Date:
Tuesday , October 19, 2004
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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nForce4 Ultra & SLI Preview

NVIDIA's new nForce4 motherboard chipset brings with it PCI-Express and SLI functionality along with new enthusiast tools, deep RAID features, and a hardened firewall for the masses.

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Features - Features - Features

PCI-Express & SLI

Again, if you are not up on PCI-Express you can read here. And if you need an introduction to NVIDIA's new Scalable Link Interface you can read here. We are not going to spend time regurgitating much of this information except to say that PCI-Express once again allows the use of two video cards in tandem, just like in the days of 3dfx's Voodoo2. With this new version of SLI, we are likely to see huge boosts in video performance in terms of frame rate and resolution with most games that are not CPU bound. While it has not been confirmed, we have the suspicion that some SLI games will actually share the total of the memory between the two SLI cards, effectively giving you a videocard setup with 512MB of memory if you have two 256MB cards.

But enough of that. Here are some figures that came direct from NVIDIA.

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DOOM3 - 1600x1200,32-bit, 4XAA

Halo - 1600x1200, 32-bit, NoAA

3DMark05 - 1024x768 Default

Athlon 64 4000+, 1GBDDR400, ASUS SLI Motherboard

As you can see, the performance increases are nothing short of amazing. We did get the opportunity to play DOOM3 with a SLI GeForce 6800Ultra setup. We had no issues playing at 1600x1200 with 4XAA enabled while staying at solid gameable framerates. If the action got really heavy in-game we saw frame rates drop to the mid-40s, but for the most part they stayed pegged at 60 frame per second.

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Above is a picture of the MSI solution that you will likely be seeing in retail. The motherboard that we gamed on was an ASUS motherboard, but we are restricted from showing you pictures of this solution for some reason.

The two long slots you see above are X16 PCI-Express slots that two video cards will need to be plugged into for SLI to operate. When a single card is inserted, it will utilize an X16 PCIE bus. When two compatible cards are inserted, and a switch or card is turned on the board, both X16 form factor slots utilize an X8 bus. NVIDIA tells us that moving to a dual X8 bus configuration was needed to keep performance at a maximum. Also, this dual X8 configuration will require that most SLI compatible motherboards be a 6-layer PCB design.

nTune for Overclockers

NVIDIA is trying their best to forego the motherboard makers using their own proprietary overclocking and tweaking utilities that are specially branded for the motherboards they make. While nTune is not new, it is certainly being expanded. With a few exceptions, it looks as though most of the features in nTune will be at the disposal of the enthusiast as it is installed with the nForce4 chipset drivers.

nTune not only gives you the ability to overclock the CPU, but also tweak memory settings, overclock the Ram, overclock NVIDIA video cards, and most of this in done on the fly.

The nTune program will also do an extensive diagnostic of your system that might take up to an hour as it is comprised of many internal tests. Once done, it will give you the "best" overclocking settings for your rig.

We have seen nTune in action and the simple fact of the matter is that it works. I truly hope that motherboard builders do not try to circumvent the features that NVIDIA has added with nTune in hopes of pushing their own enthusiast and BIOS/Driver updating software. NVIDIA's nTune solution is better than any other software we have seen for tweaking enthusiast settings.

3GB/sec SATA Controllers

Currently, if you have SATA hard drives, they are of the “1.5GB/sec” variety. Hard drives are coming to market this year that will support a new standard that basically doubles the amount of data that can be pulled across the current SATA bus. Now we say “controllers” above, because a pair of controllers will be available on the high-end nForce4 chipset.

The new SATA controllers, which can also be paired with IDE controllers to build RAID arrays, have a rather incredible front end software known as NVRAID. NVRAID will allow you to control just about any aspect of your RAID arrays from a very user friendly GUI. Hot spares are allowed as the system will monitor itself and is even planned to notify you of which disk has gone bad by visually identifying the SATA plug being used should you have a disk failure. NVRAID also has the ability to move disks from one array to another on the fly and without data loss. NVIDIA has made it easy to add disks to your current arrays and has done it in a very impressive way. NVRAID will surely open up the world of RAID arrays to many users that have been previously intimidated by RAID technology.

NVIDIA ActiveArmor

NVIDIA brings forth their nForce3 firewall technology and have given it a new name, ActiveArmor. There is much more new to ActiveArmor than just a name though.

Combined with NVIDIA’s onboard gigabit Ethernet controller, ActiveArmor can give you firewall protection that is not afforded to you by anyone else’s desktop solution. When the driver is loaded for any Ethernet connection, the PC immediately becomes visible to network attacks. So there may be a minute or two while you boot your Windows system in which you are visible to the outside world if you are not behind a NAT enabled router or other hardware firewall system. With ActiveArmor, the hardware firewall exists in silicon and as soon as the Ethernet driver is loaded, the firewall becomes active. This certainly gives you some needed protection from continuous port scans that we see now days.

UPDATE: As pointed out by Ryan Myers, WinXP with SP2 does now load the native firewall before the Ehternet driver.

In earlier versions of Windows, there was a small window of time between the network starting and the firewall becoming active, leaving your computer vulnerable for that brief period time.

In Service Pack 2, during startup and shutdown, the firewall driver uses a rule called a boot-time filter to help prevent attacks during those brief periods. Once Windows Firewall is up and running, it loads your custom firewall settings and removes the boot-time filters. This makes your computer less vulnerable to attacks during startup and shutdown operations.

While the nForce3 solution used quite a bit of CPU power under load, the nForce4 brings with it almost 90% or better of the workload being done on the nForce4 chipset. This of course leaves your CPU free to do other things. This ActiveArmor solution is tremendously robust and now more user friendly and intelligent as it will prompt you to inbound and outbound packets you need to be aware of. ActiveArmor then allows you to allow or disallow the traffic on the fly. With the nForce4’s new ActiveArmor, there are not too many reasons to not use the solution in place of WinXP native software. Certainly we are looking forward to more experience with this product.