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Chipset Integrates Gigabit Ethernet, RAID, Firewall
EconolineCrush writes "Tech Report has a review of NVIDIA's latest Athlon 64 chipset, the nForce3 250Gb. The 250Gb is especially interesting because it's the first core logic chipset to integrate a Gigabit Ethernet MAC, hardware-accelerated firewall, and RAID across four Serial ATA and four "parallel" ATA devices. NVIDIA is even working with third party developers to help their software take advantage of the chipset's hardware firewall components. Looks like we've reached a point where chipsets will differentiate on features more than performance."
The big question is, will all this stuff, half of which I will never use, slow down my computer?
Now that motherboard chipsets for athlons don't use a memory controller (the 64 bit ones have em on the chip processor) is that why we're starting to see all this stuff integrated into the motherboard?
Photos.
It sounds nice except for the firewall which strikes me as misplaced. I do not want firewall duty being handled by my new systems, I would much rather have it handled by a nice router or really outdated system in a closet.
vampirical
Do more firewalls make a more secure machine? There will be a firewall built into your chipset, your OS, your router...
I have a feeling it's got to do with pointless features more than anything else.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
How will we be able to patch it?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Will any one from OSS support it? Because all there video drivers are Tainted module
Maybe Sun is not the first but its a core part of their ideology. This link to OS News has a link and discussion about this.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Onboard audio I don't really care for, but a nice NIC and an onboard SATA controller are key to grabbing my purchase. I've got an ASUS P4P800 and it has been quite good to me. By the way, what kind of security do you look for in a motherboard? Aside from the (brand new) onboard firewall, I can't think of any integrated security features except for the bios password.
The security is only good if the user turns it on.. or doesn't turn it off as the case may be.
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies
I definitely agree with keeping things modular. Especially with the advent of the new PCI standards that provide more bandwidth and higher speed, it will be easier to just pick and choose the features that you really want and not pay extra for things you're never gonna use anyway.
But... Does it run linux?
:) I could actually have 8-12 in this machine and it be justified.
Cause if it's like the early nforce boards, I was much better off with Via's stuff.
Nvidia's great suff, but I just haven't been impressed with their provided drivers yet. Comparing several build ATI+VIA systems to Nvidia core systems, I have far less problems, hassles, and overall better performace out of the ATI+VIa ones.
Like take the Asus offerings. The A7NX's rocked, but the nforce eqivalent.. sure it had like extra nic's, and other goodies, just didn't hold pace with a clean linux kernel and 3 gig's of ram.
I switched the $150 nforce chipset board with a $60 Via, and ended up with a MUCH better high end workstation.
Of course, I guess not everyone needs 3 gigs of ram.
-=fshalor
It's an integrated hardware firewall. I RTFA'd and it seems pretty cool. It starts up along with your system, so you don't have to worry about malware infecting your system during the short period between booting your system and the operating system and necessary drivers loading up. It also has a software interface reminiscent of Smoothwall and has several security profiles available for those unfamiliar with firewall configurations, but there is also a command line interface. Combined with those nifty antivirus features in the new athlon 64 chips, you've got yourself a pretty secure box.
"NVIDIA is even letting third-party software developers take advantage of the nForce3 250Gb's dedicated firewall hardware."
It doesn't say that they've published the necessary APIs and/or documentation for taking advantage of this feature, only that they're "letting" people take advantage of it. Does this mean it will remain closed and non-free like the nForce ethernet driver on previous chipsets? While they do release a "tainted" Linux driver, they don't allow groups like the OpenBSD project access to the documentation in order to write their own driver.
All that hardware off-loading of processing from the CPU is not going to benefit everyone unless they freely provide documentation for using it.
Here's hoping they release the necessary documentation instead of hoarding it like Intel has done with their on-NIC IPsec off-loading.
Other than that, I really like the integrated firewall for two reasons:
1.) It starts before the OS would have the ability to start a firewall
2.) It (apparently?) works regardless of OS (that's a big question mark)
Someone is WRONG on the Internet!
i look forward to seeing the documentation for these devices, so they can be fully supported by [insert any os besides windows].
oh wait, did you say nvidia? nevermind. buggy binary drivers, no support for advanced features, drm, and linux only (no bsd allowed).
I hope manufactures start to notice that a lot of people who buy the high end motherboards are the same people who are likely to use linux exclusively or at least dual boot. Initially, most of the popular serial ata chipsets included with motherboards, silicon image 3112 comes to mind, had lousy linux support particularly for the raid features. 2.6 has come a long way with ide raid support mostly due to developer's working to reverse engineer, but maybe just maybe manufactures will start to realize that linux support early on is a good and profitable business practice.
