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Graphics Software Upgrades Hardware

New nForce Boards Previewed 230

Posted by timothy from the when-ndas-lift-on-fox dept.
s3k writes "Firingsquad.com takes a look at nVidia's new nForce4 chip. It now includes a hardware-based firewall for improved CPU utilization, support for Serial ATA 3 Gigabytes/second hard drives, Gigabit Ethernet, and most importantly, 20-lane PCI Express. Firingsquad includes game performance numbers with nForce4 Ultra and a few performance notes on nForce4 SLI, which, according to nVidia will need a 550-watt power supply!" pacmanfan adds a link to PC Perspective's article (including benchmarks), Necroman points out the coverage at Bjorn3d and Anandtech, and Atif Butt would like you to check ATIF Approved for their take. The same boards, the same NDA -- don't be surprised to find the reviews cover similar ground, and are mostly positive.
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New nForce Boards Previewed More

New nForce Boards Previewed

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  • Mmm. Goodies. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) * on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:22AM (#10573924) Journal

    I *do* like the trend for passing computationally-expensive chores onto support chips rather than the CPU (ethernet checksums, firewalls, raid checksums etc.) but what I would really like is a raid-5 facility on-board.

    If you look at a 3ware 9500 card, it'll cost ~£500 for an 8-port setup! Given that the N-force can support 8 drives (4 sata, 4 ata) in a single RAID image, it would have been nice to get the raid-5 as well as the -1 or -0 levels. You'd be insane to risk losing 1-2TB of disk (assuming 4-8 250GB disks) on a raid-0 array!

    I know I can run software RAID across the disks, but I'm still more comfortable with h/w solutions - I've tried s/w raid (and it has failed, bigtime) in the past, and getting past the psychological barrier to try it again is hard - losing oodles of data is a huge body blow, and when you have that enormous amount of data, even restoring from originals is a pain :-(

    All I want is a single server with enough space and reliability to store all my DVD's and MP3's of CD's, is this too much to ask ? [grin]

    Nevertheless, I'm pretty impressed with a stateful firewall implemented in hardware :-)

    Simon.

    • Re:Mmm. Goodies. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:35AM (#10573958) Journal
      You'd be insane to risk losing 1-2TB of disk (assuming 4-8 250GB disks) on a raid-0 array!

      Once again, a slashdotter forgets that he does not represent Joe User at which a product is targetted.

      If you want RAID-5, then go buy your favorite PCI-Express RAID card and do it yourself. There is no since in making this more expensive for the 99.999% that won't be using it.

      • Economies of scale (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) * on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:46AM (#10574007) Journal

        The [grin] at the end of 'Is this too much to ask' was supposed to be an indicator that I realise it's not the most common of requests...

        OTOH, I don't think *my* data is any more or less valuable to me than X's data is to X. How many 'Joe Public's are going to "throw away" one of their two disks to run raid-1 ? Very few I suspect. Most people will go with the raid-0 approach, if they use raid at all, and one raid-0 disk dying is a bad thing, even if it's one of their two 80G drives.

        If you don't think that many people will use raid at all, then you have to question why it's there at all, and then you would have a point. I think nvidea would have done some market research on that, though.

        So, actually I think it's a valid point - the size of the array isn't important. The reliability is, and that's independent of size.

        Simon.
      • Joe User wouldn't normally be making a RAID. Also, if Joe User wanted to make a "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks", he'd most likely be doing this to make it redundant, and if he's losing a disk, it isn't really that inexpensive, and not in Joe User's mediocre budget. I think having RAID-5 support on-board is a valid suggestion.
      • It could be put in the "Enthusiast" boards and left off or disabled on the lower end boards.

        What you say makes sense, but most users don't need RAID-0 or -1, so why is it there? Because they can, and it is a selling point even to the enthusiast that's not sure if they'll set one up. First, something about available expansion capacity should they later decide they need it, second, something about bragging rights.
      • Except that these boards aren't going to be put in crappy Dells, they're enthusiast boards, going into high-end custom built boxes. The ability to do RAID-5 on the board would probably be very well recieved, and would be one of those things that would put the nForce chipset above others (which is rather hard to do given that the memory controller is now onboard the CPU with the 64 bit Athlons).

