Specifications

abit NF7-M
Written by Stephen
Friday, 04 September 2009 10:42
the SPP lacks integrated graphics and is geared towards the high performance crowd. The
original nForce IGP featured several of the same items we’ll be discussing today with the
nForce2, although they have all be improved upon. The original nForce platform IGP debuted
with GeForce2 MX integrated graphics, while the nForce2 IGP features a more modern
GeForce4 MX for integrated graphics. The original nForce platforms integrated graphics were
viewed as outdated, and simply could not support the bulk of the operation that end users were
looking to be able to do, hence why the nForce2 IGP now features GeForce4 MX graphics.
The nForce2’s integrated graphics core clocks in at an identical speed to that of the GeForce4
MX 420, 250MHz. NVIDIA has made no design or feature changes to the GeForce4 MX core
used in the nForce2 IGP, so since most of you are more than likely already familiar with it I
won’t go into that matter any further. The only reason I don’t particularly care for the GeForce4
MX core being utilized for the integrated graphics is due to its lack of true DirectX 8.1 support as
I noted many months ago in our review of eVGA’s MX offering. I would have much rather seen a
stripped down version of the higher end GeForce4 core, however due to the relative cost, this
didn’t happen. The only main feature change between the nForce and nForce2 involving
graphics is the level of AGP support. The original nForce platform only supported up to AGP 4x
speeds, while the current nForce2 platform features support for AGP 8x.
Yet another feature taken from the original nForce platform is the DualDDR, or TwinBank,
Memory Architecture. This 128-bit memory architecture allows for a larger memory bandwidth
than even that of Intel’s RDRAM powered i850E chipset! The only real “problem” is that the
performance difference between 64-bit and 128-bit DDR is only negligible without the integrated
graphics enabled. The reason for this should be rather self explanatory as most of us know this
is due to the heavy bandwidth usage of the integrated graphics. Without integrated graphics
enabled, there is no such “lost” bandwidth, hence there isn’t a large performance increase as
one would assume.
..:: DualDDR Architecture ::..
DualDDR is the latest version of NVIDIA’s own Dual Channel DDR solution. The typical memory
bus of today is 64-bits wide, while the nForce2 chipset utilizes a bus width double that at
128-bits wide. This allows for a peak gain in bandwidth of 100%! As we stated earlier however,
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