aaahh...I see. I assumed the NF200 was being introduced as a workaround to the P55's limitations, being a gamer first and foremost I'd rather spend more on GPUs and get a mid range CPU/mobo that'll clock well, I asssumed that was the case with the FTW 200. I hope someone (hintOriginally Posted by SKYMTL
) will test the differences when it officially launches as it's a question that keeps resurfacing.
.
Great preview, I like the BIOS switch, ECP V2, and EV bot. Nice to see them focusing on overclockers like that.
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With the PCI-E Disable jumpers EVGA provides, that should be quite easy on the FTW 200 and Classified. It sure beats using masking tape to physically block off the the pins on the card itself.I hope someone (hint
I wanna see some X58 love now!!! All these P55 boards have badass features that the X58 should have! Good job to eVGA though! \m/\m/
integrated dm... not bad, but 2 places behind the comma is not enough, hope they can make it 3! and i hope its accuracy is good...
the pciE disable jumpers should be a tad higher, would be tricky to access them there with long cards installed i think
pciE lanes... i dont get it...
i think they made a mistake, the 4th slot is always 4 lanes, not 8... and its pciE 1.1 through the p55 chipset... so basically useless for vgas.
i dont understand how the switching will work...
16/8
16
16/8
8
actually it is:
16/8
16
16/8
4
so its either:
16
16
or its:
8
16
8
is that right?
then running sli will mean you either have to go for slot1 and 3 and have lots of free space and can use pci... or you go for 16/16 but then the cards are next to each other and pci is blocked... x58 classified was better...
the best would be if the first slot is always 16x and the third slot is either 8 or 16 and the second slot is 8 or 0.
but im not sure if it affects perf at all going 8/8 compared to 16/16... my guess is 1-3% when using dual gpu cards but for benching every bit counts...
the matx board looks sexy!!!
Wow, the first P55 EVGA FTW one looks amazing. So many crazy features.
I thought P55 was supposed to be mainstream version of X58? Why does it have more/better features than current X58 boards??
Also are they coming out with newer x58 chipset boards, because it talks about future x58 boards that will be "PhysX" ready.
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I think I might buy the budget / micro version, put in a nice midrange i7 / i5, and some nice memory with one video card. Excellent.
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Some more info from EVGA's P55 presentation:
Yeah, I didn't have the space to pop in the whole slide show.
the switching is designed to make best performance in each scenario.
First slot is always natively connected to cpu
First slot is switched to x8 if 2/3/4 connected.
2 is always x16 from nf200.
3 is x16 if 4 is not filled
this brings performance similar to x58 in single, dual, triple, triple + physx scenario compared to other ways of laying.
smart design
i dont think any of the others have done anything like this
They have, just not ready for release yet.smart design
i dont think any of the others have done anything like this
Does that mean if you filled just 2 and 3 they'd both run at 16x?
.
Some boards do struggle with PCI/e clocking on P55 - although you can sometimes work around it by ramping up slowly starting at 105 MHz and then goign to 115MHz. Trouble is that you have to start again if the board power cycles. Might be fixable via BIOS, but nothing yet..
We've got a few more boards to A/B test, but so far ease of use under cold conditions is being headlined by EVGA once again on this round of CPU's.
In terms of HW functions (compensation adjustments), the other boards lack the GPIO's or opamps, so you're not going to see an answer to the EVGA stuff unless manufacturers decide to jump on the bandwagon with revisions.
The ripple shown in the slide is from one of the vendors that uses a multiplexed PWM. 50~90mv of ripple (depending upon load) at a base swithcing frequency of 250KHz. One of the reasons as a consumer not to invest in more phases = unconditionally better thinking. Luckily there are only 2 vendors that currently use multiplexers - ASUS and GB. I hope other vendors do not jump on this bandwagon in a bid to lure the naive. Such topologies are in no way better than a buck controller driving each phase generically that supports higher switching frequency and higher current delivery for improved trasnient response.
later
Raja
Last edited by Raja@ASUS; 08-21-2009 at 12:38 AM.
thx raja, was wondering what board they compared to, could as well have been a cr4ppy cheap matx board from ecs or biostar or j&w...
i think evga is the only one who really tried to squeeze everything out of p55/1156... not sure about dfi, havent heard of their board at all so far...
and roch, yeah im not sure about that either... peter, your explanation of the pciE lane assignment is confusing, can you explain how itll be set up for 2 cards in slots1 and 2, or 1 and 3?
i thought about the dmm on the board thing again and... actually it doesnt really make sense...
it would be much better to have a really good hwmonitor chip that can track voltages accurately in bios and in windows than having an on-board dmm that requires you to manually touch the pads and shows you the volts on a small display
is it possible to have some logic or chip that can meassure volts very accurately hooked up to all voltages and you can switch what voltage its meassuring somehow? kinda like a dmm but it displays results in bios or in windows and you can switch the voltage its reading from bios or from windows?
Last edited by saaya; 08-21-2009 at 02:42 AM.
There are sampling chips out there that could do it, but I guess then you're into the realms of having to code and develop software that reads it (quite often without support from the manufac if the intended usage of the product is not geared for PC motherboards per se).
