What to get AMD 690G or Nvidia 7050?

[laserred]

Reservations: I have not found a working driver for the audio part of the HDMI for the 7050 chipset,

You also mentioned this board needing an aftermarket heatsink. I disagree. With minimal airflow, the heatsink does get hot, but not burning hot. I've had my hand on it for 15+ seconds without any discomfort, let alone burns.

I have this mobo, and dealt with the HDMI audio problem too. Your wish is my command!
http://www.biostar.com.tw/upload/Driver ... 8/HDMI.exe

Also, I have the Ninja 1100 with a D12SL fan mounted on it, I simply silde the fan downwards a little so it is not centered on the Ninja, and the little bit of fan blades blow enough air across my NB to keep it only mildly warm even when cranked to the max at 1.36V, and onboard video overclocked to 500MHz. Hope this helps!

[QuietOC]

In terms of overall PC performance, dual core is king. Only people with specialized needs should ever buy a single core now.

Like everyone should buy a SUV right?

Most people having a dual-core is like commuting to work in an SUV. Sure, they might once in a while benefit a little from the ability to haul a bunch of stuff, but 99% of the time they don't need it. Likewise very few people do anything that benefits significantly from multiple CPU cores.

Multiple cores are power inefficient for everything. It may be acceptable as faw as performance/Watt if you need lots of SMT performance (a.k.a. encoding) while large caches are very helpful for most things (non-encoding).

Someone in my office just told me how he had to disable one of the cores on his AMD X2 system to play some (probably old) game. Really, you think dual-core is king?

It is in fact only people with specialized needs that can benefit from dual-cores. For everyone else it is just a touchy, feely way to waste power and money.

[aristide1]

Biostar TForce 7050-M2

As one who purchased the TForce 6100 S754 very early and used it very happily for a long time, I was very disappointed in the TForce 7050-M2. It completely lacks undervolting options, only overvolts RAM, can't overclock at all. Seems to be a basic appliance motherboard like any other you can buy. Not sure where the blame is, but it seems a step backward to me. If you don't demand much from it, it should be fine.

Go to Rebel's Haven and download some later day BIOS. There's a 4 page thread on this board in the forums. The original BIOS are way too tight, great things happen after a BIOS update. My FSB is currently above 280MHz. I think I went with the 615 BIOS and the latest BIOS install program. I did it with a floppy drive and everything went well the first time. And the board doesn't have "safe mode" which can really limit your OC.

[aristide1]

In terms of overall PC performance, dual core is king. Only people with specialized needs should ever buy a single core now.

Like everyone should buy a SUV right?

Most people having a dual-core is like commuting to work in an SUV. Sure, they might once in a while benefit a little from the ability to haul a bunch of stuff, but 99% of the time they don't need it. Likewise very few people do anything that benefits significantly from multiple CPU cores.

Multiple cores are power inefficient for everything. It may be acceptable as faw as performance/Watt if you need lots of SMT performance (a.k.a. encoding) while large caches are very helpful for most things (non-encoding).

Someone in my office just told me how he had to disable one of the cores on his AMD X2 system to play some (probably old) game. Really, you think dual-core is king?

It is in fact only people with specialized needs that can benefit from dual-cores. For everyone else it is just a touchy, feely way to waste power and money.

I'll tell you why the SUV comparison is not valid. Single cores tend to be older cores. 90nm or even 130nm manufacturing process. Dual cores tend to be 65nm, and are moving towards 45nm. You get all that extra performance with no power penalty. Compared to 130nm cores you probably will use less power. From this perspective older cores are sucking up way more juice per unit of work produced and time wasted.

Dual cores offer benefits you may not always notice because the delays that have shrunk may not have been large enough to notice. Or you simply got into the habit of doing one thing at a time because your single core really never did multitask so great in the first place. Worst case Brisbanes are 65 watts, whereas AMDs 90nm ones are usually 89 watts. The BE series is what? 35 or 45 watts? And it too is dual core.

AMD dual cores are now under $60 with a more than adequate hs. Single cores of late will probably be geared to places where power consumption is critical; laptops, but not because dual cores are bad, it's just that every watt counts and slightly better wins.

And it's easier and cheaper to make a cooler running core quiet.

[aristide1]

AM2 3800 X2 BOX 35W 65€
AM2 4000 X2 BOX 65W 59€

The fractional 10.5x mulitplier on the X2 4000+ isn't helpful. I am not sure why AMD is choosing to run half multipiers and the resulting lower memory performance on its 65nm chips.