    • Re:Mmm. Goodies. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by caluml ( 551744 )
      I've tried s/w raid (and it has failed, bigtime) in the past, and getting past the psychological barrier to try it again is hard - losing oodles of data is a huge body blow

      Rebuild your raid array, and restore from backup. You were making backups of the raided data, weren't you? Tell me an obviously bright fellow like yourself was.

      There are two types of people: Those that have lost data, and those that will.

    • Re:Mmm. Goodies. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Algan ( 20532 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:43AM (#10573989)
      ...but what I would really like is a raid-5 facility on-board.

      I was looking for something similar and I stumbled upon this one: http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/socket754/k8n-e_d/ overview.htm [asus.com]

      Apparently it comes with an onboard Silicon Image SATA controller with 4 ports and the ability to do Raid 5. I'm seriously tempted to give it a try...

    • Re:Mmm. Goodies. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @08:11AM (#10574104) Homepage
      raid-0 is not for your archival use.

      Raid-0 is what I use for my pair of 250 gig drives for video capture. they are fast enough so that I do not get any frame drops when capturing from DV or from my Targa-3000 analog capture card (capturing at a measly 20Meg per second data rate.)

      Raid-0 is for insane speed and temporary storage.

      if you are looking for server class RAID solutions there are motherboard out there for you, but you will be paying that extra 500 for it.

      It blows my mind the number of people that want server class hardware but refuse to pay for it.

      "I want a $50.00 motherboard that support's 4 processors, 8 gig of ram, and has both untra 320 scsi RAID and SATA RAID! oh and put a geforce FX5900 on it, soundblaster audigy built in and 5 1000/100/10 erthernet ports on it!"

      It will never happe, so stop looking for it.

      if you want server class hardware then you have to buy server class hardware at server class prices.

      • Re:Mmm. Goodies. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Noehre ( 16438 )
        The thing is, adding something like RAID5 to an existing RAID system would be trivial and vastly cheaper.

        Look at something like nVidia's Soundstorm. The extra silicon on the chip for Soundstorm costs, what, a few dollars? Compare that to buying a seperate sound card for $50-150.

        The fact that a market doesn't exist (or more likely not a big enough market) doesn't mean that it isn't possible or a lot cheaper.
        • You need an extra processor for the parity calculations of a RAID 5 setup. most RAID cards have an Intel i960 processor on board for this purpose. You could use the CPU for these calculations, but then you might as well just use software RAID.
      • I only require 4 of the 5 ethernet ports and I am willing to pay $65. So I guess that mother board would be a good fit. Do they sell it at newegg?
      • It will never happe, so stop looking for it.

        OF COURSE it will. Without a doubt. No question whatsoever. You sound pretty new to the industry for an expert on "server class hardware". It wasn't that long ago that the idea of hardware RAID-0 and 1 on a gaming-oriented board would have been considered ridiculous. It's just a matter of time now before RAID-5 gets thrown in there, too.
        • Oh yes, it required an expert to conclude that "one day" RAID-5 will become a non-feature included for free.

          And you kindly offered a solution to those who want RAID-5 included - which is... to wait 2 years until that happens. Very insightful.

          RAID-5 doesn't make much sense because it requires many (or more than RAID-0 in any case) disk drives which in turn requires a fairly big chassis. People who really need RAID-5 would get a real server system (with two or three onboard 3Com or Intel NICs, management f
      • It blows my mind the number of people that want server class hardware but refuse to pay for it.

        Decent hardware RAID boards are still bloody expensive. However, hard-drives are down in price, up in capacity, and quite often lower in reliability. Higher demand fuels lesser pricing, so it's not unrealistic to expect that if a need for hardware RAID comes along, it should be filled. I wouldn't expect it from a cheap motherboard, and RAID-5 is overkill, but it wouldn't be insane to expect midline board to sup
    • know I can run software RAID across the disks, but I'm still more comfortable with h/w solutions - I've tried s/w raid (and it has failed, bigtime) in the past, and getting past the psychological barrier to try it again is hard

      Actually, Linux software RAID is way faster than any commodity HW RAID solution I have seen so far. It is because Linux can use all RAM for cache and can do RAID checksums almost at the speed of available RAM (around 6 GB/s). Your typical fileserver has the CPU idle all the time (wi

  • now i can finally... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Interfacer ( 560564 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:24AM (#10573929)
    Get rid of my central heating system.
    In order to heat up the house i just have to play DOOM3 at ultra high quality settings.

