New nForce Boards Previewed

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.

Comments

Mmm. Goodies.

[Space cowboy]

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.

[swordboy]

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.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[caluml]

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.

[AKnightCowboy]

Well said. For me personally, Nvidia can keep these cheap-ass boards until they integrate a fiberchannel controller onto them. I don't have time to screw around with this nancy-boy Serial ATA crap. I want a serious 8-way motherboard with fiberchannel so I can interface to my home SAN.

PS: Go buy a 3Ware card if you want Serial ATA RAID. All onboard RAID controllers suck.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Algan]

...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

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.

[dnoyeb]

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.

Of course, if your NVIDIA or VIA and want to elevate your importance. This is not what AMD or intel or motorola would like. That's why they keep comming up with new junk to stuff on the CPU to claim its going to do more work, ala MMX, 3DNOW, etc..

I know I can run software RAID across the disks, but I'm still more comfortable with h/w solutions...
I too have tried software solutions. I have seen past the facade and like you I am willing to pay the extra few bucks to get a true hardware setup. I want to simply pull drive out, insert new drive. I don't want to worry about where the OS is installed, and other non-hardware issues for a hardware failure.

Personally I will be running for a new motherboard when the new BIOS formats arrive and we can do away with this shoddy interrupt system that leaves sound and most other real time applications less than impressive on computers, regardless of their speed.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[io-waiter]

Cheapo IDE RAID-5 are software based, they have a special driver doing the checksums, so they are more like ordinary os-level RAID-5 than dedicated hardware RAID.
RAID-0 and RAID-1 are different beasts, much less CPU intensive.
A hardware based RAID card as your 3ware example is much more expensive, for a reason.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Lumpy]

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.

[Gentlewhisper]

Actually you can get SATA RAID 5 support on Intel platforms. I'm talking dual proc mobos here, not the consumer crap.

Speaking of dual, I did read the FA and there is no mention of any upcoming dual proc boards using the nforce4 for the opteron.

The opteron is a great chip, great everything. But when you want to get a motherboard for it, it seems like brands like Tyan is the only bet.

Currently I am running my setup on a Arima HDAMB board. Arima, never heard of them huh? Same with me, but it is like the only board I could get when I built my rig, and looking at manufacturers like Asus, it seems like the Opteron doesn't even exist!

I guess AMD will still face quite a bit of trouble entering into the market in the foreseeable future, with most mobo makers still fearful of pissing off Intel Corporation.

But of course, at the rate they are screwing up, with their latest PrescHOT and 64 bit copy cat and the recent announcement that clock speed isn't everything... well, I just wish they keep it that way. So that in the years to come Intel won't be a corporation anymore

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[ceeam]

RAIDs are reasonably good against disk failures but those are on par with _file_system_ failures! Think about it - if a fault in OS, or a fault in RAM (cache), for example, or malware mess up your FS metadata RAID5 is supposed to help you how? Still, everything counts when you run a multi-million enterprise (at least), but for storing "your DVDs" it's an overkill and not even a panacea.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[tonsofpcs]

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.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I don't know why anyone would want to go through the effort of setting up raid 5 with on-board controlers. With a 3ware card you get FULL Linux/Windows/BSD support. If you frequently update things like a Mainboard, then it's certainly worth it to be able to take the card and your array with you. Will your next board recognize your raid-5 container? I'd rather not take that change.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[phrasebook]

Yeah yeah, another good RAID samaritan. Fact is, failures in RAM, the filesystem implementation, OS etc. are very, very rare compared to hard disks developing bad sectors or failing to spin up properly. I've been saved from a bad hard disk twice since I setup software RAID 1 about three years back, and yes it's just for storing "my DVDs" (music actually). I know it doesn't protect me from a rm -rf / or a power surge or a fire or anything except a bad disk. But since bad disks are comparatively common, there's good value in running a RAID. Getting back on-topic, I wouldn't care if a chipset had RAID built in or not - can't see a reason not to use software RAID anyway.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Noehre]

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.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[MongooseKY]

Anyone going the Asus route would be well advised to pray and pray that the hardware never fails, because to say that Asus tech support sucks would be a gross understatement. Their hardware is decent, but woe be unto him that has to deal with them on a customer service issue of any kind. I spent over a month recently trying to get a video card issue resolved with them and finally gave up. Luckily the reseller http://www.newegg.com/ DOES have good customer service and gave me a refund of the current market value. I've bought my last Asus product.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[provolt]

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?

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[bluesnowmonkey]

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.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Anonymous Coward]

so where are we going to put the extra dimm slots for the RAID cache?

have you ever LOOKED at a real raid card? let alone used one?

lumpy is absolutely correct.

quit crying about server class hardware costing server class prices.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Rob.Mathers]

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.

[Donny Smith]

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 features, etc.). And in case you haven't noticed, the chipset has one on-chip GbE NIC, and to get data in and out fast (like when you want to back-up 700GB over LAN or when you serve the files to clients) you'd need more GbE NICs which means even with RAID-5 included one would need to add several LAN cards. As the grandparent post said, the chipset is made for workstations (performance = RAID0) and temporary storage.

And finally, as nForce4 supports only four SATA disks, one could build a very basic 3+1 RAID-5 array which is the one and only reasonable choice (as 2+1 would perform much slower and leave one disk in a non-RAID configuration). Most users serious about RAID-5 would rather buy a separate add-on card which can stripe across at least five-six disks and not three or two.

I wouldn't speculate about nForce4 design but it's possible that RAID-5 would be a bit too much for the chipset as it is more compute-intensive.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Yenya]

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 (with good enough disc controller and ethernet interface), so why not waste extra CPU cycles doing RAID checksums. The only problem is that the data go over the bus more times (4 times in case of RAID-5 write), but your drives usually cannot saturate a 32bit/33MHz PCI bus for random access at all, so with 64/66 or 64/100 controller this is not a problem.

I have 3ware 7506-8 controller (8x P-ATA), and I have measured that the writes can be ~30% faster over SW RAID-5 across 8 disks than the HW RAID-5 case. This is because of faster CPU and bigger cache (=RAM) - so the elevator can do better work for random access writes. The test server was dual Athlon MP-2000+, but even with this test the CPUs were almost idle (

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's cool and all, but Silicon Image (also known as SIIG) really sucks. All their controller boards I've ever come across have been cheap and underperforming.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[bluesnowmonkey]

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.

No need to put all these words in my mouth. I said nothing about "free", and I'm not offering solutions to anybody. I'm just saying that the inclusion of RAID-0 and RAID-1 on a budget motherboard is strong evidence that it won't be long before RAID-5 is included as well.

And don't give me shit about servers. The nForce chipset isn't targetted at servers in any way, shape, or form. They're targetted at businesses that would like cheap, decent 3D capability in their desktop fleets, as well as budget gamers. What about a power home user who would like to maintain a large, permanent collection of music, downloaded movies, ripped DVDs, whatever? Hardware RAID-5 is perfect and would be a nice selling point for such a user.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Donny Smith]

>And don't give me shit about servers.