To make Brisbane a "comparable" cpu with their 90nm counterparts they had to offset the slower cache in these units, so they bumped them 100MHz to make up the difference.

The Biostar 7050-M2 has half and whole multipliers.

[QuietOC]

I'll tell you why the SUV comparison is not valid. Single cores tend to be older cores. 90nm or even 130nm manufacturing process. Dual cores tend to be 65nm, and are moving towards 45nm. You get all that extra performance with no power penalty. Compared to 130nm cores you probably will use less power. From this perspective older cores are sucking up way more juice per unit of work produced and time wasted.

Until Intel or AMD manages to shut off the one of the cores, dual-core always uses twice as much power as an equivalent single-core. The move to multiple cores is at least as stupid than the Netburst philosophy of clockspeed over performance per clock. Remember the majority of the market bought into the Pentium 4, even though it was patently ridiculous.

Luckily the majority hasn't been duped by the multiple-GPU "performance" yet, but it might happen next year.

Dual anything in computers is pretty uninspiring. I am going to see how bad single channel DDR2 is with my next motherboard (nForce 7100 for Intel).

[aristide1]

Until Intel or AMD manages to shut off the one of the cores, dual-core always uses twice as much power as an equivalent single-core.

But that was my point, they are not equivalent, they are 2 far more efficient cores than the single core. Just as 2 Civics get still get better gas mileage than 1 Hummer.

You can apply several technologies to slow down current processors to use less power when not in use as well.

[frank2003]

As a long time user of SMP systems, I can tell you some basic benefits of having multiple cores/processors, even though your apps are not multithreaded:

- you can still do interactive work while running CPU-bound jobs
- a bad, run-away process won't take down your system with it

At full load, a single CPU-bound job on a dual core system will not consume much more power than a comparable single core system. Also at full load, a dual core processor will consume less power than two comparable single core processors. If you are "unfortunate" enough to have received a dual core system as a gift and you want to run in single processor mode, you can always tell the OS to use just one logical processor (in Windows, it's /numproc= boot flag).

I believe the main stream PC makers have already embraced dual core for over a year now. Can you still find a main stream PC that's not equipped with a dual core processor?

[QuietOC]

Can you still find a main stream PC that's not equipped with a dual core processor?

So we should just accept whats being offered?

Sorry, for example, I just watched my company buy several dual-dual-core 3GHz Apple Mac Pros with 1GB of FB-DIMMs for use as dumb terminals for a server based application. I mean I am glad they didn't get the dual-quad-core Mac Pros, I guess.

I sometimes make use of dual-core myself at work. I am running Windows XP and OSX concurrently and occassionaly background processes--with a slow 2.16GHz, 4MB cache Core 2 Duo.

[aristide1]

And some people have PCs soley as glorified typewriters and email machines. On these pc's any processors is idle 99% of the time. With a dual core it's idle 99.9% of the time, ergo no significant change.

What's significant is the amount of electricity used, which is where all Pentium 4's out there are sucking up much more than their share.

If efficiency was your concern you would address APFC power supplies.

If we would take your logic to the extreme then we can say a typical car needs 10-15HP to maintain 55mph, so then we really don't need any more power than that, it's all just a waste.

[xen]

I don't see the power consumption of dual cores being so much higher than single cores...

According to this image, idle power usage of a X2 3800+ EE (65W) is about 6.14W and that of a Sempron 3600+ is about 5.59W (including voltage regulators). That means a modern single core draws about 3W for simply existing - not a huge issue I would think, compared for instance to the ~30W power draw of modest LCD monitors and the ~75W draw of a modest CRT monitor.

Back to the topic of mainboards... is there any 630a/7050 or 690G mobo that you would recommend over all the others? All of them have different amounts of connectors, most are µATX. Do these chipsets generally support outputting over both VGA and DVI (or DVI and HDMI) at the same time? I'm thinking about renewing my entire audio/video/computing setup in due time, but I haven't looked into audio/video components yet so I don't know what connectors I will want (and I'm not sure I want to be HDCP ready ). In any case, having both HDMI and DVI ports seems quite useless unless you can use them both at will and if you leave one of them out you can have an extra parallel port which can be useful.

From the boards supplied by my two favourite online resellers, I've more or less narrowed it down to... only Gigabyte .

Gigabyte offers these boards with additional S-Video/YPbPr bracket:
- MA69GM-S2H - µATX, 690G, DVI, HDMI, TOSLINK, firewire
- MA69G-S3H - ATX, 690G, Parallel, TOSLINK, HDMI, firewire

Then there is the Abit AN-M2HD which mirrors the S2H but without the DVI port. If I don't care about HDMI/TOSLINK at all I can get the Asrock ALiveNF7G-HDready which gets me Parallel, COM-bracket, DVI, firewire, HDMI-audio over DVI, dual VGA output.

But I'm wondering what you guys would have to say about power consumption, undervolting, etc, or any other reason for favouriting one over the other.

[loimlo]

Then there is the Abit AN-M2HD which mirrors the S2H but without the DVI port.

There's a HDMI to DVI adapter in the Abit AN-M2HD package, so I think it has all digital output connections available. Besides, you couldn't output digital signals from DVI & HDMI at the same time on AMD 690G & nVIDIA 7050 boards; that's a chipset limitation, and you could only output D-Sub & one digital signal only. Realistically speaking, it's a tie.

I am waiting for AMD RS780 & SB700 combination, and I believe it will blow away the competitors.

[xen]

Besides, you couldn't output digital signals from DVI & HDMI at the same time on AMD 690G & nVIDIA 7050 boards; that's a chipset limitation, and you could only output D-Sub & one digital signal only. Realistically speaking, it's a tie.

Okay, but would you be able to selectively switch from DVI to HDMI at will or do these chipsets just select one at random or at preference if both are connected? That's what my current VGA card does (switch from D-Sub to Composite, but not both at the same time) which is unpleasant but acceptable. If I'd have one DVI monitor and one HDMI television, and I'd be able to switch between them at will, then the separate connectors would be a better offering, but that said, perhaps it would be better to just connect the D-Sub to the monitor and the DVI/HDMI to the TV.

I am waiting for AMD RS780 & SB700 combination, and I believe it will blow away the competitors.

You might want to fix that with an aftermarket heatsink .

Say, what is the yellow plug above the TOSLINK on this backpanel:?

Is it coaxial spdif or composite vga?

[loimlo]

You'll meet a mess of lost screen until you remove one digital signal manually. It's my experience with MSI 690G board, and that's the reason why I gathered information on this.
As for board choices, I prefer Abit AN-M2 series for its superior fan controlling(2 fan sockets), but Gigabyte MA69G-S3H provides ATX form factor for you interest. On the one hand, I would get Gigabyte or Biostar for quality 690G boards. On the other hand, I would Abit or Biostar for quality 7050 boards. You've to decide what chipset you want first, then a board.

From the picture, I guess it's Coaxial SPDIF.

[xen]

That makes sense.. if DVI and HDMI are signal-compatible, then the economical choice is to have both ports be driven by the same circuit... okay so switching by software is not an option.

About 690G vs 630a/7050, I still have no clue. In one of the threads mentioned in this thread, the GigaByte MA69G-S3H seemed to be relatively power efficient.

I'm also a bit confused about CPU power draw. The Tom's hardware review I mentioned gives fairly low wattages for the cpus, but this digit-life.com article from the same period mentions wholly different wattages, with reversed results (about whether to choose intel vs. amd)! But the latter fails to mention how they measured it, and they even call it "supposed" power consumption, and it seems a lot less trustworthy overall. Any thoughts on that?

And yet! I will go to sleep... laterzzzzz

[QuietOC]

Just some update notes about the ASUS M2A-VM:

I currently have 4GB (4x1GB) of memory in it and the LE-1620 running stock voltage/frequency. We've been playing a lot of HL2 using the on-board video and occasionally the system will just reboot (at the least opportune time in the game). Definitely an IGP problem.

[QuietOC]

The original BIOS are way too tight, great things happen after a BIOS update. My FSB is currently above 280MHz.... And the board doesn't have "safe mode" which can really limit your OC.

My ancient TForce 6100 could run happily all the time at 310+ MHz. I expect newer chipsets to be able to run faster not slower. I wonder if the GPU clockspeed (and/or additional built-in features) is the problem--buy less to get more. I also expect that bundling the southbridge functions into the northbridge chip was a bad move for stability.

[loimlo]

About 690G vs 630a/7050, I still have no clue. In one of the threads mentioned in this thread, the GigaByte MA69G-S3H seemed to be relatively power efficient.

Well, board difference would account for only 3~5W difference. You might consider prioritizing items & functions that you need desperately.

As for cpu, my AMD cpus drawn less power than iXBT stated before. I've 2 X2s, and one single core Athlon.

[aristide1]

The original BIOS are way too tight, great things happen after a BIOS update. My FSB is currently above 280MHz.... And the board doesn't have "safe mode" which can really limit your OC.

