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LOSTCIRCUITS
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| AMD's Quad FX Platform What's in a 4x4? | |
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(Author: MS, January 21, 2007) |
Final Words
At the end of this article we are left with somewhat ambivalent feelings. The current version of the Quad FX platform has a number of shortcomings, some of which appear more or less immaturities that can hopefully be resolved with firmware / BIOS updates and some of which are related to lack of driver support in Vista - but there is definitely some potential in the platform.
The biggest gripe we have at this moment is the power consumption but realistically, unless somebody was to claim a 100 W overhead just for the extra HT-links, it appears more or less an issue that could be resolved by tuning the VRM to work more efficiently. Whether this requires a simple BIOS update or else a rework of the hardware is something that ASUS will have to answer but whatever it is, it is an issue that will have to be addressed in order for the Quad FX platform to be competitive.
Similar issues are still prevailing with some of the other BIOS settings, backwards configuration of critical settings and non-execution of others open up a bunch of questions regarding the true optimization of the platform for performance as well. Granted, depending on the application, the system is fast, but it seems that there may be ways of squeezing out more performance by tuning some of the memory timings that did not seem to have any effect with the current (0124) BIOS revision. Other quibbles we faced were, for example that it was not possible to get the system back out of power-saving mode in Vista, it would flash the message "resuming Windows" and then go back to sleep with the only remedy being a complete disconnect from the wall power. Even a complete power down with subsequent cold boot would only repeat the "resuming Windows" and go back to sleep cycle, in other words, well, there is some more work to be done on the BIOS.
At this point, it seems that the probably best operating system for the Quad FX platform may be Windows XP-64, which unfortunately is already at the brink of obsolescence. Vista-64 is fine and dandy but if only half of the features of the motherboard can be used, i.e., no support for SLI or nV RAID, then that's not a real option either. Along the same lines it is probably a good thing that the same RAID controller is used in the Intel version of the nF 680 SLI chipset, meaning that there will be driver releases regardless of the political ramifications of AMD's ATI acquisition.
By the end of the day, some of our concerns hit straight at the single source supply situation for the motherboard. Adding a bit of competition in the form of DFI, ABIT, Iwill or Foxconn could be a huge incentive for ASUS to cover more ground. Especially in view of the fact that most of their motherboards see at least one BIOS update per week, where are those fixes for the L1N64 SLI? This is not meant to indicate that the current solution is bad, on the contrary, but we think it would only take a bit of tweaking to make it a lot better with respect to performance and energy efficiency.
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