    If they start supporting dual P4 extreme as well i can even add a water heater for the bathroom.

    Thanks nvidia :)
    • While this comment is rated funny, I would like to know how feasible it would be to actually use a high end CPU & mobo to heat a reasonable amount of water. I'm not kidding here ! I know that offcourse the main obstacle will be having a big pump and boiler in your office, which kinda beats the purpose of interior decorating, but in terms of heat, would it be possible ? I have 5 machines, 3 of which are almost constantly running (1 linux server, 1 dual xeon XP, 1 dual 1.8 G5 and 2 older P4s for code tes

      • Re:now i can finally... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:49AM (#10574015) Homepage
        While this comment is rated funny, I would like to know how feasible it would be to actually use a high end CPU & mobo to heat a reasonable amount of water.

        Processors tend to start overheating at around 60-70C (a guess), whereas water from a central heating boiler apparently runs at around 82C [diyfaq.org.uk]. To get any real heating done, you'd have to run the processor at a rather high temperature, and one which would likely badly damage sooner or later.

        Plus, there's the issue of power output - a modern processor might kick out around 70 watts of heat, whereas a typical electric shower is around 5 kilowatts. You might get a slight trickle of warm water from your processor, but nothing much.

        Personally, I wish manufacturers would pay more attention to power consumption of computers, as all that heat still has to be dissipated, even if it's not going to be an effective heater. I'd rather not have my PC whirring like a helicopter just to do some web browsing...

        • Personally, I wish manufacturers would pay more attention to power consumption of computers, as all that heat still has to be dissipated, even if it's not going to be an effective heater. I'd rather not have my PC whirring like a helicopter just to do some web browsing...

          If all you want to do is web browsing, why not get a second mini-itx PC or small laptop?
        • I don't know about the Intels, but AMD CPUs are "allowed" to go as high as 70C and higher - IIRC 90C is close to the limit.

          At any event, while heating water is not really feasible - there was a Slashdot story about a guy frying eggs on his CPU, took an hour - heating a room with one or two desktop computers is quite feasible. It doesn't replace a real heater, but the difference is notable. Not that this comes as a surprise...

          Incidently, heating your room is also the only reason why most people would want

      • Re:now i can finally... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sxpert ( 139117 )
        friend of mine uses it to heat the fishtank via a double heat exchanger (the fish don't like de-ionized water)
    • I use my computer for heating my bedroom all winter. It's not exactly central heating, but it does take the bite off those early-morning pre-work wakeupigans. My room will be downright tropical, and I just have a vanilla Athlon 1.4.

      -Jesse

  • SATA 3Gb/s hard drives... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by madprof ( 4723 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:29AM (#10573942)
    So what technology is going to be able to produce this sort of throughput from a harddrive?
    • Huge amounts of cache will let it burst fast enough to sometimes take advantage of it. There are 16mb cache sata drives on the market now. It's only a matter of time until drives come with a gig of cache.

      • Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives... (Score:4, Informative)

        by John Betonschaar ( 178617 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @08:00AM (#10574060)
        It's only a matter of time until drives come with a gig of cache.

        A gig of cache does't make any sense, unless you have a 100TB drive or something. Above a certain amount of cache (depending on the size of the memory that it caches), doubling the cache size only improves the cache hit/miss ratio by a single percent or so. I once knew the calculations that give the hit-miss ratio, but I forgot them. Anyways, it's just standard theory so you should be able to google it up.

        Your sig is mine
      • OK that's fine. So we've got a hard drive that has 16MB of cache with an interface that has a max throughput of 3Gb/s ... does it really matter?
        We're talking about such a small amount of cache memory here. And to fill that cache will always require a very very slow disk read. Do we really get any significant performance increase?
        There must be some sort of improvements in the works for the moving parts of a hard drive surely?
        • At 3 Gb/s, you're going to need a whopping 0.04 seconds to empty out that cache (assuming a 100% hit ratio).
          • Serial ATA uses 10 bits per byte, so the byte rate is 300 Mbytes/sec, not 375 MBytes/sec as you might expect if there were not 2 extra bits per byte. The 10 bit encoding provides clock recovery, byte and word framing, error detection, and some extra non-byte characters (usually called "comma" characters) that are used for syncing and packet framing.

