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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!
So what technology is going to be able to produce this sort of throughput from a harddrive?
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
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)
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
"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!
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.
Well, the motherboard as an integrated gigabit port. You'd expect them to try the firewall with a ~1Gb/s traffic.