Onboard audio I don't really care for
I thought the same as you.. but ever since I got my Asus A7N8X Deluxe, I've changed my mind about onboard audio. This baby has an amplified main output, 6.1-channel dolby digital capability, and an SPDIF output, onboard!
It also has *2* NICs onboard, an SATA controller (with RAID), Dual channel DDR 400mhz memory controller, AGP8x, 6 USB2.0 ports, 2 Firewire ports (both 4 and 6 wire), and something I thought had long gone missing from PCs: the midi/joystick connector!
This motherboard has everything, and the kitchen sink (the bus is actually 8-bit HyperTransport v1.0 from what AIDA32 claims), and it's ROCK SOLID stable.. what more could you ask.. oh yeah, it's relatively cheap too.
(Disclamier: I have nothing to do with Asus, just a very satisfied customer)
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
I think we reached that point long ago. The chipset performance difference is often less than 5%, and usually less than 2%. Are you going to notice that in day-to-day activities? Not likely. Chipset loyalties, features, past experiences, these are the things that matter. After 2 years of rock solid performance on my Nforce 1, I would have to be hard pressed to switch to Via if they had a performance difference. Plus Nvidia's drivers generally work, and they try to make drivers that work no matter what board you have, just like their graphics cards.
Not that I'm a die-hard Nvidia chipset fan. At the time I bought the board two years ago, however, only the Nforce board provided all the features I wanted at the budget I was shooting for. The integrated video isn't horribe either, unlike Intel's Extremely Nasty solution.
Differentiating on features more than performance? I thing the legions of Small Form Factor junkies kind of make the argument that that bridge was crossed quite a while ago. They settle for less performance, and practially all reviews of those boxen focus on the features, and less on performance.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Oh come on, its nothing like what Microsoft does. Microsoft uses underhanded tactics to search and destroy any company that they think they can take over and profit from. These guys added a logical feature (a firewall), and made a logical progression (from 100base to gigabit ethernet).
You say security is what you look for in a motherboard - how is this motherboard, with a well designed, built in, hardware level firewall, any less secure than any other motherboard that is the same except for the firewall. Or are you complaining about the SATA? Motherboards with SATA should be banned, and we should all still stick with ATA alone? Or maybe its the onboard RAID? Or is 100base onboard ethernet somehow better than GB?
The more I think about it, the more I realize that I shouldn't respond to this at all, but should have given you a -1:Flamebait. I mean if " Security, stability, and performance are the top features I look for in a motherboard", then RTFA and notice that performance is ahead of its class, and its very stable, not to mention the extra steps taken for security. Hopefully some mods will take care of this.
is it's ability to overclock. This is the first confirmed chipset with pci lock and agp lock.
NJ Local Music Scene
I would say the RAID system has more business being near the SATA/ATA controller then the firewall does.
You have the chipset being the bus's traffic cop and directing everything, and on top of that, its going to analyze, though probably very simply, and scrub every packet that crosses it. It just strikes me as something that the chipset shouldn't be doing, if you really feel the need for a firewall on chip, throw it on a special NIC. On top of it, how do you update it when every problem is found? Flash the bios? I don't know about you, but I don't want to be doing that all that often. I think that putting the firewall in the chipset was a bad idea.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
But keeping things modular is more expensive -- it's much more efficient to integrate everything on one or two chips rather than producing a PCB, chip, and supporting electronics.
I'm all for integration - i think it will be more reliable, consume less power, and be more environmentally friendly in the long run. If you don't require all the 'features', then buy a motherboard with fewer integrated features. I just don't see the point of favoring a PCI NIC over an integrated one.
It looks like the chipset can more than hold its own, even with beta drivers.
d s/ nf3/n250/001.htm0 04q2/nforce3-250gb /index.x?pg=1
http://www.gamers-depot.com/hardware/motherboar
http://techreport.com/reviews/2
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Eeeks Hardware Firewall.. That just smells like a bad idea... Exploit at the hardware level anyone?
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Host firewalls are "A Good Thing(TM)". With the abundence of malware, trojans, and application attacks that are allowed to breeze through firewalls (because that's not what network firewalls were designed to block), having a host firewall is an asset, not a liability.
It's not like an on-chip firewall is going to slow down your box, and no one said you have to configure it to allow access to the rest of your network (like a gateway firewall), it's just an extra layer of protection that you can tailor much more specifically to that host's needs.
This doesn't mean you have to throw away your current firewall, this means you get more (and better) protection. In fact, features like this would be great for deployed application servers. Each DMZ host can be protected from the others even though they're on the same switch, and it doesn't require buying licenses and installing more software (like ZoneAlarm).