            So it'll actually take 0.0533 seconds, plus command overhead.

        • Hardware-wise, we might see denser disks allowing smaller platters with higher spin rates.

          But the cache can depend on software optimization. You can have a slow disk read, but if the disk was aligned (properly defragmented) or if the software was pre-linked properly, then the disk read/load cycle into the cache would be really fruitful (rather than getting a cacheful of crap.)
    • Solid State Drives would be my guess. I'd venture to guess that data movement without "physical means" ( heads moving across a rotating platter ) would/could provide that amount of data transfer.

  • Multiple reviews and news articles (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Collated at this site [amdboard.com].

  • Disappointing Audio (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DaHat ( 247651 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:35AM (#10573963)
    I'm more than a little disappointed again to hear that their SoundStorm system was left out again.

    I for one love the audio coming out of my Asus A7N8X Deluxe.

    I like many laughed at and bad mouthed embedded audio for years, until I heard and saw what this mobo could do. Now, I've got a single SPDIF cable running to my speakers.

    nVidia has proven themselves as a strong player in the mobo chipset market, however the SoundStorm omission costs them dearly IMO.

    • Re:Disappointing Audio (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Pyrion ( 525584 )
      IIRC nVidia sold SoundStorm to Creative Labs (this is hearsay, don't take my word for it). That's why after the nForce2 they stopped using SoundStorm. It was written off because nVidia figured "most people" didn't know how to use the onboard Dolby Digital decoder and the feature wasn't in high demand.

      IMO they didn't even need an onboard Dolby Digital decoder. They could've shelved that and made a generic onboard sound system in hardware (rather than RealTek's ALC garbage that uses the CPU) to beat the crap

      • Re:Disappointing Audio (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Hieronymus Howard ( 215725 ) * on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:54AM (#10574041)
        The nice thing about SoundStorm, and the reason I bought an nforce motherboard, was the Dolby Digital ENCODER. No-one else has that, not even Creative.

        And the whole motherboard, including SoundStorm, was similarly priced to a Creative Soundblaster.

        I'm totally pissed at Nvidia for omitting SoundStorm on the NForce 4.

        • I agree. For HTPC applications Nforce 2 was hard to beat. The whole HTPC community was praying for Soundstorm 2 on these new mobos. Considering the market is big enough for Microsoft to pay attention to you would think nVidia would as well.
        • Here is a feature that a Creative Soundblaster has that most mobos do not: MIDI ports.

          I use an Audigy 2 mainly so that I can have MIDI ports to hook up a keyboard. The game bundle included was just icing on the cake ;)

          It used to be that mobos had MIDI ports on a header, and included a PCI-slot header if you needed it. Now, they don't even include MIDI as an option.

          Yes, I know that they have USB-to-MIDI adapters, but I have no idea if those work under Linux or not.

          Sorry. I just had to grumble. I am

    • Re:Disappointing Audio (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gentlewhisper ( 759800 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @08:27AM (#10574189)
      "nVidia has proven themselves as a strong player in the mobo chipset market, however the SoundStorm omission costs them dearly IMO."

      It's inclusion costs them even more dearly in terms of tangible dollars. According to some guy at 2cpu.com, each chipset with SoundStorm = almost $30 of licensing fees paid to Dolby Corporation.

      Not very cheap considering the whole mobo sells for peanuts nowadays!
    • I've owned an NForce1 and 2 and honestly, the audio was one of the big reasons I bought into it. I Skipped on the NForce3 becasue of this and most likely I'm going to be skipping on the NForce4 as well.

      At this point I'm hoping that NVidia makes a Soundstorm chip and sells it to manufactures the same way they sell video chips, but it's not looking too good. Frankly after the living hell I had to put up with Creative and their crap drivers and hardware, I'm praying that this happens, although from what I'm r
    • Aside from the encoding/decoding features, doesn't anybody experience terrible 'noise' and feedback through their on-board sound? I've got an ASUS nforce board with horrendous noise from any speaker outs - whenever you move the mouse, see some disk access or use the CPU, there's a noticeable buzzing/hissing sound. Maybe it's cause I mostly use headphones, but I hardly ever see people complain about this. With a SB Live in the PCI slot there's no hiss.

