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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.
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
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
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!