Networking

We were a little disappointed that NVIDIA has removed ActiveArmor from the nForce 500 series. Those of you who may not know, ActiveArmor was NVIDIA's hardware based firewall built into the chipset. While it is something of a blow for those who were fans of it, including us, we always used it along with a software firewall and a network router, so it is not a huge loss. NVIDIA does make up for it though by offering two very compelling new technologies.

FirstPacket - Bandwidth is probably the first thing everyone looks for when shopping for Internet providers and networking equipment. Why settle for 56k when you can go for cable or DSL, right? Gigabit networking is obviously much faster than 10MBit or 100MBit. While this still holds true, latency is another feature that not many people think about, unless they are a gamer.

Latency can best be explained as a measurement of time it takes for communication between two networking devices. Higher latency means it takes more time for the communication. For gamers, this is known as ping, or in the case of high latency, "crap connections". The problem doesn't improve either once you start adding more latency dependent applications to the network such as VoIP and network monitoring.

While line conditions, network load and server load will all affect latency, in regards to your PC, there is really nothing to police the traffic coming in and out. FTP for example doesn't really care too much about latency, but Counter Strike does. The problem here is your PC has no idea whose data belongs to who. It is possible to control outbound traffic, but inbound the network interface has absolutely no control over.

Typical Traffic Behavior (with no FirstPacket)

Currently, in a typical PC, network traffic works by FIFO (first in, first out). If a PC is dedicated to the task of gaming, there's minimal queuing and packets from the game can leave the PC as they become ready to go. If you're trying to upload a 300MB file while gaming, you'll notice packet loss and ping spikes. This is happening because FTP will try to maximize each packet as quickly as it can, hence hogging up the pipe.

Best example is typical road trip. Say you and a bunch of friends are in 5 cars heading from point A to point B (game traffic). If you leave early enough, you'll avoid traffic and get to the destination on time. Now, imagine you're all driving in a single lane road coming to an intersection. Two cards from your group turn right first, but then you have to let a 30 foot semi truck (FTP packet) cross the intersection. Once the rest of you go, you're all stuck behind a slower moving vehicle.

FirstPacket is NVIDIA's solution to this problem. By creating a two line queue, FirstPacket can put user assigned small packets into the fast lane.

Traffic Behavior with FirstPacket

The non-FirstPacket queue is generally going to be used by latency-tolerant packets and that queue will drain quickly enough to prevent time-outs. Remember, the FirstPacket queue is only used by applications that the user assigns to it. Naturally if you put a couple dozen applications in there that are a mix of latency-tolerant and latency-sensitive packets, you'll defeat the purpose of it.

While we know what FirstPacket can do, here's what it cannot do. As mentioned earlier, incoming traffic is pretty much something uncontrollable. FirstPacket does not increase overall bandwidth, as you're still going to be limited by how big your pipe leaving your PC is. FirstPacket will also not lower your pings to an internal server if somebody else in your network is shoving gigabytes of data through your hub. The only remedy here is to use a switch, but that still won't improve pings to an external server if that is under a heavy traffic load.

That said, some people leave bittorrent running, be it intentional or not, while gaming and FirstPacket can significantly improve the experience. We witnessed a live demo from NVIDIA a couple weeks ago where the test PC was averaging a 500 ping to an internal Far Cry server while uploading a 100MB file to 6 workstations without FirstPacket enabled. Turning FirstPacket on and adding Far Cry in the list of FirstPacket queued programs, we saw the ping drop down to the mid-50s. We should also point out that FirstPacket isn't limited to just gaming and you can add latency-tolerant apps to the list. Then again, this next feature should be more appealing in that case.

NVIDIA DualNET with Teaming Advanced Networking - NVIDIA's nForce 500 series MCP will be the first integrated motherboard solution that will offer two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The technology offers more than dual-Gigabit though, as the connections will provide fault tolerance, load balancing, teaming and advanced TCP/IP functions.

By combining the two network connections, you can have up to 2GB of bandwidth in either direction. Furthermore, this connection is fault tolerant, so if one link goes down, the file transfer continues, albeit at a slower rate. Each connection maintains their own MAC address, but as far as other computers on the network are concerned, there is only one IP address. The MCP also has TCP/IP acceleration that effectively lowers CPU utilization during file transfers. NVIDIA demonstrated this to us where without any offloading, CPU usage was about 70%. On a single NIC, with offloading enabled, the CPU usage was about 20% and with Teaming, about 40%, or double.

It's important to point out that DualNet and FirstPacket are only effective for traffic coming and going (FirstPacket is upload only) from the PC with these features. Effectively, it can improve the Internet connection, but that is assuming that the speed issues there was due to your PC's traffic.

MediaShield

If you're looking for storage options, NVIDIA offers them in spades with MediaShield. Out of the box, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, and RAID 5 are all supported. RAID 5 is quite nice as it offers the best balance of speed and fault tolerance. You do need a minimum of 3 hard drives though, one of which will be lost for the parity set. However, if a drive goes down, you will not lose any data. NVIDIA demonstrated this by playing a HD video and unplugging one of the drives. The video continued to play despite the missing drive. The MediaShield software did alert us of the downed drive and as soon as we plugged another back in, it went through the rebuilding process. Also, if this rebuilding gets interupted (power failure, shutting down the PC), there is no data loss and the rebuilding continues from the point it was interrupted.

Final Words

We're hoping to acquire an AM2 soon, but our initial impressions are positive overall. We think that FirstPacket and EPP are the most impressive features as both will give a "free" boost to your overall computing experience. FirstPacket will be a big hit with gamers we think since it will allow you to play games with a decent ping while using other network apps the same time.

EPP is another nice feature that should help out a lot of people without much experience overclocking. Given that DDR2 is new for AMD, if you're out buying a new system right now, we see no reason to skip out on EPP ram.

We think LinkBoost is also quite sweet, but it does sour a bit when it currently only works on the 7900GTX. We can understand that competitor cards will not get a boost, but we're hoping NVIDIA expands their LinkBoost lineup to cover other cards in their current line-up. That said, it's important to point out that say if you plug in an ATI card, you will not be penalized for it.

DualNet and Teaming will be great for those who maybe use their PC as a server in their network. 2GB of bandwidth is simply huge and even if you're PC isn't a server, it's pretty nice to be able to transfer some big DivX files to your HTPC in under a minute.

Storage freaks will be happy with MediaShield, with RAID 5 being especially impressive. We didn't get a chance to discuss it today, but nTune has been improved as well as NVIDIA's Vista compliant software interface. Finally, while SoundStorm doesn't make a return, we will now see HD audio on the higher end boards, though this will depend on the motherboard manufacturers.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

HOME