      On the other hand I have a ThinkPad R50 with nice clean
      • What you're describing is probably a ground loop of some kind. Try running your PC's power supply through the same power strip/power outlet as your powered speakers.

        My Dell laptop will cause noise through the speakers when the mouse moves/etc. unless they're plugged into the same outlet.
      • Unfortunately, onboard audio is hit-or-miss, and there's no real consistency between manufacturers because it's the isolation that counts.

        If you asked me about onboard sound two years ago, I would have said it was a lost cause. But then I got a new workstation last year with Intel onboard audio, and I was fairly impressed...no hissing even at fairly high amplification levels. My old workstation (from 2001), had some terribly implemented onboard Realtek codec, and it was noisy just like you've noted. Unf

  • Nvidia is closed sourced (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Unfortunately, nvidia drivers are closed sourced, the nvidia's drivers source codes are not available. Only some buggy binaries :((

  • Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:37AM (#10573975) Journal
    Now that gigabit is a given (even laptops now come with it entry level), why isn't there a flexible Linux distro that I can store on my router? In this respect, I could save lots of cash by eliminating the need for local storage on, say, a media box to stick under the TV.

    HELLO LINUX WORLD?

    This is the killer app!

  • Devil's advocate..... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BobSutan ( 467781 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:38AM (#10573979)
    I just read the preview at HardOCP [hardocp.com] and they did bring up a good point.
    "The nForce4 is really little more than an nForce3, but with a much deeper feature set. Of course SLI will likely be the big selling point this year...hopefully. I say "hopefully," because thinking back on the nForce3 Ultra launch, we saw many moons between the nForce3 reference board and actual retail samples from motherboard makers. Not to belittle all of the progress that has made it into the new nForce4 feature sets, but I have a feeling that those goodies will not be selling many nForce4 retail motherboards, at least not this year."
    There you go. When will they be available, and how big of an impact is SLI going to be in the coming months for gamers? However, when you think about it the NF4 is being sold to gamers in general and only a small percentage will be able to afford the dual 6800s to populate these boards like they were in tended, in SLI. Looking back at 3dfx's version of SLI and how few of the folks in the communitiy actually used it, I fear this will just be a rehash of a good idea that is prohibitively expensive for most. If this turns out to be the case, NVidia could have just wasted a lot of money on a useless feature. And if that is true, lets hope they've got better monetary reserves that 3dfx did. Then again I don't think that'll be a problem for NVidia.
    • I could see someone purchasing a single 6800 then after the price drops buying another for SLI on the cheap to get the speed of the new model cards that are coming out for $$$. I have to say that it looks like a pretty smart move from Nvidia to influence people to buy another Nvidia based card in the future.
      • I'm not too bothered about SLI, but it'd catch my eye if I could run 4 monitors, all with 8x PCI Express(as opposed to my current setup, dual on my 9800 Pro on 8x AGP and a single one on my PCI Rage Pro).
    • What about dual 6600GTs ? They're selling for ~ US$ 210,00, but by the time nForce4 SLI hit the stores they will be costing ~ 180,00

  • 550 watts hey... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Amiga Lover ( 708890 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:38AM (#10573981)
    How long until an entry level machine needs 3 phase power, 16GB ram, terabyte hard drives and networking quick enough to stream the entire iTMS all at once... (don't mind me, I'm an ancient git who's been reminiscing about 1mhz 8 bit machines today)

    • Re:550 watts hey... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:44AM (#10573995) Homepage
      don't mind me, I'm an ancient git who's been reminiscing about 1mhz 8 bit machines today

      The best way to cure this, I find, is to go and buy one. Not emulate, actually go and fetch the hardware you're reminiscing about from eBay.

      I have a 48k Spectrum, a C64, then some newer and still vaguely useful machines like an Atari ST (dedicated MIDI box) and an SE/30. Try actually using them for real, and you'll soon go scurrying back to your platform-de-jour remembering how hard it was to make these things do anything useful.

      Of course, it was fun and might still be fun, but on the whole the computing past is nice to visit but you wouldn't want to live there.

      Cheers,
      Ian

      • That's just what I've been doing with a new purchase, a Mac Plus. I also have a classic II and a couple of C64s I drag out from time to time.

