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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.
Collated at this site.
Unfortunately, nvidia drivers are closed sourced, the nvidia's drivers source codes are not available. Only some buggy binaries :((
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.
...but what I would really like is a raid-5 facility on-board.
/ overview.htm
I was looking for something similar and I stumbled upon this one: http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/socket754/k8n-e_d
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...
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
try harder
http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html
http://www.ltsp.org/
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
It's only a matter of time until drives come with a gig of cache.
A gig of cache does't make any sense, unless you have a 100TB drive or something. Above a certain amount of cache (depending on the size of the memory that it caches), doubling the cache size only improves the cache hit/miss ratio by a single percent or so. I once knew the calculations that give the hit-miss ratio, but I forgot them. Anyways, it's just standard theory so you should be able to google it up.
Your sig is mine
OK that's fine. So we've got a hard drive that has 16MB of cache with an interface that has a max throughput of 3Gb/s ... does it really matter?
We're talking about such a small amount of cache memory here. And to fill that cache will always require a very very slow disk read. Do we really get any significant performance increase?
There must be some sort of improvements in the works for the moving parts of a hard drive surely?
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.
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
"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!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
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.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
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
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.
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed