Hier ist mal ein interessanter Bericht vom neuen Board von MSI:
We have a dekko at the MSI RD480 Neo2 Crossfire
First Look
By Nebojsa Novakovic: Sonntag 11 Dezember 2005, 17:32
[Advert]
AS ONE the heavyweights in the PC component industry, MSI can well afford to support multiple camps - be that both Intel and AMD for the CPU platforms, or now, both SLI and CrossFire in the multi-GPU graphics arena.
Here we have a first look at MSI's RD480 Neo2 mainboard, their first with the RD480, ATI's initial AMD CrossFire chipset - also known as Radeon Xpress 200 in the marketspeak. To be followed by a test with R520-based CrossFire cards (which we still wait for), this is a good hint of things to come on the ATI CrossFire platform in the long run.
The red PCB houses a lot of standard stuff - 2 long PCI-E slots (either in 1x16 or 2x8 configuration) with large 2 slot gap in between, 2 short x1 PCI-E slots, and 2 PCI slots. The ULi M1573 south bridge adds four standard SATA (not SATA2) ports, HD audio and 8 x USB 2. The Gigabit Ethernet uses Realtek 8110SB chip, running over simple PCI-33 - that means that the real throughput will be somewhat less than the wire-speed Gigabit you experience from PCI-X or PCI-E Gigabit controllers. But again, most home users never experience (or need) full Gigabit throughput - after all, no home hard disk can come close to it anyway, if sending large files over the network.
Without a huge, overpowering VRM block, this board is not meant for ultraheavy overclocking, but even then it did the job well in my test. I composed a system around it with an Athlon64FX-57, CoolerMaster AquaGate Mini CPU water cooling, HIS IceQ Radeon X1800XL and OCZ PC-4800 EL (DDR-600) DIMMs. The power for all this was supplied by MGE XG Magnum 500W power supply (see the separate review snippet).
Using the Cell menu for overclock settings, I played with different variables - reaching 3.02 GHz with DDR-430 CL2-2-2-5 settings first and HT overclocked to 1.08 GHz, the CPU temperature in one-hour run increased from 45 C at 2.8 GHz default, to 49 C as measured by the BIOS hardware monitor (I upped the CPU voltage by 50 mV, though). Then I pushed the CPU to 3.33 GHz with DDR-475 CL2-3-2-6 setting and HT overclocked to 1.19 GHz, and the board still worked fine, even booted the Windows - however, with CPU voltage upped by 0.15 V, the temperature reader showed an alarming 58 C. Anyway, the board completed the Sandra tests flawlessly: Sandra 2005 SP3 Memory benchmark at 6.81 GB/s is pretty impressive for such a simple system, not to mention the 15409 MIPS in integer, and 6762 Sandra MFLOPS.
Beyond these clock settings, Windows didn't boot any further - so I went back to "cool, stable" 3.02 GHz setup. Anyway, great HT overclocking is a nice surprise on this middle-class board - the HT 2.0 spec supports up to 1.4 GHz clock actually, it just depends on the chipset and board vendor's implementation. In fact, this is better HT overclocking than on the Asus Nvidia SLI board I ran before - it conked out after 1.1 GHz.
So, if cheaper than SLI, and with AMD's upcoming promise of affordable CrossFire with single-slot X1800XL cards, this board may be a good choice for a PC user who wants future graphics performance scalability, but not from Nvidia.
Can't light the (Cross)Fire
Since Fudo already succeeded running twin ordinary X1300s in a CrossFire pair - and following the assumption that the high-end X1800's won't work without a CrossFire master - I took a risk and put together HIS X1800XT 512 MB (as a master) and HIS X1800XL256 MB (as a slave) - the system was running WindowsXP 64-bit edition with native Catalyst 5.11 driver, so why not try? I installed the Windows with only the XT inside, and Catalyst ran fine. Then I installed the added X1800XL and set the BIOS to manual Dual GPU settings. The Windows booted, but not only it couldn't run CrossFire, but it couldn't even detect the second card at all in the Catalyst!