Someone is WRONG on the Internet!
The reason I use a PCI NIC over an onboard one is because if it dies, I can replace it readily...
:( ) but it's a valid point, though since I'm not a hardware expert I can't really comment on whether third part components aren't as power friendly as onboard ones...
:)
Reliability... well, I don't really agree with you there.. KISS is the most reliable in my opinion.
Less power is a non-issue for me (yes, I suck as an environmentalist
Each to their own opinion...
Open Your Mind. Open Your Source.
If you aren't looking to use the firewall, it looks like it's pretty easy to turn it off.
In the Forceware screenshot it shows a line labeled "Firewall Setup: Change firewall profiles including turning Firewall on/off." But, I guess if price was an issue, and you the firewall kept you from getting it, I could see that. Seems to me, this would be cheaper than a spare system in the closet. I guess you would have to test it with the firewall on/off to know if it was stealing your cycles, though.
The ForceWare software that comes with it looks semi-decent. I like how it has a built in statistics graph for the firewall, too.
But if your motherboard NIC dies, you can still replace it with a PCI NIC. Unless motherboards actually start dropping PCI slots, reliability is a non-issue.
And the really nice part? When/if you DO stick an even better card in the AGP slot, you can still use the onboard for a second monitor.
For quite some time now, all of the machines I've built for our office have used NForce2 IGP chipsets, for precisely those reasons. A board that costs $100 (or less), is rock-solid, has terrific driver support, stellar performance, sound, network, etc. makes my life very, very easy. In fact, $450 will put together a VERY nice system (sans monitor) based on them.
Plus, the fact that they'll play quite a few games (Q3, WarCraft III, Counter-Strike) incredibly well makes staying late very enjoyable....
As a matter of fact, I'm going to upgrade my machine at home in the next month or two, and chances are that I'll keep using the same boards!
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I realize you were making a joke but it reminded me of something that I think a lot of people around here will find interesting and intriguing. Check out the briQ. It's an entire PowerPC-based computer that has been squeezed into a 5.25" chassis (the size of an optical drive). So, while you can't have a Mac (per se) in your PC, you can have a computer that can run Mac OS. How freaky is that?
If it's as bad as the rest of nVidia's Linux support, it's nothing to be excited about. nVidia's drivers taught me why open source drivers are so important.
And they're "good" about Linux support. That just underscores why open drivers are a must.
Any home user doesn't need a hardware accelerated firewall. Windows XP comes with a simple firewall that handles this kind of stuff with ease. The only rules a home users needs are block every port, and maybe let a few through, nothing fancy. Additionally, this'll apply only to about 4 megabits of bandwidth at most, considering the speed of even the fastest broadband residential connections.
This may just be somehting that the people at compusa can read off the tag. "Integrated firewall firewall for increased security". Either that or another feature for power users to tick off. Possibly similar to how pentium ads talk about optimization for streaming internet video when any processor made after 1997 can stream anything on the net today.
Photos.
No difference between an Asus and an Abit motherboard?
From the numerous Abit NF7-M and Asus A7N8X-VM motherboards I've used to build all of the office machines for some time, I can tell you that there's a BIG difference between an Abit and an Asus motherboard:
The Abit works.
Now, I know, that sounds a bit cynical. And I can't say that none of the Asus boards have worked. But I *can* say that the Asus boards have been quirky, odd, and just plain wankery. The Abit boards have been solid, reliable, and terrific.
As an example, I've had to add a PCI NIC to most of the Asus boards. The onboard LAN is just too flaky. I've watched as users rebooted, only to have their onboard NIC disappear, even though still enabled in the BIOS.
I'm by no means anti-Asus. In fact, the Asus boards have some tweaks in the BIOS that I really like. But my time is valuable, and the Abit boards take a lot less of my time.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I also used to hate onboard audio... but all motherboards that use the Nforce/Nforce2 chipsets quickly changed my mind, enough so that I sold my creative soundblaster live because I didn't need it anymore. I like having a freed up pci slot and less clutter in the case. Not to mention the onboard audio on my Abit board using Nforce2 had one hell of a gui to control all the features. Nvidia does a great job with drivers, and their onboard sound is no different. I did have another Abit board using the nforce1 chipset, and the onboard nic started acting up so I had to turn it off in the bios. I knew 3 other people with the same board that eventually had the same thing happen. Eventually, the whole board started acting up... so having things onboard isn't always a great idea, especially if one of those things goes bad.
Nvidia has some serious talent that produce great graphics cards, & chipsets with audio/ethernet/integrated graphics.
