NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI; two is better than one

DualNet and FirstPacket
Two features unrelated to SLI certification but a part of the 500 series is DualNet. NVIDIA, keeping with its strong desire to make two things a single better thing, supports linking two Gigabit Ethernet controllers together for a combined throughput of 2Gb/s. NVIDIA claims the net performance gain in practice is 40%, but we'll be giving it the once over when we've concluded our benchmarks. Obviously, this isn't much help unless you're completely saturating your current 100Mb/s or 1Gb/s network at home, and so should see wider use in large LANs.

The other big feature in the 500 series is 'FirstPacket'. Now, we've all heard of Quality of Services in relation to routers - you can configure routers with QoS support to give priority to certain packets over others and process them first. In most cases, this allows one person to download large files while another plays an online game that requires a smooth, uninterrupted stream of packets.

Now you can prioritise outgoing packets within the system, giving your games priority over, say, FTP transfers. How effective this is, again, is something we'll test. Apparently NVIDIA had a hard time finding a game that would show the feature off well enough.

Additionally, NVIDIA claims it's fixed the problems with data corruption related to offloading TCP/IP work from the CPU to the chipset. Called 'TCP/IP Acceleration', it's yet to be determined if this feature results in a noticeable performance gain. Again, we'll be conducting our own tests.



Six drive SATA RAID
Yes, if you've had 6 SATA drives just sitting around, just waiting to be RAIDed, well, here's your chance. The 500 series will support RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5 with six SATA drives. With drivers installed, the system will even show, via a graphical display, when a drive fails and how its failed using colours to signify different problems.

Before you ask, no, there is no support for hybrid SATA/PATA six-drive RAIDs.

A better BIOS
Perhaps the most interesting feature (that we may or may not see on upcoming nForce 500-based motherboards) is NVIDIA's custom BIOS that's very reminiscent of DFI's BIOS for its LANParty series. According to NVIDIA, anything that was tweakable or readable from the motherboard, it's in the BIOS - voltages, fan speeds, memory timings - the lot (although the official demo shown to the press had the noticeable exclusion of the 12V rail that we were assured would be corrected). We've included a few shots below of the BIOS from the press demo.







Driving to sound of nTune
Of course, the last area to see improvement (vast improvement!) is NVIDIA's drivers and nTune tweaking software in preparation for the nForce 500 series and the company's upcoming graphics chips. As you'll see, NVIDIA has changed the entire look of not only the control panel, but of nTune. According to the company, this was mainly to bring the presentation in line with the Windows style and to make the software fit well with Microsoft's next OS, Vista. Here's a shot below for your perusal.



Stay tuned for benchmarks and additional info, and see the next issue of Atomic for related details.

UPDATE: We just received a press release today saying OCZ will be incorporating EPP in its memory moving forward. Expect more vendors to follow.