Ouch!

Yes, RAID-5 is great but you still need to back it up somehow.
How can a home user can backup 750GB of data (it'd take some 200 DVDs) unless he has a tape drive (not exactly a popular item) or yet another RAID-5 for disk-based backup which means the user would need two RAID-5 disks - impossible with nForce4 which supports up to four SATA disks.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

I take it you haven't heard of Moore's Law...

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Quikah]

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.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[grumpygrodyguy]

I don't find Asus support to be that bad. They answer the phone in less than 5 mins usually, and if the tier-1 support guys can't help you then they elevate you to tier-2 within 2-3 mins and you can talk to them. Pretty decent support arrangement if you ask me.

What really disappoints me is that Soundstorm(tm) is still being ignored. Many people buying these boards are gamers, and it's a massive drawback knowing that you'll have to drop another $100-$200 on a crappy Creative soundcard. The NForce2 boards were wonderful home-theater solutions with built in dolby decoders. Not even Creative's most expensive boards can do that. It always depresses me when technology appears to devolve rather than improve like it's supposed to.

With the incoming PCI-E boards, and the lack of Soundstorm integration with the new NForce chipsets....I'm sad to say that my AMD days are probably over for the next few years. Hello Intel....again...*sigh*.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[Bill Dog]

NO BUSH IN 2004.

Bummer. Unfortunately, being a Slashdot reader, and a "grumpygrodyguy" on top of that, it's probably safe to say there'll be no bush for you in 2005 either! :-)

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[gid]

you mean like this board?

I really thought about running raid to speed up work, and increase reliability, but it's just not really worth it on the desktop.

raid-0: decreases reliability since you have 2 drives that can go bad instead of 1, lose 1 drive and you're dead in the water.

raid-1: doesn't give an performance increase, in fact it's a performance hit for a lot of things.

raid-5: I didn't know of any boards that did it at the time, and they extra cards are expensive, plus the extra 2 drives.

raid 0+1: gives you some good reliability, but now you're talking 4 drives to buy and worry about instead of 2 or 3.

I came to the conclusion, just got the fastest single ide drive you can buy, and go with that. (74 gig WD Raptor 10k SATA) And back up your stuff. The beauty of one drive is that there's only 1 drive to go bad and replace, you also use up less power and it's quieter. With raid-5, not only are you buying 3 drives, but if you really want that reliability, you better have an extra drive on hand just in case.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[tehdaemon]

For the most part, hardware RAID-0 and 1 on a gaming oriented board still is ridiculous.

See this. (short version, they are mostly software raid controllers.)

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[AKnightCowboy]

I was pleasantly suprised that I could go from an old 7000-2 3Ware card to a newer 7500-4LP and it recognized the volume and booted up just fine. I guess it's not that amazing, but if I had some craptastic onboard RAID controller from vendor X and then bought another motherboard that used vendor Y's chipset then I'm SOL... especially if I'm buying a new motherboard because my old one is toast. ;-)

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[oddfox]

Uhh, if you want a crappy Creative card, you can spend like $29 dollars getting a SB Live! 5.1 card. If you want a good Creative card, you can get an Audigy 2 ZS PCI retail for $91 (Which is what I upgraded to from a SB Live! Value). What exactly is the turn-on about having a dolby decoder/encoder/whatever, esp. when you're stuck with the the ALC650 codec?

Does it have something to do with movies, DVDs specifically? I wouldn't know about that not having a DVD-ROM drive, I watch all my movies away from the computer on the home theatre system. Seems like integrated audio is a real weird way to go about choosing your chipsets and especially CPU choice, and it's not like VIA is scrapping their on-board audio projects.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[WuphonsReach]

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.)

For $DIETY's sake, why?

Get yourself the HuffYUV codec, which is 100% lossless, takes near-zero CPU time, costs nothing and will cut that video rate down to 7-9MB/s. Even my old and slow 5400rpm 160GB Maxtor can keep up with 8-9MB/s.

In fact, my primary capture drive is that old-n-slow 5400rpm unit.

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[grumpygrodyguy]

What exactly is the turn-on about having a dolby decoder/encoder/whatever, esp. when you're stuck with the the ALC650 codec?

Seems like integrated audio is a real weird way to go about choosing your chipsets and especially CPU choice

Re:Mmm. Goodies.

[oddfox]

Thanks for the links, good reads and informative, but I still don't think that SoundStorm is such a big deal that the NForce platform was floating on it (Obviously it wasn't, because as has been stated, mobo manufacturers found it too expensive with not enough return). You still had to get the proper equipment to go with the sound system, and then set it up the right way, or it was just your standard nothing special on-board audio. :)

now i can finally...

[Interfacer]

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 :)

Re:now i can finally...

[selderrr]

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 testing win95,98,me,200. But these are turned off mostly). That amounts to quite some watt, no ?

Re:now i can finally...

[Ford Prefect]

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. 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...

Re:now i can finally...

[sxpert]

friend of mine uses it to heat the fishtank via a double heat exchanger (the fish don't like de-ionized water)

Re:now i can finally...

[TummyX]

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?

Re:now i can finally...

[Enigma_Man]

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

Re:now i can finally...

[moonbender]

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 a 550W power supply. Okay, that's not true - a 550W PSU that's only utilized to 50% doesn't generate a lot more heat than a 300W PSU driven fairly hard, although PSUs are more efficient if they're used at close to their capacity. But in any event I seriously doubt this chipset actually needs a 550W PSU, just like the Nvidia graphics cards supposedly needed a 500W supply and run fine with any brand-name 350W PSU (not using a no-name PSU is key here).

Re:now i can finally...

[skids]

So many houses these days are heated with electric heat, this is not such a bad idea. Imagine an embedded consumer product that "competes" in the space-heater market, but consists of a bunch of CPUs/GPUs all set up to run a dedicated BOINC installation... You couldn't get more than 70-80 degrees out of it, but with enough mid-range passively-cooled inexpensive chips you could probably warm a room pretty well, and at least offload a portion of the electricity from the normal heating system. A run-of-the-mill space heater usually eats around 2500W.

Sure, it would be a geek chic thing and cost a whole lot more than a normal space heater, but why not put that power to good use? :-)

(Natch, it's arguable that money is better spent upgrading heating systems to use something other than land-line electricity, but for people renting apartments...)

Re:now i can finally...

[Slack3r78]

Just as an FYI, the 1.4GHz Thunderbird was one of, if not *the* hottest chip AMD has ever made, so it's a bit more than a "vanilla" Athlon. :-)

SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[madprof]

So what technology is going to be able to produce this sort of throughput from a harddrive?

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[Phosphor3k]

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...

[John Betonschaar]

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

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[Anonymous Coward]

Solid state hard disk through the SATA ports. Gets the full benefit of PC3200 or what ever.

Existing methods are strange and go through PCI and other more fancy interfaces.