The next logical step would be an Nvidia CPU, perhaps integrated with other technologies. Wishful thinking?
Why didn't they just include a processor core like PowerPC or ARM core? Might as well make a super duper all-in-one cpu on a chip.
BTW, since this is Slashdot I should mention to people that if you plan on running Linux, avoid this board like the plague. It is HORRIBLE under Linux. I've got one with 1 GB of Infineon DDR RAM and an Athlon XP 3200+. I've had to underclock my processor down to 2500+ and completely disable APIC support and compile a vanilla Linux kernel with absolutely no reference to APIC or ACPI before the system would run stable for more than an hour. Now I MAYBE get 2 weeks out of it before it just crashes hard... sometimes it locks up, sometimes it just reboots itself. memtest shows memory is fine, replaced video card, and am using the onboard ATA controller and an Intel gigabit ethernet card with onboard NICs disabled. 2.4.25 kernel still causes crashes. I don't know if it's temperature or what, but this system sucks ass. Average (remember, running at XP 2500+ speeds) is 48C idle. If I bump it up to 3200+ it sits at 52-53C idle and gets up past 70C on high CPU load and is probably going into thermal shutdown. This is with a huge Zalman flower cooler on it and 3 other fans blowing onto it. Piece of shit system.. I wanted a Mac G5!
Word to all that. I got the same mobo a few months ago and I'm loving it. Was terrified to leave my precious 440BX behind, but its worth it. This one's got performance, features *and* stability, though I'll readily admit that it gave me all kinds of trouble with Linux to start with, but I guess thats just the cost of moving to modern hardware.
Sad that these otherwise snazzy NForce3s don't have near as nice onboard sound as the NF2s though.
Assuming your motherboard has PCI slots, nothing is stopping you from putting in third party components. I'm perfectly content with the onboard nforce2 audio on the MSI board I have at home for gaming. It sounds the same, if not much better than the SB PCI 512 I had my old machine. The nvidia ethernet works fine as well under Windows XP. Now that I think about it, the only thing that isn't integrated into my motherboard is my graphics card, since this is my gaming system, and a firewire card. Everything else onboard is more than adequate if not superior to what I had in my 2-3 year old former gaming system that had all third party components for sound, graphics, nic, etc. If it dies, so what... it was $68, I'll just buy another one. A decent sound card used to cost at leasta hundred bucks and a good NIC used to be $60 (3com 3c905) by itself.
Then I tried this mobo in linux. SuSE did a normal install fine. As soon as I installed video and motherboard drivers, the whole OS was FUBAR. Pretty much the same thing in Red Hat... except I sorta got most of it usable (sound is still iffy).
I'd be careful with hardware RAID. What do you do when your RAID chip explodes and you can't buy a replacement mobo? Since you don't know how the hardware RAID device puts data on the discs, when you lose the chip you lose the data. Software seems worth the performance hit* for knowing that plugging the discs back into ANY ATA device gets your data back.
* And software is fast enough for SATA. If you're using Ultrafast FibreChannel or something then you might like the hardware RAID better...
My other car is first.
Yes, assuming. Read up on Intel's plans for future motherboards and you'll find that lots of slots (or any slots) may not be on the menu. The idea is to produce machines with enough on-board I/O to serve the needs of the majority of users, and keep board costs down as much as possible. Slots will eventually become a luxury that you have to pay a premium to get.
And from a maintenance standpoint, I disagree with you. Yes, motherboards are cheap, but there's a considerable difference in the labor required to swap out a motherboard, and replacing a single card. That may not be important to you or me, but to a user that is dependent upon his local computer store (or a large corporation that has limited IT resources) it can be. Yes, you can just shotgun the entire motherboard, but the odds of the new one being register-compatible with the old one are low, and given that current Windows OSes aren't particularly drive-portable you're probably screwed.
A decent sound card goes for $30 and a decent NIC for $5 nowadays, so you really aren't saving much by going with onboard I/O. The idea is to save computer makers money, not necessarily to provide you with a better or more maintainable product. One of my favorite older motherboards was Abit's KT7A-RAID: no sound, no network, no video, just a bunch of PCI slots, AGP, and even an ISA slot. Their thought was that they were selling to people that wanted control. Ended up being one of the best boards I've ever owned.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You're kidding about the XP firewall, right? In the version that ships with vanilla XP and SP1, calling it worthless would probably be an understatement. You're the first person I've heard that takes it anywhere near seriously.
That said, SP2 will ship with a much improved firewall that could be called a Zone Alarm lite, but honestly, my preference is still for a hardware level firewall. The reason for this is you're stopping the traffic before it ever touches the system, helping to stop a vulnerability in software from turning into a break-in of the actual system.
