XFX is well known around here for their fine quality video cards and accessories. They recently sent us a new motherboard that they have crafted, called the Mach4 NF2S-AED. This board is based on the new Nforce2 chipset for AMD processors, meaning it has all kinds of goodies to fiddle with. Here are the features and specs, taken from XFX’s website:
Processor
- AMD Athlon, AMD Athlon XP & AMD Duron
Front Side Bus(MHz)
- 400/333/266/200
Chipset
- NVIDIA SPP North Bridge
- NVIDIA MCP-T South Bridge
System Memory
- Dual DDR Support
- (3) 184-pin DDR DIMM Sockets (2.5v)
- DDR 400/333/266/200 ( PC3200/2700/2100/1600)
- Support for up to 3GB
Expansion Slots
- (1) AGP 8x, supports 1.5v Slot
- (5) PCI (PCI 2.2 compliant)
Onboard IDE
- (2) ATA 133/100/66 Bus Master IDE
Serial ATA
- Integrated Serial ATA (150MB/s)
Onboard FDD
- (1) Floppy Disk Drive (FDD) Connector (Supports Modes, 1.2/1.44/2.88 mb)
Onboard Audio
- 6 Channel Intagrated Audio
- AC’97 CODEC
FireWire (IEEE 1394)
- Integrated IEEE 1394
Onboard Ethernet
- Integrated 10/100
Onboard I/O
- (6) USB 2.0/1.1 (4 internal /2 Rear)
- (2) Serial ATA (150Mbit/s)
- CD Audio-in Connector
- Auxiliary-In (AUX) Connector
- Wake-on-LAN
- (3) CPU/ Power/Chassis FAN connector
Back Panel Connectors
- (1) PS/2 Mini-DIN keyboard Port
- (1) PS/2 Mini-DIN Mouse Port
- (2) USB 2.0 / 1.1
- (1) Parallel (25-Pin Female 1284 IEEE Bi-Directional SPP/EPP/ECP mode)
- (2) Serial (RS-232 Standard 9-Pin Male, 16550 UART compatible)
- (3) Audio jacks (Line-Out/Line-In/Microphone)
- (1) RJ-45 Ethernet port
- (1) 1394 port
System Monitoring & Management
- CPU Temperature Monitoring (Flexible Thermo Sensor)
- CPU Voltage Monitoring
- Wake-on-LAN
- Wake-on-Ring
- Keyboard-Power-on
- Timer-Power-on
- System Power Management
- AC Power Failure Recovery
ATX (305mm x 244mm)As you can see, these are some pretty impressive features. Some of the main features are the support for 400MHz front side bus speeds for Athlon XP Processors, onboard Serial ATA, onboard RAID, onboard 6.1 audio, onboard Firewire, USB 2.0, support for dual-channel DDR RAM setups, AGP 8x, and onboard 10/100 ethernet. This is clearly a premium board jam-packed with all kinds of new tech made for the enthusiast who wants the latest and greatest. Lets take a look at some of the neat things that come with this board.
This board comes in an XFX box with a pretty tough looking 3D pitbull on the front. I have to say, XFX have the most professional looking boxes, logos, and manuals that I have seen lately. As you can see, the box is really cool looking, with quite a bit of information on the board, including its features and a simple installation guide with pictures.
Now let’s move on to the contents of the box. Here we can see all the goodies that come with this board. In the picture on the left, there is the 6.1 audio header, the Parallel ATA cables, and the Serial ATA cables, as well as the manual, Serial ATA/RAID driver disk, and motherboard driver disk (the manual and CD are in the Mainboard Essentials Kit). In the picture on the right we can see the USB 2.0 headers, the Firewire headers, and the motherboard itself.
Here are some more pictures of what comes with the motherboard. The board comes with everything you need to have a pretty rockin’ setup.
Now let’s take a look at the board itself. the board has 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP, 3 Parallel ATA (one is shared between regular IDE and the IDE RAID controller), etc.
Here are some closer-up pictures of the individual components. On the left we have the socket for the CPU. As you can see, the capacitors are pretty close to the socket, but they’re not really close to the mounting clips, so they shouldn’t be too much of a problem. In the middle is a picture of the northbridge heatsink. I like the passive northbridge heatsinks because they do a fine job of cooling, don’t have any moving parts to break down and screw up the board, and they don’t create any noise like active cooling solutions. On the right is the Nvidia southbridge chip.
Here we have the Serial ATA connectors on the left, along with the VIA IDE RAID controller. On the right are the RAM sockets. If you wish to use Dual Channel technology, you would place one stick of RAM in each of the blue sockets so you can take advantage of a 128 bit data path instead of the normal 64 bit, with the speed enhancements that provides.
