nForce5 thoughts?

[erwos]

So, what do you guys think of the nForce5? While I don't think it's a huge step forward in terms of performance, I like what they've done in terms of features, so I'm a little surprised that reviews seem so blah about it all. The only thing I'm disappointed about is the lack of Firewire - more and more, I find myself wishing for more peripheral buses.

There's a lot of good new stuff, though. The six SATA ports are phenomenal - you can now run a 4-drive RAID 5, system drive, and optical drive on SATA without having an add-in card. TCP/IP acceleration should be excellent if it works as advertised. Who doesn't have a hardware firewall at this point?

-Erwos

 

[R3MF]

looks good.

what i want to see is a board maker come out with a mATX 570 SLI board.

not because i care about SLI, but i'd like an 8x PCI-E expansion slot which ain't available on the 570 Ultra chipset.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: erwos
The six SATA ports are phenomenal - you can now run a 4-drive RAID 5, system drive, and optical drive on SATA without having an add-in card.

I like the 6 SATA ports, but don't like the 1 PATA port, and would hate to see that go down to 0. PATA is viable and more flexible for optical and system drives. It'd be better to have a fully-loaded config with the system and optical drives on separate PATA channels. I can live with it though, and prefer the 3rd SATA channel to the 2nd PATA channel.

I haven't seen mention of on-board video. If that's combined with the 6 (RAID-5 capable) SATA ports and on-board gigabit networking (dual even; 802.3ad?), with good driver support including Linux this could be a good platform for low-overhead medium/high-performance file servers.

(Note that NV RAID 5 is useless for Linux at present -- it supports NV RAID, but not NV RAID 5. Of course Linux has its own software RAID 5 implementation, which would be fine provided that they have good basic chipset support. NV RAID 5 is great for low cost Windows-based file servers running XP.)

I'd wait for the driver / BIOS / kernel bugs to be resolved though before trusting lots of data on this platform -- tough judgement call on when to jump in, but the near future would be risky unless this is for tier-3 storage (secondary backups, etc.).

 

[RyanVM]

Who knows, maybe the third (or is it fourth?) time will be a charm on the TCP/IP acceleration.

 

[Skott]

Kinda like the one review said. More evolutionary than revolutionary. Nothing spectacular. Just modest improvements so far.

 

[Ramzie]

Hows the new HD audio on these things? If its not a significant drop in quality or functionality i want to save money and not get a Xi-Fi CL card for my upgrade ... thoughts?

 

[Ramzie]

Hows the new HD audio on these things? If its not a significant drop in quality or functionality i want to save money and not get a Xi-Fi CL card for my upgrade ... thoughts?

 

[nyker96]

should be functionally similar to nforce4 with some bug fixes. But read that most of the "added" features are not too useful, but nevertheless, it will be the cream of crop AM2 chipset to beat for sure. Wonder how its OC potential stands.

Major stuff: hi-def sound (heard it's ok), fixed network packet losses problem from nf4 (biggie), OC PCI-E (heard it's useless), better user interface chipset control module (always welcome), couple more can't remember.

 

[yehuda]

Originally posted by: nyker96
Major stuff: hi-def sound

This part is unclear to me.

As far as I can see, the integrated sound component on nForce 5xx motherboards is still a third-party product, and it varies among motherboard models, just as it used to in the days of nForce4.

So, what has changed with the introduction of "high definition audio"? Does it simply mean that manufacturers are now bound to a stricter specification, and can no longer get away with a cheap, poor quality sound chip?

 

[RyanVM]

Pretty much

 

[SolMiester]

How about writing to the BIOS from Windows, now that is great for BIOS n00b's

 

[thestain]

My favorite feature is the Quality of Service one.. wish we had QoS controls for everything on our pc.. be nice to have the packet priority when a sound card or other device gets cpu or memory starved.

 

[R3MF]

most important change:

extra 8x PCI-E slot on the 570SLI/590SLI chipsets

why of why did they disable those extra PCI-E lanes on the 570 Ultra?

 

[krotchy]

Originally posted by: R3MF
most important change:

extra 8x PCI-E slot on the 570SLI/590SLI chipsets

why of why did they disable those extra PCI-E lanes on the 570 Ultra?

To force you to pay extra for the performance boards.