I think not having to probe it (iProbe to go with iClock ??) would be nice, a rotary switch linked to an LED output would suffice..
later
Raja
yeah... or that... not perfect but should be very easy to implement...
a switch that lets you jump from one voltage to the next without having to pin a needle on a tiny pad.
raja, since peter seems to be off, do you know how that evga board has the pciE lanes assigned?
For the NF200 boards:
According to EVGA, if the 1st x16 slot is populated and another card is installed into one of the other "x16" slots, the second card will run at x8 while the primary slot will remain at x16. There are only two manufacturers who may be releasing P55 boards that can run CF or SLI at x16 / x16 and neither of those is EVGA.
Maybe EVGA will have something else planned for the Classified 200 board but the briefing I had clearly stated that the FTW 200 will run 1x16 and 3x8 (no x4 slot) when two GPUs are installed. I am guessing that's 16 lanes from the NF200 and 8 from the PCH but I could be mistaken.
slot 1 will always be native so that single card you dont have to go thru nf200.
and roch, yeah im not sure about that either... peter, your explanation of the pciE lane assignment is confusing, can you explain how itll be set up for 2 cards in slots1 and 2, or 1 and 3?
i thought about the dmm on the board thing again and... actually it doesnt really make sense...
it would be much better to have a really good hwmonitor chip that can track voltages accurately in bios and in windows than having an on-board dmm that requires you to manually touch the pads and shows you the volts on a small display
u can run sli or cf on 1,2 or 1,3 its exactly the same.
you can test performance of various ways of routing for optimal 1,2,3,4 card with a nf200 bridge card and see that this gives the best performance in all scenarios. In simpler terms , direct to cpu @ x8 is still slightly faster than x16 to nf200 to cpu.
u cant measure voltages of your vga with just hw monitor, gpu, vdd, vddq, vpll, nvio, etc
Last edited by LardArse; 08-21-2009 at 07:19 AM.
I guess it all really comes down to the possibility of future GPUs saturating a native x8 interface.
The extra 'hop' is always a bit of a kicker.
775 mounting is nice.
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PCH doesnt have any pciE 2.0 lanes, only 1.1 and it DOES have 8 lanes iirc but only 4 of those can be bundled to a 4x link...
thats still really confusing... the cpu only has 16 lanes, so how can you use nf200 AND have the first 16x slot hooked up to the cpu directly?
unless you route 8 lanes to the first 16x slot and the other 8 lanes to the nf200...
so then its:
8/16
0/16
0/8/16
0/8
very nice!
tri sli will be a bit ackward then, running 8/16/16 hahah
wow there are so many possible combinations... interesting!!!
single vga:
1.) 16x to cpu (slot1)
2.) 8x to cpu (slot1 with slot 2/3/4 occupied by any other card)
3.) 16x to nf200 and then 8x to cpu (slot2 or 3)
4.) 8x to nf200 and then 8x to cpu (slot4)
you already said 1.) is slightly faster
dual vga:
1.) 8x to cpu + 16x to nf200 and 8x to cpu (slot1 + slot2/3)
2.) 8x to cpu + 8x to nf200 and 8x to cpu (slot1 + slot4)
3.) 16x to nf200 and 4x to cpu + 16x to nf200 and 4x to cpu (slot2 + slot3)
4.) 16x to nf200 and 4x to cpu + 8x to nf200 and 4x to cpu (slot2/3 + slot4)
according to nvidia 3.) should be the fastest, but my guess is 1.) is faster...
and the best way would be 1.B) using the 1st and 3rd slot so the 1st vga has lots of fresh air and you have the pci slot free... very nice!
tri vga:
1.) 8x to cpu + 16x to nf200 and 4x to cpu + 16x to nf200 and 4x to cpu (slot1+slot2+slot3)
2.) 8x to cpu + 16x to nf200 and 4x to cpu + 8x to nf200 and 4x to cpu (slot1+3+4)
3.) 16x to nf200 and ~2.5x to cpu + 8x to nf200 and ~2.5x to cpu + 8x to nf200 and ~2.5x to cpu
3.) shouldnt be all that bad according to nvidia, but i think the cards will be highly bw starved...
1.) is the fastest i guess, and the first slot can be a 295 and the 2nd and 3rd slot run through the nf200 so 2 gtx285 cards can be masked as a second nf200... very nice
2.) is a nice option if the cards are slim or watercooled as the pci slot is still free then and the first vga has lots of room for fresh air.
quad vga:
1.) 8x to cpu + 16x to nf200 and ~2.5x to cpu + 8x to nf200 and ~2.5x to cpu + 8x to nf200 and ~2.5x to cpu
in my testing even dualgpu cards dont saturate an 8x 2.0 link...
the perf loss from 16 2.0 to 8 2.0 lanes for a dual gpu card is there but its tiny...
i only tested with a 4870x2 though... nvidia usually likes extra bandwidth more, so there quadsli with 2 295 cards might see a drop when running them on 8x/8x... but since the board will have 4 slots to run quadsli with 4 cards... that shouldnt really matter...
For my side, dont really need to guess, take a bridge card try it in different configs and you can see.
where am i supposed to get a bridge card? or anyone else besides andre and oskar for that matter :P
im not doubting it, im just saying i guess cause i never had a chance to try it...
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