccups. I think the boards alright, OC's as far as my CPU and ram will go. That said they did ship it with a POS bios and for a company as big as ASUS I expected a bit more than to have to upgrade the bios 2 hours into my setup (Thank god for these forums).

My first real AMD build and I can tell you, considerably more research needed ahead of time to get everything where it needs to be. But its fun, I can see why AMD is popular with hobbiest, by the time your done building a rig you have so much time invested tinkering you get hooked

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Originally posted by: S0Lstice

My first real AMD build and I can tell you, considerably more research needed ahead of time to get everything where it needs to be. But its fun, I can see why AMD is popular with hobbiest, by the time your done building a rig you have so much time invested tinkering you get hooked

I have built several AMD's in the last few years. They were all very straight forward and simple builds, until NF4. The NF4 was the most challanging, and yes addictive build yet! My NF4 build was definately not like any of my previous AMD builds. Because NF4 brought so many new technologies to the AMD platform at one time, and was rushed to market under great pressure from Enthusiasts who were delaying their purchases waiting on one or all of the new NF4 features.

 

[ohnnyj]

I have had my A8N since the beginning of December and have not had a single issue with the board. I setup my system just like any other and have not run into any problems. It was a breeze setting up SLI, set the EZ card the right way attach the bridge and install the drivers, this isn't rocket science. I am pushing this board pretty hard as well with an FX-55, 2GB (4x512) Corsair 3200XL, 2xBFG 6800GTs, 2x74GB WD Raptors, a single 34GB Raptor, a 400GB Seagate, a Plextor 716A and 716SA, an Audigy4 Pro, a Belkin Pre-N, and a few thermal monitors. Of course this attests to the quality of my PCP&C Turbo-Cool 510 SLI, but it takes a stable board as well to make sure everything runs smoothly.