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

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.