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[madprof]

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?

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[tomhudson]

Too big a cache will actually slow down throughput. Like everything else, there is no "one size fits all" solution.

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[madprof]

Is this not too far away then?

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[Anonymous Coward]

Solid state drives have been around forever. I remember reading about them in the Computer Shopper about 10 years ago, they were IDE or SCSI, and used 2 5" drive bays (for memory, battery, and a non-solid state drive to store info to in event of a power failure). Maybe some hook directly to PCI today, but I would guess not.

With today's low memory prices, you might actually get some decent storage out of them without having to pay $30,000, and I imagine it would be a pretty awesome thing to have on the end of a 3Gb/s SATA device... Probably almost as good as real SRAM.

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[jandrese]

At 3 Gb/s, you're going to need a whopping 0.04 seconds to empty out that cache (assuming a 100% hit ratio).

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[pjrc]

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.

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought so! Thanks a ton! I thought I wasn't going to be able to sleep at night until you provided that information.

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[darkmeridian]

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.)

Re:SATA 3Gb/s hard drives...

[chemguru]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Collated at this site.

Disappointing Audio

[DaHat]

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

[Pyrion]

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 out of RealTek and Creative Labs.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Anonymous Coward]

I have that mobo, and it doth sound so sweet.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the SoundStorm was integrated into their memory controller (makes sense for the best possible low latency audio, since you could pre-empty everythign including the CPU). Thus the move by AMD to on-CPU memory controller on the Athlon 64 pretty much killed the SoundStorm as NVIDIA designed it.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going out via SPDIF, the sound card does not matter, as long as it's not fundamently broken.
There will most likely be more jitter from a mobo soundcards clock than a decent one, but you need decent monitors to hear that at all.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Hieronymus Howard]

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.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Anonymous Coward]

The MCP-T (Aka southbridge with SoundStorm) had an AC3 encoder which meant you could play games with multichannel sound on a home cinema system. Besides, the sound card may not matter to digital sound quality once the sound is actually playing, but it has to get there without being interrupted even under 100% CPU load, which onboard sound solutions aren't always that great at. (Heck, with some driver versions even MCP-T can't get it right...)

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Big_Breaker]

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.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Gilgaron]

If you read over at nforcershq.com, their nVidia sources claim that lake of interest by the Taiwanese mobo manufacturers in Soundstorm is the reason it has been discontinued. Apparently the sound team has been disbanded and moved onto other projects. I agree that it is a shame.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Gentlewhisper]

"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!

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Deathlizard]

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 reading NVidia disbanded the entire group, which was a big mistake in my opinon. They had a tech that made Creative sweat and still does even in it's old age, and could easily gain marketshare in the audio front, but they seem to refuse to compete in that market.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[slavik1337]

SoundStorm is still crap, it's pretty much AC97 with a chip dedicated to decoding it ...

Re:Disappointing Audio

[phrasebook]

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 on-board sound, no hiss at all. Is this preventable or is it just bad design?

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Anonymous Coward]

SoundStorm is decidedly NOT crap... If you use it for SP/DIF output, because it's ***THE ONLY*** chipset availavle, anywhere, on a motherboard, or elsewhere, that has an AC3 encoder.

Which means that you can hook it up to your home surround sound system, and get good Dolby Digital surround sound goodness through your games, and this is the only way to do it at a consumer level.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[DaHat]

I had the same problem at times. It was especially noticeable when scrolling down a web page. It was especially odd that this problem was fairly intermittent.

Thankfully, it all went away when I went to digital out.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[harrkev]

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 feeling better now, Nothing to see here. Move along.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[delus10n0]

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.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Zemrec]

Sorry to hear that. I was looking forward to it as well. For a while I had a small gaming box built around an Asus Nforce 1 board, and I used SPDIF output to my Cambridge Soundworks DTT3500. First time I ever saw the Dolby Digital light come on. And it really did make a difference. Unfortunately I sold that box since there was only 2-channel sound support in Linux, and I found myself mostly using Linux on my other (faster) box.

Off topic, but did anyone else notice their cpu usage went to 90-100% on the FiringSquad.com page? I'm currently surfing with Firefox 1.0 PR on OS X 10.3.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[default luser]

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. Unfortunately, I imagine lots of boards made today still have issues like this.

It's not impossible to deliver high sound quality in this day and age, just more expensive than most manufacturers are willing to pay for something as ubiquitous as sound.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[222]

This is entirely understandable, but a lot of people were very satisfied with SS audio.
I cannot understand why they would disband the SS audio team instead of moving into the pci audio arena.
After all, my voodoo 2 was manufactured by creative :).

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Pyrion]

I guess they figure if you're "that hardcore" in the audio department that you'll fork out a couple hundred for a top-of-the-line sound card anyways. The average Joe can survive with the Microsoft SW synth for MIDI output.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure did. Same version of firefox but on windows xp sp2. I thinks its all the flash content.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Trogre]

So ditch the dolby encoder and go for DTS instead.

It sounds better, anyway and pretty much anything that decodes Dolby Digital can do DTS.

Re:Disappointing Audio

[Anonymous Coward]

Conservatives: Kill murderers, enslave women.
Liberals: Imprison murderers, free women.
Don't be a mindless drone.

LINUX

[saxa]

will linux support that ??? Rgds

Re:LINUX

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but it will not support Linux.

Re:550 watts !

[alman]

550 watts ! Kewl - this really will be able to make my coffee and bake my pizza too then. I need never leave the screen.
Remember what goes in must come out!

Nvidia is closed sourced

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Nvidia is closed sourced

[Anonymous Coward]

Not entirely true. The ethernet driver for nvidia nforce boards was reverse engineered as is available as 'forcedeth'. The sound driver support has been in alsa for ages, albeit it only supports the ac97 features as far as I know, while the nvidia closed source driver has some additional features like hardware mixing.

I believe the rest of the components drivers have been released as opensource however. And the optional 3com 920 ethernet card on some nforce boards has also had drivers for quite a while.

I wouldn't be surprised if the trend continued in the new nforce board.

Re:Nvidia is closed sourced

[Billly Gates]

Boy, good thing those guys at ATI are fully opensource and offer great non buggy open source drivers which have performance comparable to Windows.

For a minute there I thought nvidia was the only way to go if you run Linux.

Re:Nvidia is closed sourced

[eobanb]

Wait...you mean they're closed source... AND the source code is not available... AND you can only get binaries? All three of those things? Well that sucks.

Re:Nvidia is closed sourced

[The Analog Kid]

Yeah, perhaps if you have a 9200 and lower, anything else you need to use ATI worthless drivers. Have fun playing DOOM III on Linux(oh wait you can't, because the drivers suck so much).

Re:Nvidia is closed sourced

[dodu]

The ALSA sound driver works quite well, except that the AC3 stream delivered through the SPDIF output is not recognized by most AC3 decoders. (check ALSA bug 411 for details: https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.ph p?id=411)

In this case, the problem comes from Soundstorm stuff which prevent ALSA driver from correctly setting the hw (Namely RealTek's ALC650 chip which has public specifications).

