More NVIDIA nForce 600 Series Details Revealed

[sladesurfer]

More info http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4637

NVIDIA has remedied this situation and the nForce 680i SLI will officially support a 1333 MHz front-side bus. Whether or not this will support Intel’s upcoming Conroe 1333 MHz front-side bus refresh is unknown. Nevertheless, the supported 1333 MHz front-side bus will allow overclockers greater headroom with current overclocking friendly Core 2 Duo processors. NVIDIA has improved the dual-channel memory controller as well. The nForce 680i SLI’s memory controller now has memory dividers capable of support DDR2-1200 memory. Also supported is NVIDIA’s SLI-Ready memory with Enhanced Performance Profiles.

Graphics expansion will be a key point of nForce 680i SLI motherboards. In addition to the two full-speed PCI Express x16 slots, nForce 680i SLI motherboards will have a third PCI Express slot for NVIDIA’s unannounced three-GPU applications. This will most likely be a form of HavokFX SLI physics processing to counter ATI’s upcoming triple-play physics processing. The third slot will electrically have eight lanes routed to it.

[fhpchris]

What the 680 WONT have is Matrix raid, and many people may not think that matters, but moving from Matrix raid to anything else with the same number of drives is like going from a single drive to multiple drives in raid 0 all over again.

I, somehow, ended up with two 7900GTXes, and while I would buy the DFI C55, without matrx raid, I might just get the AW9D or BX2

[Kunaak]

what raid on there doesnt matter to me.

if the boards good, I will get it.
thats all.

[nn_step]

What the 680 WONT have is Matrix raid, and many people may not think that matters, but moving from Matrix raid to anything else with the same number of drives is like going from a single drive to multiple drives in raid 0 all over again.

I, somehow, ended up with two 7900GTXes, and while I would buy the DFI C55, without matrx raid, I might just get the AW9D or BX2

Why should it matter to you?
Since you love changing hardware so much, why don't you get a Good Raid Card

[fhpchris]

Why should it matter to you?
Since you love changing hardware so much, why don't you get a Good Raid Card

Show me one that does that with 4 7200rpm drives...

[vitaminc]

Show me one that does that with 4 7200rpm drives...

Look at the CPU utilization at a whooping 10%. Way to utilize dual core.

Also, check I/O per second, its a better measure. Besides, 9ms access time is slow compare to the typical 5ms access time of SCSI drives.

BTW, burst speed doesnt really reflect the performance of your HDD. Or do you seriously expect your HDD can send out data at similar speed compare to your DDR memory. :o

[JoeBar]

what raid on there doesnt matter to me.

if the boards good, I will get it.
thats all.

Same here.
Raid, what raid? Been there, done that...

[3NZ0]

better activate asap

What strip size is that?
What model hard drives?

[nn_step]

Show me one that does that with 4 7200rpm drives...

If you love Matrix raid so much, buy an Intel Raid card that sports it, They do make those you know

[Kanavit]

wow , Havok FX phsyx for SLI? sounds sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

[fhpchris]

If you love Matrix raid so much, buy an Intel Raid card that sports it, They do make those you know

Last time I checked, the support list of I/O hubs was only chipsets, and not ones like the, "Intel IOP333 I/O Processor "

I kinda fail too see why I should buy a 700$ card to run raid 0 or 0+1?

@ 3NZ0
64k stripe size
Seagate 7200.10s (older firmware)

@vitaminc
ya, small stripe sizes really use the cpu, but I have plenty of cpu to use
I know a 7200 RPM drive will not compare to 15k SCSI!, but 9ms access is about what a raptor does on a nomal controler...
AFI runs 74gb raptors on matrix raid, mabye he will chime in.. He gets much better access than I do on his P5B DLX
The drivers cache data to the DDR memmory, hence thats where that number is comming from. I know its not really reflecting real world performance, but you can believe that that 9ms and 300 mb/sec transfer do.

Ive used 10K SCSI on PCI-X on raid cards at work, and this is just as fast(access might be slower), or faster easily. Some people with newer Firmware drives can put down close to ~400mb/sec with matrix raid, and that is amazing for just four drives.(four drives that cost less than 100$/ea and .25$/gb)

When I install Cat 6.10s I do not even read some of the windows that come up, everything installs so fast!

[J-Mag]

Show me one that does that with 4 7200rpm drives...

Are they only 20gb drives or does the test only run on the outer edge of the disks?

[3NZ0]

fhp, thats some seriously slick speed from 4 perpie 7200 drives!











my 15k rpm server drives still walk over it though

[Charles Wirth]

I will have a definite answer on the raid soon. I will test 4x 10K raptors in raid 0

[Harshal]

Nice to know all da Options for Future, along with OC-Ability... too bad I have ordered ABIT already :P

[afireinside]

Are they only 20gb drives or does the test only run on the outer edge of the disks?

They're 4x 320gb drives with a 74gb raid 0 array on matrix raid and the rest is either raid 5 or 1, not sure what he's running now. I ran 2x 74gb raptors with a 36gb raid 0 matrix partition and ITS FAST. 40mb sustained transfer and 2ms seek time over my NVraid I run now. The speed difference is huge. Matrix raid setup just installed apps and loaded games so much faster.

[fhpchris]

Are they only 20gb drives or does the test only run on the outer edge of the disks?

Matrix raid lets you put more than one raid array on one drive. :0
It lets me put a ~70gb drive running raid 0 on the fastest part of the drive, and another raid 0+1 array (or raid 1 or whatever you choose) on the rest of the drives.

This way the drives are only using the faster parts. AFI gets ~6ms response from his 8meg cache 74gb raptors, and by using only the fastest part of the drive you get a transfer rate that never gets slow and a crazy access time

[J-Mag]

Matrix raid lets you put more than one raid array on one drive. :0
It lets me put a ~70gb drive running raid 0 on the fastest part of the drive, and another raid 0+1 array (or raid 1 or whatever you choose) on the rest of the drives.

This way the drives are only using the faster parts. AFI gets ~6ms response from his 8meg cache 74gb raptors, and by using only the fastest part of the drive you get a transfer rate that never gets slow and a crazy access time

"Enter the Matrix" LOL

Anyway, I have heard of people partitioning drives this way before in order to achieve a similar speed effect.
Is it possible just to partition all of you drives into the fast outer tracks as one set of partitions and the inner tracks as another set, then raid them normally?

[fhpchris]

"Enter the Matrix" LOL

Anyway, I have heard of people partitioning drives this way before in order to achieve a similar speed effect.
Is it possible just to partition all of you drives into the fast outer tracks as one set of partitions and the inner tracks as another set, then raid them normally?

You cannot run different raid arrays then, and even if you have a small partition on a large array, when you benchmark it, it will test beyond the partition...

[Trice]

Does this chipset require an F6 driver for RAID?