My ancient TForce 6100 could run happily all the time at 310+ MHz. I expect newer chipsets to be able to run faster not slower. I wonder if the GPU clockspeed (and/or additional built-in features) is the problem--buy less to get more. I also expect that bundling the southbridge functions into the northbridge chip was a bad move for stability.

You probably OC'd after you booted, which is not an option in Ubuntu. That's how everybody with a TForce 6100 got passed Safe Mode.

[QuietOC]

You probably OC'd after you booted, which is not an option in Ubuntu. That's how everybody with a TForce 6100 got passed Safe Mode.

No. I never got the Windows OC utility to work after the first few BIOS revisions. Then I decided a 2.4GHz Athlon 64 3400+ was fast enough and a cheap ECS 6100 board could run that as well as the TF6100.

I like to be able to overclock/overvolt along with undervolting, and I am finding it is not much better with this 690G AM2 motherboard. Setting a CPU voltage in the BIOS of course overrides the Cool'n'Quiet voltage mechanism, and the latter can only adjust the voltage up to 1.35V. That may be enough to make 2.8GHz or so useable, while not giving up very low idle wattage.

[djkest]

I'd got 2 CPUs for you to consider. First one is and A64 3700+ @2.2GHz, single core. I love that CPU... but anyways... other one is an X2 3800+ @2.0GHz. If your theory about multiple cores were useless and bloated, then why does the dual core fold much faster with a lower clock speed? And idle at a mere 50W with a PCI-E TV card in it? (and it's not even a brisbane). It's also faster for games (which it doesn't do much of anymore). HD video playback however, another area where dual core shines.

Dual cores are not fully utilized yet, but there's no going back to the single core once you've experienced the dual core.

My other machine is running an overclocked dual core, full on gaming graphics card, and idles at 92W... lower than my crappy 2.8GHz P4 at work

Back on topic, I like my 690G, but it's not perfect. I think folding 24/7 is kind of hurting my stability.

[QuietOC]

Dual cores are not fully utilized yet, but there's no going back to the single core once you've experienced the dual core.

I tried 1.9GHz X2 3600+ earlier this year and was happy to switch back to my 2.4GHz S754 Athlon 64 3400+. I only decided to sell the latter when I found out how cheap DDR2 was now and how much I could sell me DDR for. I haven't decided whether to keep the LE-1620 or X2 4000+, but for most people the former is a much better choice.

I used to have my virtual core on my 3.06GHz P4 folding at work--it made it nice and warm under my desk. My new work iMac seems to keep both cores busy just sitting doing nothing--though it seems to be the virtual Windows XP requiring most of those cycles.

[awolfe63]

I just tried both. I had trouble with the 7050/630 under linux (ubuntu) for myth - but it was fine under XP. I switched to the 690 since I had an easier time getting the linux drivers to run.

Both are good choices.

[Roop]

This is an excellent comparison of the 690g and 7050. in includes sandra, games, 720p, 1080p, h.264, raid and much more.

original in dutche

googlefish

i think the 7050 is suppposed to be able to do vga and dvi simultaneously.

"DVI (Digital Visual Interface) provides high visual quality of digital display devices such as LCD monitor. The interface of this motherboard supports dual VGA output both DVI-D and D-sub and is HDCP compliant allowing playback of HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc." (Asus website for M2N-DVI)

Maybe that means it can do both? Not too straight forward. Mine is in the mail and should be here next week. i'll report back once i know.

I love ASUS and have exclusively used their motherboards since the socket A platform came out. They just won't die and are always perfectly stable. For me it was ASUS M2A-VM vs Asus M2N-VM.

I chose the later because the nvidia chipset can do two things with less cpu usage than amd:
1. play 720p and 1080p videos with lower cpu
2. do massive sata2 operations with less cpu

last note - on the dual cpu argument: the new version of ffdshow supports dual cpu. playing 720p and 1080p movies can now be decoded on both cpus.

[xen]

The Asrock 7050 mobo specifications page explicitly states that it can output to D-sub and DVI simultaneously. I don't know if that also implies dual-head in the sense of an extended desktop, but I suppose so.

I don't know about the 690G though. It seems the 690G is better at most games, but as you said, requires more cpu cycles to play HD content. The interesting part for me though is that both were able to play the content without problems with an X2 3800+ installed, up to 1080p VC1.

Have you seen the difference in power draw between a system with only its IGP and with a nVidia 7900 GTX installed? A 40W difference at idle! But I suppose this holds for any 'end-of-generation' vga card, when every last bit of performance is squeezed out of it.