FYI, I have an A7N8X-X (not the Deluxe) at work and I found it would lock up hard every couple of days until I turned off SMP support in my kernel. This is enabled by default for all kernel sources, and I imagine it gets turned on by some vendor kernels as well. You should try that to see if it helps; I haven't had any problems with my machine since I tried, but it's only been a week or so. However, several co-workers reported exactly the same thing, and they've all been fine since they disabled SMP.
It's still a pretty pointless board to run in Linux - why bother getting something with all sorts of fancy onboard crap if there's no good drivers to use it all? They definitely should have gone with a KT600 chipset board.
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
This is good stuff, people! Really!
Once we get past the "dumb beast" stage, the stage at which we believe bigger-is-better (in this field, more MHz), we reach a point where quality and smart features that are useful in today's world are what differentiates products. I've wished the market supported proper chipsatz (I just like how it sounds in German say it, so shoot me) development for a long time, now this news seems like bringing that a step closer to reality. It's a known fact that Intel, when they were interested in doing so, produced kick-ass chipsets. BX440 ring a bell?
These are smart features. Features that a lot of people will make good use of. But make no mistake - these are not marketing gimmicks (at least generally speaking) - these are not your useless AMR slots of yesteryear!
We are paying a lot of money for diminishing-return upgrades until these feature trends start being implemented. The fact that your computer calculates an Excel formula in 1/100th of a second faster than mine is not worth anything in reality, yet people are wasting good money on perceived upgrades. Yes, it's very nice that you get 1000 fps in your FPS of choice. using a Radeon 9800 Pro. My older now-$50 card gets 200 fps, which is fine for me. In fact, my monitor can't even display it that fast, and your LCD sure as heck can't! What I really want is to get rid of that firewall sitting next to my machine, with it's brick-style power adapter (anyone listening? get rid of those things!). What I really want is SATA RAID-5. Or thereabouts. It makes sense. We're ready for it. It's just a matter of time till someone steps in and delivers it. No more BS!
No more BS, no more RAMBUSsing, no more HyperBS-ing, no more FXing, no more Presscotting! Just do it, do it well, do it right! We'll buy it! We're buying your crap now, you can only profit by doing something smart and giving us what we really want.
P.S. Hat's off to nVidia for the nForce2, I hope the nForce3 250Gb is equally good in it's market. Although I'd change the name.
Must-not-watch TV!
I once found on Canon's website a manual on how to clean an digital SLR sensor.
Basically a digital SLR is a body+electronics+sensor and you can screw on your own lens. Note that while professional camera bodies are expensive, good lenses are also very expensive, so it makes sense to keep your lenses when you change body to a new camera. And, of course, if you are going to change the sensor you need to change the electronics too - which leaves the metal case which is not that expensive (look at regular film SLRs - they go for around $150-300 nowadays).
Now back to cleaning: the manual said something like this:
What happens is that the CMOS sensor is bare and anything harsher will likely damage it. So you really want it sealed - which implies having something transparent (like a lens ;) in front of it that you can't remove.
Good lens are expensive so you can just as well make it a part of the lens system to reduce the price.
MS and Phoenix are planning to incorporate several features including TCP/IP in the BIOS. With the prospect of an onboard firewall, nVidia may very well be both ahead of its time and an (un)intentional partner with MS and Phoenix.
Is it feasible to have iptables run in hardware? I mean, if NVIDIA say they're going to help third parties set up their software to use the hardware, they had better help the only firewall software we care about.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Well I have an Asus A7N8X-E and it is amazingly stable and the best machine I've owned in Linux - that said it's sound card that needs a good linux driver.
p hp?t=36 337&start=15
Basically - for those that don't know there are major problems with the sound support - it's a great card, works amazingly under windows.
Here is a link with more info:
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.
A forum user has posted his correspondance with an nvidia rep/dev(?) in which it is stated that they are working on linux support. . . he also clarifies why the APU is a sore point for nvidia (not just in linux but in general)
So in linux you can get it to work easily, but only with one channel (ie everything has to play through arts/esd/whatever...) - but in kde this is useful:
http://ripi.net/software/kickarts/
If one chip breaks, the whole machine is useless! That's exactly what I want in a computer.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
From my experiance one's useally able to turn off all the unused motherboard crap in the BIOS.
Not MS's Window XP default firewall.
Apparently the board's firewall is based on a modified Linux kernal in the firmware that boot's a embedded processor before the bios finishes loading & WinXP's bootloader start's running.
The average home user just needs to make sure their ports are blocked. No it's not a 'good' firewall, but it's massive improvement over none.
Photos.