        Using them for real brings a real link between the "god how did we live like this" and the "wow - this thing can do THAT". It's a good base to touch occasionally. Web browsing on the classic is pretty bad. I couldn't use it for the imaging I do daily, and it doesn't have a hope of playing an MP3. It could play the equivalent .wav, but couldn't actually store it on the
    • how long? about "minus several decades", if you're ancient how can you forget that you used to need big iron to do the stuff you can do at home now?

      • You had machines with 16GB of RAM and TBs of hard drive decades ago?

        Really?!

        Nah. I don't believe you.
        • no, but the point is that you're getting more processing done now with less electricity than what you would have needed 20 years ago.

          so the entry level machine of the future won't need 3 phase power.. even if the other specs match.
    • Hmm, that's easy! Memory, EG, take current entry level amount (256?), divide 16G to that (=64), divide current entry level amount by that number (=4). This takes us back around 10 year. So we can assume it is still about 10 years until 16Gigs are in entry level machines. Terrabyte HDD = 1000 Gigs, current is probably 40, quotient = 25. 40 / 25 = 1.6. The year is 1995-1996, IIRC. So - 8/9 years until terrabyte HDDs. Don't take this too seriously though ;)
    • (don't mind me, I'm an ancient git who's been reminiscing about 1mhz 8 bit machines today)

      Then get a developement board for one of the 8-bit microcontrollers which are on the market (I'm thinking PICs or Atmels). I also recall with fondness programming the 6502 in my Atari and playing with the PIC18Fs (programming strictly in asm, of course :) is a lot of fun. Microcontrollers are good because they have on-chip everything needed to interface to the outside world (from I/O to serial to I2C, etc. etc.) so

  • Story Typo (Score:5, Informative)

    by Shinglor ( 714132 ) <luke DOT shingles AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:39AM (#10573984)

    support for Serial ATA 3 Gigabytes/second hard drives

    It's Serial ATA II which is 3 Gigabits/second. That's just the interface speed, I doubt we'll be seeing drives that fast on the desktop in the near future.

    • It's Serial ATA II which is 3 Gigabits/second. That's just the interface speed, I doubt we'll be seeing drives that fast on the desktop in the near future.

      Probably not ever for your average mechanical spinning platter. When solid state drives become more common then it might be a different matter. I believe I read somewhere that a company would be bringing out a holographic based drive in the next 18 months. I can't remember the speed or capacity, but I would imagine both are greater than todays average d

    • Re:Story Typo (Score:5, Informative)

      by pjrc ( 134994 ) <paul@pjrc.com> on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @10:35AM (#10575151) Homepage Journal
      To make things even more confusing, the Serial ATA II Specification [sata-io.org] actually is about adding a bunch of features, not the increase in speed from 1.5 to 3.0 Gb/s.

      These features include as backplane support with higher voltages (FR4 fiberglass insulation of circuit boards is more lossy at GHz bitrates than plastic used in the cables), port multipliers (connecting several drives), port selector (redundant communication channels), native command queuing and other features mostly targeted at the high end server market.

      The 3 Gb/s (gigabits/sec) speed was actually part of the original 1.0a spec [serialata.org]. The speeds 1.5 Gb/s, 3.0 Gb/s and 6.0 Gb/s are refered to as "Gen 1, Gen 2 and Gen 3".

      So it's natural to confuse "Gen 2" as mentioned in the 1.0a spec with the revision "II" spec which actually adds features and not increased speed.

  • Drivers (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MBMarduk ( 607040 )
    I've been avoiding nForce chipsets on mobos because of their supposedly binary-only and/or non-existant/reverse-engineered drivers for Linux. I'm confused. Does all the hardware on an nForce work with Linux nowadays? Are the drivers OSS or closed like their video ones? Are all even available?

    • Re:Drivers (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @08:17AM (#10574126)
      The video is a GeForce and supported by the stock X nv driver. The audio is an Intel ICH compliant device and will work with both ALSA and OSS. The network is supported with the forcedeth driver, which was reversed from the binary nVidia driver. It works well, but may not support the Gigabit speeds on the nForce4 yet. The RAID controller and other fancy gee-gaws is anyones guess.
    • My Asus A7N8X-X board with an Nforce2 chipset is happily running Gentoo with a 2.6 kernel. Everything works that I'm aware of. However, I dont know about support for the Nforce3/4 chipsets, so YMMV.
  • Anyone else notice that SLI has gone from 16 and 8 PCIE channels to 8 and 8? Also, the chipset only appears to support 20 channels total, so my hope for a 16 and 16 specialist board looks fairly unlikely.
    • Anyone else notice that SLI has gone from 16 and 8 PCIE channels to 8 and 8? Also, the chipset only appears to support 20 channels total, so my hope for a 16 and 16 specialist board looks fairly unlikely.