Well, I re-installed the Catalyst then, and also updated the mainboard to the newest BIOS version. After the reboot, the system could detect the second graphics card, but to no avail - CrossFire couldn't be lit up. So, yes, readers will have to wait for the "master" cards to get Crossfire with X1800 series, however by that time R580-based stuff could be out too...
With the standard HIS X1800XT card alone, the MSI mainboard did give some impressive results anyway, here they are!
Sandra 2005SP3
CPU speed GHz
2.8 - 3.0
CPU int MIPS
13844 - 14896
CPU FP MFLOPS
6133 - 6579
multimed int it/s
20944 - 22487
multimed FP it/s
32244 - 34825
memory int MByte/s
6043 - 6535
memory FP MByte/s
6052 - 6550
Next time round
What I would like to see next from MSI? Well, ATI RD580 is not far away, with its humongous 44 PCI-E lanes and even better feature set with a choice of SATA-2 south bridges. If one puts a good heat pipe or water cooling system like Corsair Cool on this chipset, well maybe we can exceed the HT clock spec beyond 1.4 GHz - reliably for long-term use.
MSI started a nice custom of using quality hardware-based on-board audio like Creative Audigy2 - well, it may be time to put X-Fi with XRAM on board now... after all, the users who will splurge on a dual X1800XT PE and all the system to run it, won't mind spending a bit more on really good sound without CPU utilisation bottleneck.
Finally, hat about all those PCI-E lanes? Hmm, two X16 slots (separated by a two slot gap, please), plus one X4 slot, plus two X1 slots, plus one bridge for a PCI-X 133 slot in addition to usual PCI, and you got yourself a good slot set catering to both current plus future cards. And, to feed all that bandwidth? Oh yes, you'll need the new Athlon64 M2 socket and dual-channel DDR2-800 at least, I guess... µ
quelle: theinquirer.net
We have a dekko at the MSI RD480 Neo2 Crossfire
First Look
By Nebojsa Novakovic: Sonntag 11 Dezember 2005, 17:32
[Advert]
AS ONE the heavyweights in the PC component industry, MSI can well afford to support multiple camps - be that both Intel and AMD for the CPU platforms, or now, both SLI and CrossFire in the multi-GPU graphics arena.
Here we have a first look at MSI's RD480 Neo2 mainboard, their first with the RD480, ATI's initial AMD CrossFire chipset - also known as Radeon Xpress 200 in the marketspeak. To be followed by a test with R520-based CrossFire cards (which we still wait for), this is a good hint of things to come on the ATI CrossFire platform in the long run.
The red PCB houses a lot of standard stuff - 2 long PCI-E slots (either in 1x16 or 2x8 configuration) with large 2 slot gap in between, 2 short x1 PCI-E slots, and 2 PCI slots. The ULi M1573 south bridge adds four standard SATA (not SATA2) ports, HD audio and 8 x USB 2. The Gigabit Ethernet uses Realtek 8110SB chip, running over simple PCI-33 - that means that the real throughput will be somewhat less than the wire-speed Gigabit you experience from PCI-X or PCI-E Gigabit controllers. But again, most home users never experience (or need) full Gigabit throughput - after all, no home hard disk can come close to it anyway, if sending large files over the network.
Without a huge, overpowering VRM block, this board is not meant for ultraheavy overclocking, but even then it did the job well in my test. I composed a system around it with an Athlon64FX-57, CoolerMaster AquaGate Mini CPU water cooling, HIS IceQ Radeon X1800XL and OCZ PC-4800 EL (DDR-600) DIMMs. The power for all this was supplied by MGE XG Magnum 500W power supply (see the separate review snippet).
