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.

[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.

[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.

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...

[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...

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...

[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

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

[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

[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!

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.

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

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

[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: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

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: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.

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: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.

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.

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?

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