Let’s look at the I/O panel. On the left we have the 2 serial ports and 1 parallel port, as well as The ubiquitous PS/2 connectors. On the right we have the onboard 10/100 RJ45 jack along with 2 onboard USB ports. I’m surprised that they are still including onboard serial and parallel ports on new motherboards, since the technologies have pretty much been taken over by USB and FireWire, but it’s nice to have them in case you have an older printer or mouse.
Finally, let’s move on to the audio portion of the board. On the left are the standard audio jacks for plain old 2 channel audio. The second pic is my speakers hooked up to the connector. The third picture is the sound header that comes with the motherboard installed and hooked up to the rear channels of my 4.1 system. You can’t see the SPDIF connector, but it’s there. The sound system supports 6.1 audio and Dolby 5.1 decoding, which is pretty sweet.
Here we’ll be taking a look at the features of the BIOS. This motherboard comes with the standard Phoenix/Award BIOS that most motherboards come with these days. As you can see, it has most of the same options selectable from the main BIOS screen.
I’m only going to cover the parts of the BIOS that differ from other boards, mainly the integrated peripherals and advanced chipset features (overclocking stuff). Let’s take a look at the integrated peripherals. This is where we can enable the onboard sound, serial ports, ethernet adapter, USB ports, FireWire, and IDE.
Everything seems to work fine in there, so let’s take a look at the most important part (for overclockers, at least): the advanced chipset features. I was expecting this section to be full of features to modify the RAM and CPU settings, but I was left quite disappointed.
As you can see, there is no way to change the multiplier on the CPU, which limits the overclocking ability immensely. The RAM settings are fairly flexible, but they scale with the CPU speed by changing the “By SPD” setting to a different percentage of the front side bus. Also, when you change the Memory timings from Optimal to Aggressive, it merely changes the RAS to 8, the RCD to 3, and the RP to 3, while leaving the CAS at 2.5. Doesn’t seem very aggressive to me, but you can change all of those settings manually if you wish.
One thing of note that is really cool is the CPU Thermal Throttling setting, which you can set to automatically slow down your PC to a set percentage if it gets too hot. This is pretty cool, but I don’t really see the usefulness of it. Nevertheless, it’s there and its pretty neat.
We’ll see the effect that the lack of CPU options has on overclocking in a bit.
I had a few problems initially when I installed this motherboard. XFX had sent us two of them for some reason, so I installed the first one I grabbed. I could not get this one to work (Windows wouldn’t install, hard drives/CD drives not recognized, etc.) so I swapped it out with the other one. This one seems to work fine, leading me to believe that the first one must have been broken. Here are a few pictures of the motherboard installed and running.
As you can see, the northbridge heatsink is not in the way of anything, which is good since I have a huge heatsink (Thermalright AX-7) on my CPU and a large heatpipe cooler on my GPU, and everything fits just fine. The 5 PCI slots will be enough for pretty much anybody, although I know some boards come with 6. Everything seems to fit well, I didn’t have any problems installing my heatsink like I have with other motherboards due to the capacitors around the CPU socket. All in all, a very well laid out board.
When I installed Windows and installed the drivers from the included CD, I immediately went to Nvidia’s website to download the newest drivers. After I installed these, I noticed that when burning CDs the buffer would fluctuate like crazy, and burning a normal 650 MB CD took over 5 minutes on my 52x burner.
I later found out that Nvidia had removed the acclerated IDE drivers from the latest driver pack, due to some problems associated with them. I finally found a driver pack that included the drivers on a forum, and after that my CDs burned fine.
This is completely Nvidia’s fault, not XFX’s, so I hold no ill towards them as a result. Also, since this board is brand new and (as far as I know) not available on the market yet, there was a lack of downloads for it from XFX on their website, but I’m sure as soon as it is widely released they will have more downloads available.
The manual has to be one of the best motherboard manuals that I have ever read. It is written in clear English, instead of the “Engrish” that most motherboard manuals contain. It completely outlines every feature, jumper, connector, and BIOS setting available, with lots of pictures and diagrams.
I wish more motherboard manufacturers would hire people who speak fluent English to write their manuals as it is clear that XFX has done. The only thing I found lacking was the fact that the SPDIF install is a little confusing.
Other than the few caveats explained above, the installation was smooth. Let’s check out the BIOS features.
System Specs
- XFX NF2S-AED motherboard
- Athlon XP 2400+ Thoroughbred Core
- 512MB Corsair XMS3200
- FIC ATI Radeon 9700
- Samsung 52x24x52x CDRW
- Pioneer 16x slot loading DVD-ROM
- Western Digital 80GByte SE Hard drive
Here’s the WCPUID screen for the non-overclocked 2400+ showing the true speed:
For benchmarking, the standard tool around here is SiSoft Sandra Professional. It is a synthetic benchmark that measures memory, hard drive, and CPU speeds. Although it is a synthetic benchmark, the results are pretty accurate and tend to scale well when measured against real-world applications. Here are the results of the memory bandwidth test. Remember that this is only in single channel mode, since I only have one RAM stick, so the results are lower than they would be if I was running in dual-channel mode. Also, the memory was run at the most aggressive timings available.