Using the Cell menu for overclock settings, I played with different variables - reaching 3.02 GHz with DDR-430 CL2-2-2-5 settings first and HT overclocked to 1.08 GHz, the CPU temperature in one-hour run increased from 45 C at 2.8 GHz default, to 49 C as measured by the BIOS hardware monitor (I upped the CPU voltage by 50 mV, though). Then I pushed the CPU to 3.33 GHz with DDR-475 CL2-3-2-6 setting and HT overclocked to 1.19 GHz, and the board still worked fine, even booted the Windows - however, with CPU voltage upped by 0.15 V, the temperature reader showed an alarming 58 C. Anyway, the board completed the Sandra tests flawlessly: Sandra 2005 SP3 Memory benchmark at 6.81 GB/s is pretty impressive for such a simple system, not to mention the 15409 MIPS in integer, and 6762 Sandra MFLOPS.
Beyond these clock settings, Windows didn't boot any further - so I went back to "cool, stable" 3.02 GHz setup. Anyway, great HT overclocking is a nice surprise on this middle-class board - the HT 2.0 spec supports up to 1.4 GHz clock actually, it just depends on the chipset and board vendor's implementation. In fact, this is better HT overclocking than on the Asus Nvidia SLI board I ran before - it conked out after 1.1 GHz.
So, if cheaper than SLI, and with AMD's upcoming promise of affordable CrossFire with single-slot X1800XL cards, this board may be a good choice for a PC user who wants future graphics performance scalability, but not from Nvidia.
Can't light the (Cross)Fire
Since Fudo already succeeded running twin ordinary X1300s in a CrossFire pair - and following the assumption that the high-end X1800's won't work without a CrossFire master - I took a risk and put together HIS X1800XT 512 MB (as a master) and HIS X1800XL256 MB (as a slave) - the system was running WindowsXP 64-bit edition with native Catalyst 5.11 driver, so why not try? I installed the Windows with only the XT inside, and Catalyst ran fine. Then I installed the added X1800XL and set the BIOS to manual Dual GPU settings. The Windows booted, but not only it couldn't run CrossFire, but it couldn't even detect the second card at all in the Catalyst!
Well, I re-installed the Catalyst then, and also updated the mainboard to the newest BIOS version. After the reboot, the system could detect the second graphics card, but to no avail - CrossFire couldn't be lit up. So, yes, readers will have to wait for the "master" cards to get Crossfire with X1800 series, however by that time R580-based stuff could be out too...
With the standard HIS X1800XT card alone, the MSI mainboard did give some impressive results anyway, here they are!
Sandra 2005SP3
CPU speed GHz
2.8 - 3.0
CPU int MIPS
13844 - 14896
CPU FP MFLOPS
6133 - 6579
multimed int it/s
20944 - 22487
multimed FP it/s
32244 - 34825
memory int MByte/s
6043 - 6535
memory FP MByte/s
6052 - 6550
Next time round
What I would like to see next from MSI? Well, ATI RD580 is not far away, with its humongous 44 PCI-E lanes and even better feature set with a choice of SATA-2 south bridges. If one puts a good heat pipe or water cooling system like Corsair Cool on this chipset, well maybe we can exceed the HT clock spec beyond 1.4 GHz - reliably for long-term use.
MSI started a nice custom of using quality hardware-based on-board audio like Creative Audigy2 - well, it may be time to put X-Fi with XRAM on board now... after all, the users who will splurge on a dual X1800XT PE and all the system to run it, won't mind spending a bit more on really good sound without CPU utilisation bottleneck.
Finally, hat about all those PCI-E lanes? Hmm, two X16 slots (separated by a two slot gap, please), plus one X4 slot, plus two X1 slots, plus one bridge for a PCI-X 133 slot in addition to usual PCI, and you got yourself a good slot set catering to both current plus future cards. And, to feed all that bandwidth? Oh yes, you'll need the new Athlon64 M2 socket and dual-channel DDR2-800 at least, I guess... µ
quelle: theinquirer.net
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