One of the ALSA developer is quite sure to be able to reverse-engineer Nvidia's audio hardware, but he has no hardware to work on.

Would it be correct to start another thread to ask for a donation for this guy ?

Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed

[swordboy]

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!

Re:Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed

[DrSkwid]

try harder :

http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html

http://www.ltsp.org/

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Re:Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed

[catch23]

Yeah the only one I see is the knoppix one. And the first link is just a page of more links, however most of the links don't help the parent post much. We're looking for a distro for network booting, or at least a cd-image that would make it super-easy to setup. (both sides, the nfs-root side, and the client side)

What if I got debian on my router? and now I want to have another computer minus the hard drive? Those links don't make it seem *easy* for us users that just want to make it work. I've done it before after reading lots of how-to documents, but I think someone could create a set of shell scripts to help us all out....

Re:Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed

[Daengbo]

What if I got debian on my router?
If you are using Debian on your router, the just apt-get install diskless, apt-get install lessdisks, or apt-get install pxesconfig, and you should be OK.

Re:Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed

[rtaylor]

I've done it before after reading lots of how-to documents, but I think someone could create a set of shell scripts to help us all out....

I've done the Netboot thing with FreeBSD, and the most difficult parts were setting up NFS and DHCP. Everything else happened by itself.

It would be pretty difficult to script the above 2 items -- although there is no reason it couldn't be druid driven.

Re:Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed

[pboulang]

10 seconds.

2 to bring up firefox and go to SourceForge

3 to type in "Diskless workstation" in the search box

5 to scan the results and find this project.

Oh lookie, you want the server to be debian? Amazingly enough, there is a link.

Re:Flexible Network Bootable Linux Needed

[DrSkwid]

sure they did


http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books /h andbook/network-diskless.html

Devil's advocate.....

[BobSutan]

I just read the preview at HardOCP 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.

Re:Devil's advocate.....

[Mostly Monkey]

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.

Re:Devil's advocate.....

[Walkiry]

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).

Re:Devil's advocate.....

[sh0dan]

[...] how big of an impact is SLI going to be in the coming months for gamers?

The performance gain is from 30 to 80%, depending on the material according to Anandtech benchmarks.

Re:Devil's advocate.....

[chrish]

I thought the board looked great, and I have absolutely no interest in a SLI configuration, since I tend to prefer ATI's video cards.

And, after being burned by the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset in my old dual P3 motherboard, nVidia is the only chipset manufacturer I'd trust for an AMD board.

Re:Devil's advocate.....

[MarkVVV]

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

Re:Devil's advocate.....

[ashayh]

However when the SLI boards do come out, many gamers will buy them simply because of the perceived notion that they can pop in another gfx card when the need arises. (Unless the premium for SLI boards is too large)

Re:Devil's advocate.....

[complete loony]

Sig reply:
"ATTiCA01 defaced this site"
So what was this site supposed to be?

550 watts hey...

[Amiga Lover]

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...

[mccalli]

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

Re:550 watts hey...

[Amiga Lover]

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 40MB drive inside :). On the other hand IRC, wordprocessing and web serving is well within its capabilities.

It's just reminiscing in the end though. Looking back at the "wow" at how different it was, in the same way looking forward and extrapolating leads to the same kind of "wow".

Re:550 watts hey...

[gl4ss]

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?

Re:550 watts hey...

[ColdGrits]

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

Really?!

Nah. I don't believe you.

Re:550 watts hey...

[ceeam]

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 ;)

Re:550 watts hey...

[enigmals1]

HA HA!! That's great! Can you imagine talking to someone in a chat and they're like... "oh I'm on a MAC Classic II... no... I'm serious."

ROTFL! :D Good job ol' bean.

Re:550 watts hey...

[jrod2027]

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...

Isn't that the recommended specs for Duke Nukem Forever? Sounds like we'll be waiting a while.

Re:550 watts hey...

[ishark]

(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 basically they don't need anything beyond +5V and GND.... There are also tons of amateur websites with small projects to copy or hack.

Re:550 watts hey...

[gl4ss]

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.

Re:550 watts hey...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask them.

Re:550 watts hey...

[LiquidCoooled]

How long until an entry level machine needs...

About 1 week before Windows Longhorn goes gold.

Story Typo

[Shinglor]

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.

Re:Story Typo

[Psiren]

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 disk drive.

Re:Story Typo

[pjrc]

To make things even more confusing, the Serial ATA II Specification 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. 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.

Re:Story Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, it's like the confusion of different SCSI types and the confusion of USB2 combined.

Economies of scale

[Space cowboy]

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.

Re:Economies of scale

[Anonymous Coward]

RAID 0 is mirror, right? So one mirrored drive dying is not a bad thing. Put in a new drive, and rebuild the mirror on the new drive. Unless you're running in quiet mode, and you don't know one of your drives has died until the other one dies. DOH!

Drivers

[MBMarduk]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Drivers

[dknight]

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.

Re:Drivers

[wikinerd]

My ASUS A7N8X happily runs Novell SuSE 9.1 without problems and is very stable.

Re:Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

The open video driver is very good for 2D, but has no 3D acceleration.

For the motherboards, most features work quite satisfactorily with the open drivers - network, sound, etc.

Re:Drivers

[ImaLamer]

I've noticed that everything on my nForce2 board was supported after turning APCI to "off" on bootup.

NVidia offers all of the drivers needed for linux here. In fact, they were just updated today (Oct. 20th).

NVidia has done a good job at keeping the drivers up to date, in fact... as much as they do their Windows drivers (if not more). I applaud them for this.

Re:Drivers

[T0mWil5on]

We sell many Red Hat Linux equipped Shuttle XPCs and the nForce drivers NVidia provides via their website seem to work quite well.

New mod

[papasui]

...according to nVidia will need a 550-watt power supply!
I eagerly await the mod that not only uses water to cool it but also acts a hydroelectric dam to power it.

Re:New mod

[keilun]

...according to nVidia will need a 550-watt power supply!

Actually, if you read the article, it mentions that normal power conditions are capable of handling SLI for GeForceFX 6800 and 6800GT. The 550-watt specification is only for dual GeForceFX 6800 Ultras.

Re:New mod

[DeathByDuke]

I welcome our new hydroelectric overseers.

Firewall CPU utilization

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that feels the reduction from 75% to 10% CPU utilization for stateful packet inspection looks at bit fishy (see the 75% intital value in the Anandtech interview for instance)?

The box I have under my desk is an old PII-300 and it filters a gbit connection without breaking a sweat, so how the hell can you tax a modern CPU to 75% doing the same thing?

Re:Firewall CPU utilization

[faragon]

I use a dedicated PII machine running at 400MHz (3COM 905B NIC) for routing and firewalling, and hardly can maintain 50 to 90MBps throughput. I can imagine, then, that if you want to scale processing bandwidth by 10x factor (gigabit ethernet), you could, in fact, need to use around 75% performance from a "new wave" processor.