      This happens because most of today's graphics cards can barely saturate the bandwidth of 8 lanes, let alone 16.

      Taking the example of AGP, so we do have AGP 8X interfaces, but how many AGP 8X cards do you see? Not many. Just because this new gee zee PCI-e interface is available doesn't mean the graphics c

  • ActiveArmor (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gaima ( 174551 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @08:23AM (#10574165)
    We noted CPU utilization rates between 10-15% for nForce4 with ActiveArmor enabled versus 70-80% with the feature turned off (as you'd get on nForce3 250Gb).

    What the ?!

    Hmm, our PIII 800 firewall firewalls 30 people, over 1x 2Mb ADSL (USB), and 1x 1Mb SDSL (ethernet), with 6 IPSEC VPNs and doesn't even use 10-15% CPU!
    Sounds like NVIDIA's packet inspection code needs some work :)
  • 1) Does the firewall matter for most folks? I don't know about y'all, but if I'm buying a 150$ mobo for a gaming box then odds are that I already have a firewall in place.

    2) SLI - the question, for a lot of gamers, will be "if I pay more for this mobo, and then buy another card in 6months/1year/etc, will I be better off than just saving whatever the latest card is?". I like the SLI idea, but since I know my wife isn't going to let me spend all that money at once, should I even bother? Will the card in 6
    • I think 1) could be usefull. Hardware firewalls do have their advantages over software implementations, the most obvious being decreased cpu utilization.

      If you already have a separate firewall then I guess you could just not turn the nforce fw on. The single chip does all the processing so hopefully you don't have to feel like the feature is wasting space and energy when it is off.

  • 550 Watts = Bills (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bruha ( 412869 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @08:37AM (#10574245) Homepage Journal
    If the computer industry does not get it's act together with high power usage they will begin to see a decline in these power systems sales. Running 450 watt systems can cost hundreds of dollars a year in extra costs in electricity. For this reason me and the wife are now looking into Mac solutions for standard work stuff and SFF pc's with 200 watt PS's to cut down on the electric bills. In fact it's just not the wattage pull you have to worry about. These systems are now putting off so much heat it puts strain on your home AC systems having to recool off the house as the heat spreads. I've seriously have considered a dryer hose hooked up to the PSU output fan and pipe it out the house.

    • Re:550 Watts = Bills (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fr2asbury ( 462941 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @10:05AM (#10574897)
      Now, just because a PSU can put out 550 Watts, and just because a system needs a PSU that can put out 550 Watts, does not mean that a system is constantly drawing 550 Watts. A computer's energy consumption is variable depending on what you're asking the system to do at the time. If you're expecting to play DOOM 3, while encoding and burning DVDs 24/7 then maybe you'll max out the power and you will end up paying for that full 550W. Otherwise, there'll probably be long periods of time where the system is sitting idle or doing relatively light tasks and not drawing much power at all.
      Running a computer with a 550W PSU is not the same as constantly running a 550W lightbulb.
    • I've recently been rethinking my computer usage based on the power they need. I used to have three computers on 24/7. A Linux box, a Windows box, and a Windows laptop. The Linux box was just for fun & learning. The Windows box is now just a place to store data & might get used if the laptop is in use. The laptop is used all the time.

      Anyway, I've started leaving the two boxes off because they make noise and use too much power. Sure it's a pain in the arse to turn them on when I need them, but
    • You do understand that those big power supplies are for running two very powerful 3D graphic cards to push the cutting edge games to the limit? If you only want to do word processing, a 250W Antec PSU will do the job just fine.

      You need to compare apples to apples. Don't compare an ultimate gaming rig to a mac using power consumption as your primary criteria.
    • "These systems are now putting off so much heat it puts strain on your home AC systems having to recool off the house as the heat spreads."