Where did you get this: "2. do massive sata2 operations with less cpu"? In the article you linked to, the 7050 board had a much lower score on PCMark05 - Harddisk than the 690G board (4841 vs. 5654). The test for RAID 0 gave equal cpu load, and for RAID 1 the 7050 was better with 2% vs. 4% for the 690G. Those aren't figures to base your choice of chipset on.

[Roop]

ok, it's here. i only have one monitor connected however the nvidia software has a multi monitor section which mentions cloning the primary screen as well as extending the desktop.

i think i read the hdd part wrong. ah well, i get just around 600mbits/sec over gigabit lan from it's raid controller so it's not bad.

i found one issue, which i believe is corrected - i'm using a 3800 x2 EE on it. with auto cpu voltage it was unstable. i had to increase this to it's max of 1.250v. this runs orthos for as long as i care to run it. it's been up for about 5 hours since this. memory only goes up to 2.0v so watch out for high voltage ram on this board.

780p playback is smooth as expected. i'm having some issues with 1080p (mkv files). that might be a software thing, i'm seeing cpu usage in the high 80's-90%

[Kato]

Hi guys i have not checked this forum in a long time, i have been busy and the HTPC project was on hold. I would like to thank you all for participating. Several things have changed , some CPU have become unavailable several motherboards are now available. I have also thought about buying a new PC and using my current PC as a HTPC. Well i am back at the AMD based solution, so this is the current shopping list:


M2N-VM HDMI SocketAM2 FSB2000 mATX NVIDIA GeForce 7050PV
Athlon 64 X2 BE-2350 Dual Core 2.1GHz 45Watt Box rev1 + Mini Ninja
Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C5DHX
SpinPoint T166 500GB HDD 7200rpm SATA (1 new + 1 that i have in another comp.)
ANTEC Media Center Fusion EC schwarz 430Watt
Sony NEC Optiarc AD-7200S-0B SATA DVD brenner

So this is it , i am not shore about the processor is it enough for 1080p mkv or should i just pay 10€ more and get the X2 5000+ / 2.6 GHz Energy Efficient 65W?

[Roop]

hey a couple items on the m2n-dvi

1. when you update the bios, i think the sata ports may be remapped. if you plug your drives into the two raid ports, they are not port 1 and 2. you have to enable all sata ports in the bios to ensure mediashield sees the two drives plugged into the red connectors. after a bios update i got a mediashield error until i enabled all ports.

2. bios update from 201 to 312 must be performed from in the ez flash built into the bios as the board name changes between bios revisions. the windows based flashing software doesn't work. the board name is: m2n-vm (201)
m2n-vm dvi (312)

3. you cannot downgrade once you've updated, even with afudos (2.29) with the /pbnc switch.

4. with bios 312 you can use 2.2v ddr2 ram. 201 only had voltage up to 2.0v

I was receiving some strange video crashes which is why i updated the bios. my screen would either go blank or display a wierd pattern. the computer would still run as i could vnc to it. hopefully the bios fixes this, otherwise i'm going to get rid of this mobo or buy a video card for it.

i've had general stability issues, even without overclocking. i think it may have been a software conflict before. the system has not hard locked in several days. i run it 24x7.

i can play 1080p 264 files with a dual core 2.0ghz and the onboard video. so far i've only download some movie samples (mkv files) in 1080p. i've watched a few 720p movies and they seem ok.

if it's only $10 for the 2.6, i'd take that. i wouldn't bother with an aftermarket cooler, i run the stock cooler at 7v and it keeps it under 40°C even in my htpc case (antec). the heatsink is sometimes not even warm to the touch. mine is EE as well. i have had zero luck overclocking this cpu though.

[Mariner]

So this is it , i am not shore about the processor is it enough for 1080p mkv or should i just pay 10€ more and get the X2 5000+ / 2.6 GHz Energy Efficient 65W?

The Brisbane should be fine for 1080p h264 stuff, although you may need to pay an additional $15 for CoreAVC which seems to be by far the fastest h264 decoder available.

The CPU should be plenty powerful enough for 1080p content using any other codec as h264 is by far the most compute-intensive.

[Kato]

Well i already ordered and payed for the items i listed two posts up , i think it should be fine and if not i can always overclock it (these chips are suppose to be great overcockers most hit 3+GHz). I am now just waiting for confirmation of payment (newer used this shop before and i am a little nervous ) I have never build such a inexpensive computer , i really like the idea of 50€ for a motherboard and 40€ for 2Gb of ram.