Firewalling aid at microprocessor/motherboard level can be intended for using on SOHO and at home, due to the cost saving of buying dedicated hardware.

Re:Firewall CPU utilization

[rikkards]

Can't see saving money on it. I can get a Linksys firewall/WAP for $39CDN. For a SOHO this would be way more than adequate plus allowing for expansion. Last thing I would want is to have to set up a computer to run as a router when there are perfectly turnkey solutions that minimize on maintenance and space costs.

Re:Firewall CPU utilization

[faragon]

Yes, still you can save money, quality/professional gigabit ethernet dedicated firewalls solutions are between 2000$ (mass retail) and 15000$ (customizable, with support).

Re:Firewall CPU utilization

[rikkards]

But how many people have a gigabit internet connection for their SOHO? Sooner or later there is a bottleneck and even if you have a gigabit switch in a SOHO there is no reason to have to put in a firewall when the I/O for your Internet is probably 10M at most.
Granted if you have a decent sized business a $50 linksys router may be a tad underpowered. :)

SLI Downgrade?

[Kris_J]

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.

Re:SLI Downgrade?

[Gentlewhisper]

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 card industry will magically find a way to use up all that bandwidth. It still takes a couple generations before they can catch up.

Re:SLI Downgrade?

[Wesley Felter]

If you want two x16 slots you just need to use two nForce 4 chips. Tyan is coming out with such a motherboard.

Re:SLI Downgrade?

[Kris_J]

Got a URL or model number for that?

Dont rush.

[DeathByDuke]

I think I'll go with with a 939 3200+ and nforce3 250Gb for now. I dont want to splash out on a new video card just to boot a nforce4 equipped system up without using the old PCI S3 Virge after paying for the motherboard, processor and RAM (mm, dual chan corsair - hey, I'm a hardcore gamer). This 9800 All in Wonder isn't long in the tooth yet. (My 1800+ XP is though...) PS, I ain't the 0.1% type of hardcore gamer that spends £400 per 6 months on a new video card. My philosophy is upgrade each bottleneck per 12-18 months, I.e my CPU (3 years old now) at the moment. ;)

ActiveArmor

[Gaima]

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 :)

Re:ActiveArmor

[Professeur Shadoko]

Well, the motherboard as an integrated gigabit port. You'd expect them to try the firewall with a ~1Gb/s traffic.

Re:550 watts !

[Gentlewhisper]

550 watts ! Kewl - this really will be able to make my coffee and bake my pizza too then. I need never leave the screen.

I don't believe it.

Currently on 550 watts, what have I got running?

Dual procs, 3 CDRW drives, 2 DVDR drives, 5 sata drives on raid-5, and an ATI 9800 Pro to tank. Sure, it is not one of those new fancy boy SLI cards, but are they trying to tell me ONE freaking graphics card can consume as much power as 1 Opteron CPU, 4 hard disks, and 4 optical drives?

I'm no maths major but I sure can do some simultanous equations, and.. it ain't computing.

Besides I'd bet on my 550W PSU I still got room to spare!

It doesn't need THAT much power, seriously.

LINUX

[saxa]

Will Linux support that ?

two big questions

[mbourgon]

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 months or a year be equal to my new SLI setup at that point?

Re:two big questions

[mixmasta]

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.

Re:two big questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Two 6600 GTs will cost less than a 6800, and outperform it.

I'd go with two 6600s.

Re:two big questions

[tjfratello]

1. sure i like the idea, a hardware firewall is a physical barrier which should be much harder to overcome than a software barrier 2. Why buy both video cards at once? I like the idea of buying one good one now (ex Geforce 6800GT) and then when I need an upgrade in a year I can easily pop in another one cheaply. I look at it as improved upgradeability.

Another source

[Anonymous Coward]

This was actually released yesterday, but there is another nForce4 Review at Hardware Analysis.

550 Watts = Bills

[Bruha]

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

[fr2asbury]

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.

Re:550 Watts = Bills

[caswelmo]

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 I don't need them that often. What this results in is my lack of tinkering on the Linux box & my increase in bitching (from wife) when the Windows box is needed. Sucks, but what are you gonna do?

Re:550 Watts = Bills

[EulerX07]

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.

Re:550 Watts = Bills

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

"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.

Re:550 Watts = Bills

[upsidedown_duck]

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.

Granted not all of a 550W power supply will be utilized, but with the CPUs themselves pushing 100W under load and GPUs not far behind, 150 to 200W total doesn't seem out of line. Add in 75 to 150 W for the monitor, and the annual power bill really can be well over $100.

This is why I'm still content with my older sub-20W CPUs. I figure I'm not only saving the cost of a new PC but also a few dozen dollars per year in electricity. That's easily worth a few meals here and there.

Re:550 Watts = Bills

[rikkards]

You could probably get rid of the Linux box by using VMWare.

Re:550 Watts = Bills

[fiftyfly]

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

Re:550 Watts = Bills

[Anonymous Coward]

True, BUT the important thing is that headroom MUST be there when you need it. Otherwise you've got a big problem.

Re:550 Watts = Bills

[WuphonsReach]

I'm surprised you don't try power-saving modes where the disks spin down (there's 10W right there for each disk), the CPU throttles back (most drop back to a dozen watts or so), or simply have the system drop into suspend. Pulling a system out of suspend only takes a second or three, compared to the 1-5 minute bootup time. Takes a second or two for a hard drive to spin back up.

Get a meter and test it for yourself, your Windows/Linux boxes are probably only consuming 100W of power when active. That's around 73kWh/mo @ $0.10 = $7.30/mo.

(Same basic issue with LCD vs CRT, 19" CRTs use 140W, 17" LCDs are around 40W for a diff of only 100W... worse, they're only lit up 8 hrs/day for a cost savings of around $2.43/mo in electricity costs.)

One of these days I'll dig out the power meter and do some real testing.

Re:550 watts !

[takev]

I think the 550W power suply is more for stability than actual usage.

If a piece of equipment shortly uses a lot of power then you don't want the voltage to dip to much. And using bigger capasitors may not always be an option.

Don't bother with it if your a Linux user.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't bother with Nvidia boards if your a Linux user. Intel and Via boards offer much better support.

Get Nvidia cards if you want, they are hell of a lot better then ATI's for Linux.

Oh and:
1. Hardware based Firewall. (yawn)
2. Raid 0 is completely worthless. Waste of money, waste of harddrive space.
3. onboard sound is a gimmick, Marketting. It's done mostly in software (although Nvidia is good for making Windows drivers, it's worthless for Linux guys). If you want good sound you can't go onboard.

If you want RAID, get a normal IDE to PCI adapter and hook up 4 drives in a Raid 5 array.

