NVIDIA nForce5 500 Series continued
ActiveArmour
ActiveArmor has come under considerable fire since its launch with nForce4 over a year ago. Promising hardware offload and acceleration of various bits of the TCP/IP networking stack and its integrated firewall under Windows, ActiveArmor hasn't always worked as promised, NVIDIA increasingly disabling bits of the hardware offload in driver revisions after demonstratable data corruption of network transfers and performance problems. Doh.Your author has not run ActiveArmor on his own nForce4 SLI board for some time, after repeated issues with the hardware firewall configuration. So back to the drawing board was the best option for nForce5, since NVIDIA see significant merit in hardware assist in networking by their core logic. Indeed, so does your author, providing it works.
NVIDIA say they've got it right with nForce5, fixing the issues with hardware assist while further increasing the feature set for nForce5 590 SLI (and other nForce5 variants). The backbone of that is the simple provision of a pair of gigabit Ethernet controllers on the MCP55 IC, each with support for all the new networking features and support for full-duplex 1Gib/sec transfers. Let's cover the features covered by faintly silly marketing names.
FirstPacket
FirstPacket is what you're morally obliged to spend on girls (or boys, for the LadyGeeks™/GayGeeks™ among you) and hard intoxicating liquor, after entering the wide world of work. It's also what NVIDIA like to call their hardware acceleration of quality-of-service (QoS) in nForce5. Your author isn't 100% sure if it's accleration of a defined QoS spec like IEEE 802.1Q, or not, but what it does it let traffic from defined applications on your system transmit and receive at a higher priority level than other network traffic.Must maintain that UberPing™ while gaming, whilst simultaneously downloading the latest episode of Naruto? FirstPacket is the daddy, yo. It's been hard to verify it working properly in practice up to just, in our testing, so we'll leave judgement for another day, but it seems to do what it's supposed to.
DualNet™
NVIDIA give you two network controllers in nForce5 590 SLI, right? But you only use one like most folks, right? Why not get the networking controllers to party together and provide a double teamed connection to whatever network it is you connect to?Simply put, if you've got a spare port on your switch or router, plug both ports on your 590 SLI board in and let it appear to Windows as a single interface. Should you pull one cable out or otherwise lose one of the links, it autonegotiates a new link with just one cable and carries on working with no downtime or loss of data. Such is the power of the hardware acclerated ACK.
It's not a new concept, indeed we vaguely remember ATI mentioning that their core logic can do something very similar, but it does provide a bit more bandwidth if you can make use of it on the network you're connected to. Perfect for quicker downloading of all that monkey..........serious nature programming from verydirtymonkeys.com, we imagine.
Disk Controller
NVIDIA give their disk controller an upgrade in nForce5 590 SLI, too. Where once there were four SATA2 ports on nForce4, there are now six on nForce5 590 SLI. You can RAID5 a pair of three disk arrays for hardware accelerated big disk collections (as well as RAID0, 1 and 0+1 across the lot) and the controller also contains specific tuning for command queuing on various disks and their firmwares.Got a drive on the (as yet unpublished) list that nForce5's SATA controller knows and loves? It'll do the command queuing a bit better than it might have before, giving you better performance on heavy random access loads to your disks. Perfect for letting your mates download your verydirtymonkeys.com archives at the next LAN, via DualNet™ and FirstPacket™, while you merrily game away. So we imagine.
NVIDIA also claim support for nForce5 RAID volumes during the install and boot process of Microsoft Windows Vista (whenever that gets released), without having to supply the installer any extra driver disks. Now that we can get on board with in all seriousness.
Summary
If you decide that high-end AM2 is where you want to plant your PC flag, nForce5 590 SLI seems a mighty fine place to do it on paper. Performance and features are laid out before the user, and there's very little a well sorted 590 SLI board shouldn't do in the pursuit of high-end computing nirvana. Based on our early first tests of 590 SLI with AM2 processors, Foxconn's board does seem very good.But that's not all when it comes to evaluating nForce5. There's also software to go with it. Time for a look at NVIDIA nTune 5.0 and NVIDIA upcoming control panel software for that and its newest display driver, Rel90.