As you can see, the results are somewhat disappointing. The board is easily beaten by the KT400 score that is supplied with Sandra. The score is roughly the same as the nForce2 PC2700 score. I don’t know if this is a result of bad drivers or because it wasn’t running in dual-channel mode, but I’d be willing to say maybe a bit of both. The drivers supplied by nVidia for the nForce2 boards are somewhat lacking (and unstable, in my experience). Let’s check out some scores from the hard drive benchmark.
This seems rather low as well, especially considering that I am running the Western Digital Special Edition drive with 8 megs of cache. I attribute this to nVidia’s IDE drivers, which have suffered numerous problems, so much so that they stopped including the accelerated drivers in the latest driver package. Also of note, I experienced data corruption when I tried to use the accelerated drivers that I downloaded from a third party site, so I wouldn’t recommend using them. nVidia took them out of the driver pack for a reason. Here are some CPU scores from Sandra, this will help to determine how efficiently the board handles the processor, compared to other boards.
As you can see, the results are consistent with what we would expect from the processor. This score is consistent with scores from my Epox KT400 board, so VIA and nVidia seem to be on about the same page here. Now let’s try out some 3DMark scores to gauge how much overclocking effects game play (the overclocked results will be on the next page).
These scores are respectable from this hardware combination. In fact, they are actually higher than the scores I got when I ran the same system with my KT400 board, which shows that the nVidia board is a great choice for gaming. Also, we must take into consideration that 3DMark03 has a sound test, which gauges how much of a performance hit the system takes for running sound. Since this board has onboard 6.1 sound, I decided to give you the individual scores for all 3 sound tests.
Ouch, these scores are pretty brutal. We’re looking at a loss of 5 FPS on the 60 sounds test, that’s an 18% decrease in FPS as a result of using the onboard sound. Of course, this number will be much less if you choose to forego using the onboard sound, as many of you will do. Let’s see how well these scores compare when we overclock the board.
As you have already seen from the BIOS, this motherboard is sorely lacking in the overclocking department. I was only able to raise my Athlon XP 2400+ from 2000 MHz to 2180 MHz. I achieved this by increasing the front-side bus from 133 to 145 MHz, which increased the RAM speed to 212MHz. Since there is no BIOS setting for changing the multiplier of the chip or unlocking the chip in software this was the highest speed I was able to achieve and not have 3DMark03 come crashing down upon me. This was with the most aggressive RAM timings, since it is my feeling that you should not have to sacrifice one area of performance to gain in another area. So here is the WCPUID screen for my overclocked board.
Now here are the scores for SiSoft Sandra’s memory bandwidth benchmark. They scale well with what would be expected from such a minimal increase in bus and CPU speed.
I decided to forego the hard drive benchmark, as it seemed redundant. Overclocking a motherboard should not have any effect on IDE speed, and if it does then something is wrong. I do, however, have the CPU arithmetic and multimedia scores for the overclocked processor. They are nothing special, basically what we would expect. However, this lets us know that the board doesn’t suffer from any serious problems regarding the CPU and overclocking (except that it’s not very good at it).
And finally, we have the 3DMark scores for the overclocked system. These actually surprised me, I wasn’t aware of how much the CPU speed affected the overall total, but I guess it’s really not that surprising since the whole system is affected by overclocking. The gains are also indicative that 3DMark2001SE is more CPU bound than its newer brother. I gained almost 2000 3DMarks in 2001SE, but only 105 in 2003.
Conclusion
Overall, this motherboard is a mixed bag. I like the fact that it has so many features, with SATA, RAID, onboard NIC, 6.1 Audio, dual-channel memory capabilities, etc., and I also like that it performs quite well.
But on the other hand, the nForce2 chipset itself seems to have some major problems, as I mentioned earlier with the IDE drivers, and I just don’t feel like this board is quite ready for mainstream consumption. I think that this board could be quite good as time progresses, with a BIOS update from XFX (to add multiplier adjustments) and driver updates(to fix the IDE problem), possibly from XFX as well since nVidia doesn’t seem to be doing so good with them.
I have also had some strange stability issues with the board. On the whole it has been quite stable, but it seems to have some funky issues. For example, whenever I install something, using Windows Update or the install program, it stalls for about 15 minutes and then goes.
I have not been able to find what is causing it. Also, whenever I play X-Com: UFO Defense (Windows version) the system blue screens with an nVidia driver error. I am giving this board a 6.5, and would like to thank XFX technologies for sending this board out for review.
Pros
- Lots of features
- Good onboard sound
- Fast for gaming
- Supports Dual-Channel 400MHz DDR-RAM
- Good layout
Cons
- Lack of overclocking options
- Slightly low benchmark scores
- Instability issues
- Problems with IDE drivers from nVidia