1st drive: primary master
2nd drive: secondary master
3rd drive: pci card master 1
4th drive: pci card master 2

Linux software raid is faster then anything else out there (realy IT IS), plus then you don't have to buy any crappy IDE adapters with propriatory drivers. Oh and it does support RAID 5, and probably even hotswappable drives if your using SATA hardware.

News flash: The "hardware raid" you buy on motherboards are mostly done in software anyways. They use your CPU for proccessing power.

So they are 95% software and 5% hardware. It's a marketing gimmick. Real hardware raid may be worth it, but don't fall for marketing.

Scroll down to "Stop the RAID0 Insanity!" on http://www.storagereview.com/ webpage.

Buy hardware that properly supports Linux. Video cards can be forgivable because you have no choice, but you do have a choice for motherboards.

Re:Don't bother with it if your a Linux user.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're talking out of your arse:

2. Raid 0 is completely worthless. Waste of money, waste of harddrive space.

How the hell does RAID0 (striped disks) waste harddrive space? If you use e.g., 2x80GB in a RAID0 setup you get, surprise, 160GB of space! RAID1, mirror uses n disks of size m to get a redundant virtual disk of size m. RAID4 dedicates 1 disk to store the XOR parity. RAID5 uses distributed parity across disks. Both RAID4 and RAID5 'waste' (if you consider that waste) 1 disk.

3. onboard sound is a gimmick,

The nforce2 chipset can do Dolby Digital encoding in hardware, how's that a gimmick? Too bad they pulled it out for the nforce4.

Linux software raid is faster then anything else out there (realy IT IS)

You're again talking out of your ass. The Linux md driver is acceptably fast for simple RAID0 and RAID1 setups, and that's about it. Oh, and the venerable ccd driver found in the BSDs is still a bit faster, btw. Now try doing RAID5 in software and you'll soon realize that hardware raid (real hardware raid, like 3ware's) pays off in the end.

Buy hardware that properly supports Linux. Video cards can be forgivable because you have no choice, but you do have a choice for motherboards.

You have no choice? Since when? If you don't need the latest and greatest you can always get a low end Radeon or a Matrox card with open source drivers (yes, even 3D support). Taint your kernel if you want, I do have choice and my choice is not give nvidia a cent.

Re:Don't bother with it if your a Linux user.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't bother with Nvidia boards if your a Linux user. Intel and Via boards offer much better support.

Get Nvidia cards if you want, they are hell of a lot better then ATI's for Linux."

Which is it? Get Nvidia or not? Your statement comes across as though you can't make your mind up. Maybe you mean don't get ATI board's? Now I have a headache from just trying to figure it out.

Re:Don't bother with it if your a Linux user.

[kelnos]

2. Raid 0 is completely worthless. Waste of money, waste of harddrive space.

huh? waste of space how? RAID0 is a simple scheme that just makes logical volumes out of smaller physical volumes. you have two 80GB drives; in RAID0 you have 160GB of space.

RAID0 isn't intended for redundancy (despite the acronym). say you do a lot of video editing/transcoding/capturing, and need huge amounts of space on the same volume. you have several smaller disks lying around, so you put them in a RAID0 array. a nice cheap way of making use of older hardware. you don't care about reliability or redundancy, because it's mainly transient data that gets reencoded and moved elsewhere.

saying RAID0 is a waste is disingenuous.

Re:Don't bother with it if your a Linux user.

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be one of those people that thinks Kerry is a "flip-flopper" too. I'm sorry your brain is too small to grasp subtlety.

Re:Don't bother with it if your a Linux user.

[T0mWil5on]

Linux software raid is faster then anything else out there (realy IT IS), plus then you don't have to buy any crappy IDE adapters with propriatory drivers. Oh and it does support RAID 5, and probably even hotswappable drives if your using SATA hardware.

I'll just take it as read that you are naive and let it go at that.

Anyone who actually needs hot-swappable RAID level 5 will most likely opt for a SCSI hardware-based solution. Software-level solutions are not what I would call viable from a performance/data integrity standpoint.

Re:Don't bother with it if your a Linux user.

[freakmn]

He means get Nvidia graphics cards, but not motherboards.

Re:550 watts !

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you got that wrong... nForce are not dedicated graphic chips, they are motherboard chips. They contain graphics, memory controler, North and South bridge, PCI controler, audio on-board and whatever they feel like puting into them (such as a firewall).

Re:550 watts !

[Kazrath]

I had to reply to this. I know the parent is joking. But it seems to be trendy today to think that a bigger powersupply will up your framerate. Make your computer go faster. And who knows what other miracles people seem to think a big power supply will accomplish. Basically it = this: Either you have enough power to run all your components or your don't. The power supplies are rated at different wattage. However they are not going to increase the amount of juice running to a component. The components well in effect burn up if it did. Shrug just a pet peeve i've picked up reading on technical forums about people who seriously think PSU's = faster computer.

Unclear -- Ultra and SLI available for 754?

[IronChefMorimoto]

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

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

Re:Unclear -- Ultra and SLI available for 754?

[Wesley Felter]

The nForce chipsets don't support specific sockets -- they support HyperTransport. That means they support all K8 sockets. The chance of someone building a high-end Socket 754 motherboard is slim, though.

What is PCI Express ?

[flyingace]

What is PCI Express ? It does not go into the details of that in the article.

Re:What is PCI Express ?

[Shinglor]

And what the crap is a "motherboard"?

there is no soundstorm, because

[io-waiter]

1) Large parts of the technology in soundstorm was based on ip/patents from sensaura, today sensaura is a part of creative which makes competing products.
2) DD encoding requires a license fee to be payed to dolby labs, about $5 per chip.

That is probably why there is no DD encoding hardware based 3D-sound on nforce4.

AC 97 soundcard

[Anonymous Coward]

those AC 97 soundcard suck with linux, no hardware mixing if i recal correctly, or am i mistaken?

Ill still use a cheap sblive , beats all the others.

Thanks.

Re:AC 97 soundcard

[JimmehAH]

It's not an AC97 soundcard. It's nVidia's own sound doohicky. It was originally developed for the Xbox I believe and since been refinied several times by nVidia for their motherboard chipsets.

There is a unified driver package for Linux, but I'm not sure how well supported the various features are.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.0-0283

Re:550 watts !

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, with 500 watts he might be able to incinerate *that*, too!

(though I guess it might take a while)

Nforce3 IDE problems...

[freelunch]

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 and a bug report 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 seems to be giving hardware reviews under Linux a go. Any other good Linux-centric hardare sites?

Re:Nforce3 IDE problems...

[turboflux]

Like the bug report says, the nForce2 chipset has the same IDE problems. This is the first I've heard of a Linux user complaining about it, so that would seem to confirm its not just a Windows specific problem.

My nForce2 board is an Asus A7N8X-X - when I first got it, I figured it might have just been my ancient install of Windows wanting to be reinstalled. Shortly afterwards, my brother got the same motherboard and had the exact same problems. At that point I figured it was probably an Asus problem. Evidently it *is* the chipset afterall.

