nForce 500: nForce4 on Steroids?
by Gary Key & Wesley Fink on May 24, 2006 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Improved Feature: MediaShield
While the networking side has undergone an extensive makeover, the storage side of the nForce500 has been fine tuned. The nForce 590/570 series now offers three separate SATA controllers each with integrated dual PHYs that are capable of operating at 1.5Gb/s or 3.0Gb/s speeds. This results in six Serial ATA devices being available for the user instead of four as in the nForce4, Intel ICH7, or ATI SB600. These devices can be configured in RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and 5 arrays. There is no support for RAID 10.
Considering the support for six drives, it is now possible to run a massive RAID 5 drive consisting of a pair of three-drive RAID 5 arrays together, or running multiple combinations of RAID technology together. NVIDIA also supports the shared spare (or dedicated spare) technique in MediaShield. The spare disk feature, available with MediaShield RAID 5, offers protection with a dedicated spare drive that can take over for a failed disk until the repair is completed. However, the performance results during our RAID testing found no measurable differences between the nForce4 and nForce 500 storage systems. In fact, the less than stellar write performance of the nForce4 in RAID 5 continues in the "new" chipset.
NVIDIA will be introducing a new twist to improve their SATA controller performance by offering profiles for specific hard drive models. Since each hard drive has unique performance characteristics, NVIDIA will be matching the capabilities of their controller logic to each drive's particular strengths. So far, Western Digital's 150GB Raptor has the only profile loaded, but there are plans to profile additional performance oriented drives that are popular in the market. The nForce4 family will also benefit from these profiles through driver updates, but users are not able to configure or modify individual drive profiles. In our testing with dual WD1500 Raptors we noticed benchmark results that were on average about 1% to 2% better in our IPEAK tests while the synthetic tests realized a 3% gain in some areas.
While NVIDIA has implemented six native SATA ports, they reduced the available PATA ports to one. This matches the Intel ICH7 and ATI SB600, but the reduced PATA ports will not be seen as an improvement to many users. Considering the Optical drive manufacturers have been very slow to implement SATA in their drives, this decrease in port count could affect those users who have multiple optical drives for audio/video content creation and manipulation. However, with the major core logic suppliers basically on the path of phasing out PATA devices this move by all the chipset manufacturers might spur the optical drive manufacturers to a quicker SATA transition.
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artifex - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
If they want the TCP/IP acceleration to be a draw for that crowd, they'd better fix this thing with firewalls not being supported. I could not imagine running a corporate server like that. And it's a bit much for them to hold out Vista as a possible fix, as many of us would like to wait a while before dropping Vista into production environments. Like a couple years. :)
Jaylllo - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Is it just me, or do ATI/NVIDIA/INTEL make up a boatload of stupid names for simple features?afrost - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
So when do we get low power chipsets to go with our low power CPUs?Nvidia's mid to high end GPUs use less power than ATI GPUs....but it's the other way around for chipsets......????
seems odd
Gary Key - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Rumor has it, in the late fall. ;-)
FinFET - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
On this page http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?... the nForce 550's summary reads"Several of the higher and options have been dropped from the 550 chipset"
I believe you meant
"Several of the higher end options have been dropped from the 550 chipset"
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Corrected.peternelson - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
How can you say there is not improvement?
The 590SLI gives increased number of PCIE lanes to total 46.
These are available as 16, 16, 8, and six individual 1x connections.
Assuming some slots on the motherboard:
x16 slot: card x16 nvidia graphics card
x16 slot: card x8 ARECA EIGHT SATA 300 HARDWARE RAID CONTROLLER
x8 slot: card x8 MYRINET 10 GIGANET hardware accelerated LAN
I'm not particularly interested in consumer level SATA and LAN but consider them a free bonus. What MATTERS is that there is enough BANDWIDTH to use some PROPER peripherals without bottlenecks.
Egglick - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
The only new "feature" I'm really interested in is the TCP/IP acceleration, which lowers CPU usage. The rest of it is a bunch of gimmicks and garbage as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather not use those "features" at all, as they're much more likely to cause problems than any sort of performance boost.When I think of that, coupled with their stupid SLI Memory program (another gimmick), my view of NVidia's chipsets is significantly lowered. When the time comes for me to upgrade, I'll be strongly considering ATI's chipset offerings instead.
bob661 - Thursday, May 25, 2006 - link
Egglick,Your name should be Buttlick with that comment. So, let me get this straight (or gay depending on which way you swing), these extra features that Nvidia is giving us are apparently no good since you say so. The rest of us might as well just shut off our computers, grab a pr0n mag, and spank it like it's 1999. Jesus, who needs a brain with you around.
Pirks - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
Yeah, right... ATI are completely smoke'n'mirrors free guys... cool! :)