      Excuse me? You think that a smallish electronics device is causing strain to a system designed to keep your house cool/warm?

      Get real, man. I've got 3 - 5 PCs on at the same time, and my forced air AC/Heat seems to be doing just fine.
      • You think that a smallish electronics device is causing strain to a system designed to keep your house cool/warm?

        Not strain, but extra work. For every watt of heat outputted by your PCs, your AC has to input some fraction of a watt to move that watt outside your house. That means each amount of power consumption added to a PC also adds again to your cooling bills.

        sidenote: I wonder if anyone has included this in arguments for compact flourescent bulbs? Incadescent bulbs output mostly in the infared.

        G
        • It's currently -6C here and we've had ~10cm of snow in the last 3 days. My heart bleeds for your poor a/c. /me cuddles up to the computer desk with 2 laptops, 2 desktops and 3 monitors on it

  • Unclear -- Ultra and SLI available for 754? (Score:3, Informative)

    by IronChefMorimoto ( 691038 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @09:46AM (#10574728)
    I only had time to read Anandtech's preview this morning for the nForce4 chipsets, and I wasn't sure that the Ultra and SLI chipsets would be made available for Socket 754 A64 CPUs.

    I checked Nvidia's website for information on this, and I found tech specs for each chipset:

    nForce4 - http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041014863476.html [nvidia.com]
    nForce4 Ultra - http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041015990644.html [nvidia.com]
    nForce4 SLI - http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041015917263.html [nvidia.com]

    As you can see -- no specifics on the socket support. I'm wondering if this will be at the discretion of the motherboard manufacturers. My hope is that Nvidia will encourage both Socket 754 and Socket 939 variants of the motherboards with these chipsets.

    I'm an owner of a Socket 754 CPU, and I know that a lot of friends invested money as early adopters of the A64 CPU in these Socket 754 platforms. I unloaded nearly $375 for my Socket 754 A64 before AMD started cutting prices and introducing the early, and very expensive, Socket 939 CPUs.

    That's an investment that I can't just shirk off in order to take advantage of a much less expensive chipset/motherboard upgrade for, say, $125 for a top tier nForce4 motherboard (just guessing at the pricing here -- don't take it literally).

    IronChefMorimoto

  • Nforce3 IDE problems... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by freelunch ( 258011 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @10:20AM (#10575026)
    I have been beating the bushes hard looking for the best Athlon 64/socket 939 MB combo for Linux.

    The nforce3 apparently suffers from some IDE problems [lkml.org] and a bug report [kernel.org] has been filed.

    I am currently leaning towards the MSI K8T Neo2 FIR.

    I would like to hear about Linux on nforce4...

    Also, this site [linuxhardware.org] seems to be giving hardware reviews under Linux a go. Any other good Linux-centric hardare sites?

  • No soundstorm! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by d_jedi ( 773213 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @11:03AM (#10575403)
    Well, just looks like nVidia lost my sale..
  • I am waiting to get a 939 board but the nvidia solutions have a problem with their ethernet, apparently. why else have the major players BYPASSED the nvidia one and used a 3com (marvell) controller or even worse - realtek!

    so now I hear there are ide lockup issues and of course, this ethernet issue.

    finally, the via chipset (kt8mumble) has no fan on its main chip (nvidia uses a fan on all their 'northbridges') and it seems like the via board is way better than anything nvidia has.

    and the benchmarks look l

  • 20-lane PCI-E? Ho-hum.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NerveGas ( 168686 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @11:22AM (#10575623)

    20 lanes of PCI-E, with 16 of those used for the PCI-E slot? That's the same that everyone else has been churning out. If they really want people to buy their SLI cards, why don't they produce a chipset with higher interconnectivity, so they can put two x16 slots on the board for the SLI cards, and still have a few left over for the peripherals?

    steve
  • "...which, according to nVidia will need a 550-watt power supply!"

    So if I combine two overclocked nVidia boards with an overclocked Athlon and two fast SATA drives, the system will pay for itself over the winter as I can just stick it on the first floor of the house and let the heat travel upward. Bloody nifty!
  • ... Serial ATA 3 Gigabytes/second ...

    What is this nonsense? There is no 3 GB/s HDD interface. SATA II is 3 Gb/s (3 Gigabit/second) and that is one order of magnitude slower than the article states.

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