Seeing as the nForce3 suffers from the same problems, I would be very hesitant before getting an nForce4 board. Nothing like blowing a ton of cash on the board and having a nice SLI setup only to have your favourite game briefly hang itself constantly.

Re:Nforce3 IDE problems...

[freelunch]

Thank you for mentioning that you have both seen this under Windows. That is very helpful. .

Funny thing is, I think I see the same problem on my nforce2 under Linux.

I generally encounter it when doing lots of p2p. I find my root disk has been switched to "read only" after various errors. In fairness to nvidia, I should point out that I have not had the problem since swapping out that drive. So my case could be a drive problem. Other than that, I have not seen this problem. Of course I am fed up with nvidia's drivers and run only OSS drivers (which has a huge impact on X11 performance, even just opening new browsers or xterms).

It is very frustrating. I have been trying to choose a socket 939 Athlon 64 MB for the past week. There are technical reasons for my choice and OSS community reasons.. Do I reward nvidia for their support of Linux? Do I deny them based on closed source? How many hours can I spend selecting a freakin' $125 MB? Arggh...

One thing is absolutely certain. There is a huge need for more Linux centric hardware info on the web. Aside from compatibility there is benchmarking. Seen any perl benchmarks comparing Athlon XP to Athlon 64? Why the hell not?

Possibly overshooting the power reqs

[Tyfud]

Keep in mind Nvidia said the same thing about their 6000 card in regards to power consumption, and then, a little over a month later, came back and mentioned they were overzealous in their power specs, and it could use a less wattage powersupply in most cases (except the extreme ones).

I'd be willing to bet that their 550 watt req is also them wanting to cover their arse on powercycles.

Best of both worlds!

[CyberThalamus]

It's really exciting because it represents several "lanes" instead of just several bits. Parallel is like a wide SUV going down the highway. PCIE is like a lot of smaller cars that can independently go down separate lanes.

Damn nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

After buying their HORRIBLE A7N8X board I don't plan on ever touching anything nVidia again. My board had just about every problem on this this list. The worst being it would destroy any data on my SATA drives after about a month. Just look at this 35 page post of people that have the same problem. The latest BIOS doesn't help either. The only reason I'm posting AC is because I know this going to get modded down by nVidia fanboys, but just look at these threads and decide for yourself.

Re:Damn nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

Your first link was over a year and a a half old and it was complaining about an upcoming 1005 bios (1008 is latest) which was fixing most of the real bugs. The rest of the list had a bunch of trivial or inane bugs (negative temperature).

Your second link was complaining about SATA problems on a 1002 bios which was even older (and only shipped on the very first batch of motherboards).

Third: using drives bigger than 128 GB (or 137 'marketting' GB) had a bunch of requirements to work correctly and AFAIK applies to SATA too:

1) OS must support it. For Windows this means editing the registry setting EnableBigLba

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=k b; EN-US;305098

2) Drive controller must support it (implied in SATA spec)

3) Drive controller Drivers must support it.

If any of the above is true, the instant some data is written beyind the 128GB barrier, the address WRAPS and clobbers stuff on the disk. It might take a while (days/weeks) for this to happen.

The people who were 'burned' by this did not do the proper research setting up the system, an took the risk as they were building the systems themselves.

Re:Damn nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes the first post of the thread was a year and a half old, however if you look at the posts at the end they are quite recent and are basically the same problems. Like I said, as of the latest BIOS, SATA still has problems on many boards. The problems these people have (if you had read the thread) have nothing to do with what you are saying. I have a small SATA drive, 70 gigs, and it has nothing to do with the address "wrapping" over. The people who where burned by this are people who expected the product to work as it should, but it doesn't.

Re:Damn nVidia

[wikinerd]

I have the same board and I see no problems. It is very stable and I would trust it for a server.

How about more power to PCIE

[CyberThalamus]

I'd rather not have to deal with extraneous power connectors.

Mod parent informative

[Shinglor]

Mod parent informative

Re:550 watts !

[AnyNoMouse]

If you read the headline, it's talking about the nForce SLI. In short, you're going to be supporting all of your normal hardware in addition to two video cards. Possibly two GeForce 6800 video cards which already need quite a bit of juice.

No soundstorm!

[d_jedi]

Well, just looks like nVidia lost my sale..

ethernet problems?

[TheGratefulNet]

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 like the 4 isn't all that much better than the current 3.

so, is there really any compelling reason to wait for this? pci-express isn't a draw for me. stability and having the parts on the board WORK matters more.

gig-E is important to me too. and other than the nvidia boards for a64, all seem to use pci-based gig-E. which seems wasteful - yet with problems on the nvidia3 boards - I guess a working pci ether is better than a buggy one that is closer to the northbridge data path.

what to do...

Re:ethernet problems?

[Anonymous Coward]

Make no mistake about it---there are *no* K8 chipsets without stability issues.

The VIA K8T800 also has its share of bugs, like a broken IOMMU, that are fixed in the kernel. Given VIA's long history of AGP problems I'm surprised I havent encountered any so far on my board.

The AMD chipset found on server boards is broken in other ways, as you can read in the docs on AMDs website. USB 2.0 does not work at all and there are also AGP issues.

So I don't think you can even buy a K8 chipset without major bugs right now that have to be worked around.

For that matter, can you even buy a K8 from AMD that has fixes for all 111 known errata? This has been a problem for some time now---joe blow buys board with BIOS that doesn't work around errata #93 and can't figure out what's wrong.

All I know is my ASUS SK8V (1002 BIOS), FX-53, and ECC do not get along with Linux either. The RAM is fine (yes, memtest86 passes) and I have no problems with ECC turned off, but turn it on without scrubbing and the system hangs under X within 20 mins while playing a DVD. Turn it on with scrubbing and it's totally stable except for a cold boot hang in Linux (2.6.7).

20-lane PCI-E? Ho-hum....

[NerveGas]

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

Why not?

[phorm]

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 support RAID-1.

What you might have considered "enterprise server" years back is now common on the desktop. Huge hard-drives, SATA are all making the data-end of desktops closer to there server counterparts for speed/capacity, it's reliability we still lack...

Re:Disappointing Audio, intel mobos save the day

[majid_aldo]

intel is now doing dolby digital encoding (thank god!)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=intel+dolby+d igital+encoding

Low-cost heating...

[supabeast!]

"...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!

Incompetence at work: Byte and bit are different!

[gweihir]

... 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.

This depends on your usage patterns

[davidwr]

The cache hit/miss ratio depends entirely on your usage patterns, or in geek-speak, your "working set."

If I'm reading the same 50% of the disk at least every minute, I'll be well off to have a cache at least that big. If I'm routinely only hitting the same 1%, then that's overkill by a factor of almost 50.

To put it another way:
If I had a 10GB drive but routinely accessed only 400MB of it, a bit over 400MB of cache is all I need. If I delete all the files from my disk I never access, *poof* I'm down to a 600MB drive, but I'll still benefit from a 400MB cache.

