550 / 570 Ultra ??

Ernie · 4 Jul 2006 at 17:46

In basic terms could someone please explain the fundamental difference and who/what would need the extras of the 570 Ultra.

Been out the hardware loop for a while, so any help appreciated.

I don't/not fussed about overclocking (at least not to date), so was wondering why I would need any better than the

MSI K9N Neo-F nForce 550 (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 for £50

thanks

Aidoscuz · 5 Jul 2006 at 13:07

Here's an article explaining the differences between the different Nforce 5 versions. There doesn't seem to be a huge difference between the 550 and 570, mainly some networking stuff and more SATA ports.

HicRic · 18 Jul 2006 at 17:27

What are the downsides to that 550 motherboard though, anything bad or just poor o/c'ing potential? I like the price tag.

=assassin= · 18 Jul 2006 at 17:50

I'm interested in the same board myself; from what I've seen, early verions with older BIOS don't like OCZ memory, and memory in general gets set to 1.8Volts, causing it not to post - apparantly 1.3 version of BIOS fixes it, but I don't know what the current boards selling will have. The only other thing I'm interested in is whether memory timings can be changed - I know the voltage can't be changed in the BIOS, but a program called Crystal CPUID could probably allow it to be changed in windows - other than that, I saw a review take a Sempron with 8x Multi to 2.4Ghz, so that's 300FSB, so a lot of overclocking potential. I quite the look of the features, and the passive chipset heatsink is fairly large compared to the Gigabytes, for example.