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NVIDIA's nForce Professional and Tyan's Words
CoffeeJunked writes "There's a lot of buzz about dual-core CPUs and with the release of the nForce Professional chipset from nVidia, there's a lot of buzz about the future of SMP machines as we know them. LinuxHardware.org has just published a couple of articles that get to the heart of the new chipset and what board manufacturers will be doing with them. The first article covers the chipsets and boards, while the second article is an interview with Tyan about what to expect from them this year. It's a good read all around."
Where are the SATA connectors?!?!?! I find it amazing that the K8WE only has 2 and the K8SER 4. While we're on the topic, having at least 1 PCIe x1 slot would be nice. These high end server boards are being outclassed by nForce4 SLI motherboards. (And for the record, using more than 4 SATA ports is very doable)
So, they are designing a chipset for servers, which will run linux or bsd, but they refuse to provide docs or hardware to linux and bsd developers, meaning their shit is always poorly supported. Hooray.
Just a few years ago, Nvidia was practically unheard of in the motherboard market. They slowly crept in with the relase of nforce/nforce2/nforce3/nforce4 chipsets. Having an integrated video card and chipset is somewhat advantageous despite the driver troubles that linux users face. Nvidia is slowly gaining market share over motherboard chipsets, I see this as a good thing. My NForce systems are working great and so far everything has been smooth. If Nvidia keeps up with the great work and frequent updates of their chipset, I will be a satisfied customer. How do you feel about Nvidia presence in the motherboard market?
"Only if you think "trust me" should be the future model OSS should work under."
it's worked so far...
"We use our drivers to cheat on benchmarks, and if we released info for people to write a driver, it would show our hardware's not as good as we pretend."
I don't know what you're talking about. Bundling nice and important features (increasing value) is a good thing. Cheap onboard sound? Most these motherboards have 8 channel digital sound. A comparable creative (no thanks!) sound card cost almost as much as the motherboard alone. Useless onboard NIC? I don't know which ones you've tried, but I have yet to see one give me problems, from crappy ECS K7S5A motherboards to nice GBit lan on Asus boards. They just work. Cheap software RAID? If you want hardware RAID, go buy a "real" controller. It'll cost you a LOT more than the whole board does. For a lot of people, it's VERY valueable. No more promise-brand cards to buy that cost more than the mobo to do that. What's next? "I don't want no crappy onboard USB2? No Firewire?" I'm looking at a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI and the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe right now. They may be a bit more expensive, but they have nice things on them like 16x SATA RAID, SATA2, 2x GB LAN, 802.11g, IEE1394B, 8 channel digital audio (depending on which one you like better). Might look like crap to you, but it sure looks like a lot of nice stuff to me. And no, I'm no "enthusiast", overclocker, nor gamer. It's just a nice board with everything one needs or just about. No need to buy a bunch of 100$ PCI cards to have a complete system.
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That makes a little bit of sense for 3D graphics drivers, maybe. It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense for a Gigabit ethernet controller, a SATA controller or even an audio DSP. These sorts of components are being churned out by different manufacturers across the world, and most of them have freely available documentation.
Even more bizare, nVidia contributed Gigabit patches to the forcedeth driver. Yet they not only continue to produce their own closed driver, they still refuse to release specs. It boggles the mind.
Syllable : It's an Operating System