It's like the Pony Express

[Anonymous Coward]

Only without the ponies.

You haven't played Everquest 2, have you?

[rsilvergun]

Those are the minimum system reqs. :)

Hm

[billybob]

I've only used one of their products, not sure the model number, but it's a PCI raid controller. I've been using it for about a year now as raid 1 with two 160 gig drives and have had zero issues and its performance is fine.

Thanks!

[billybob]

I've been looking for an affordable raid5 solution for a long time, and have never seen a MB that supported it onboard. Cool, thanks for the link. The board is 129 on newegg. This is vastly cheaper than even any plain old raid5 controller I've ever seen, which has only been a few. I have never seen one under 200 dollars. :(

I unfortunately wont be ordering it anytime soon, but maybe in 6 months when I can afford a 64 and also 4 large drives. Hopefully 400G drives will be affordable by then. Just think, 1.2 usable terabytes of RAID5 loving storage. Mmmmmmmm.....

Bah

[billybob]

Who gives a shit man. I'm so sick of hearing about this. Just because the source is not open to the public does not make a product's creator evil. I dont use teh lunix but from what I've heard from my friends, nvidia's drivers are actually pretty damn good. atleast they're trying. be thankful you're not stuck with ati, whose drivers i hear make one want to kill oneself.

Re:Bah

[Carnildo]

I dont use teh lunix but from what I've heard from my friends, nvidia's drivers are actually pretty damn good.

Most people don't use Lunix -- as far as I can tell, it doesn't support anything more recent than the C128 -- and I'd be surprised if NVidia made hardware for systems that old.

IAWTP

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Vice President at a major electricity provider in North America and I used my leverage at the company to perform a few tests on exactly this issue. After extensive research over a period of several months we came to the conclusion that you can save up to 30$ every year by replacing your 500$ premium gamer card with a more reasonable 100$ model. As a direct result of this testing I also found that I was able to save over 800$ annually in gasoline bills by purchasing a gokart instead of the Mercedes I was planning on getting.

With posts as dumb as this one, it's no wonder posters/moderators don't bother to read anything on this site.

SoundStom petition!

[wikinerd]

I have signed the petition to nVidia to bring SoundStorm back. See: http://nsk.wikinerds.org/blog/index.php?p=77

The petition has 2390 signatories and demands future SoundStorm availability from nVidia. Motherboard makers don't like like SoundStorm, perhaps because it is expensive, but nVidia should place more emphasis on what the customers want.

SoundStorm is the audio chip that was present in nForce2 MCP-T, but nForce3 and nForce4 do not have anything similar and rely on AC97.

AC97 is just not enough. If nVidia does not incorporate SoundStorm in nForce4, I think many customers will embrace the cheaper VIA

I assume

[Anonymous Coward]

this means no mini-itx mobo variety?

the inspiration is an earlier slashdot article-turning an old SNES machine into a full-fledged PC.

Re:20-lane PCI-E? Ho-hum....

[LesPaul75]

My understanding is that the nForce-4 chipset/BIOS supports two PCI-E configurations: 8-8-1-1-1 or 16-1-1-1-1.

It's up to the motherboard maker to choose one. If you buy something that's labeled "nForce-4 SLI," that means you're getting the 8-8-1-1-1 layout. Also, I think some motherboards (maybe only the dual CPU ones) actually support some sort of switch that allows you to select either 16-1-1-1-1 or 8-8-1-1-1.

Here's an example of a board that's definitely 8-8-1-1-1 (although I don't see the x1 slots).

Mod this guy up

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally someone who understands the facts and isn't spouting some elitist "enterprise class raid...consumer garbage.." bullshit.

Re:20-lane PCI-E? Ho-hum....

[NerveGas]

Even though two 8x slots still have plenty of bandwidth for video cards, it's going to be a tough sell to a lot of people: "You get two slots, but they're only half as fast."

On the other hand, I was somewhat disappointed to see the scores on GF 6600's in SLI mode. I had anticipated them being somewhat higher. Because the two $200 cards don't perform much better (or sometimes worse) than a single $400 card, I don't think that many people are going to go for it - only the truly obsessive addicts that are in it for the bragging rights. And while they may produce enough money to get specialty, high-end video chipsets built, they don't crank out enough to get a high-end motherboard chipset designed.

It'd still be nice to see PCI-E used for really cool stuff. Instead of 1x slots, image several 8x slots with Infiniband adapters in them - talk about a clustering dream!

steve

TRUSTED COMPUTING ALERT!

[Alsee]

This is not "goodies", this has some evil nasty shit embedded.

The network connection "accelerator" hardware firewall is nVidia's Active Armor system. When you cut through all of the marketing spin, it is in fact Trusted Computing hardware. It has remote configuration, monitoring, and control. It not only firewalls incoming data, it firewall's your ability to send any outgoing data. It tracks the exact identity of the software you run and reports it to your ISP. The hardware is tamper resistant, it is designed to deny you the ability to connect to the internet if you try to change anything. If you attempt to get at your own master key locked in the hardware it is designed to self destruct.

This is the home user half of the system. The ISP's half of the system was reported on Slashdot some time ago in
Cisco Working to Block Viruses at the Router. Cisco's router does not in fact block virus at all. What it does is handle the remote management of this hardware in your PC. What it does is examine the exact software running on your PC, as reported by this hardware. What Cisco's router does is DENY YOU INTERNET ACCESS unless you have approved Trusted hardware and you are running exactly the software your ISP mandates you must run. The reason they bill this as a "virus blocking router" is that they can use this system to check and enforce that you must run approved anti-virus and/or firewall software.

And if all of this sounds absurd then I suggest you read the US president's Cyber Security Advisor's speech at the Gobal Tech Summit in Washington DC where he called on ISP's to plan on making exactl;y this sort of hardware a MANDATORY part of terms of service to get internet access. The speech starts on the bottom of page 11 and run through page 14. It is all part of the government's plan to secure the "National Information Infrastructure" against terrorist attack, against Osama bin Laden himself.

Oh, and by the way Microsoft gets to impose the ultimate user lock-in and competitor lock out, and by the way the MPAA and RIAA get to enforce DRM on files, and bvy the way the BSA gets to enforce DRM and activation and rental schemes on software.

Oh, and by the way you no longer control or own your own computer. It is remotely managed, the hardware is designed to be secure against its owner and self destructing if you try to open it, none of the new software works if you modify anything, you are denied internet access unless you run approved hardware and approved software, if you attempt to modify anything to run different software you are denied internet access.

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Whoa

[Anonymous Coward]

What an awesome troll. I salute you, sir.

Re:Whoa

[Alsee]

What an awesome troll. I salute you, sir.

What the hell makes you think it's a troll? Virtually every company in the industry is rolling Trusted Computing into their products, and they sure as hell are not going to advertize the nasty aspect. They are going to hype it as a GoodThing.

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