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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.
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.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
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...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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?
friend of mine uses it to heat the fishtank via a double heat exchanger (the fish don't like de-ionized water)
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.
.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.
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
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".
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....
...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.
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.
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.
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?
Well, just looks like nVidia lost my sale..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
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
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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.
--Chemguru