Guru3D.com
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • Channels
    • Archive
  • DOWNLOADS
    • New Downloads
    • Categories
    • Archive
  • GAME REVIEWS
  • ARTICLES
    • Rig of the Month
    • Join ROTM
    • PC Buyers Guide
    • Guru3D VGA Charts
    • Editorials
    • Dated content
  • HARDWARE REVIEWS
    • Videocards
    • Processors
    • Audio
    • Motherboards
    • Memory and Flash
    • SSD Storage
    • Chassis
    • Media Players
    • Power Supply
    • Laptop and Mobile
    • Smartphone
    • Networking
    • Keyboard Mouse
    • Cooling
    • Search articles
    • Knowledgebase
    • More Categories
  • FORUMS
  • NEWSLETTER
  • CONTACT

New Reviews
Corsair QL120 and QL140 RGB fan review
Promo: Windows 10 Pro for $13 With Office 2016 For $33
Corsair Void RGB Elite Wireless Headset review
Team Group PD400 Portable SSD review
AMD Athlon 3000G review
Team Group T-Force Delta Max 1 TB SSD review
Guru3D Rig of the Month - November 2019
ASUS ROG Rampage VI Extreme Encore review
Toshiba RC500 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD review
Promo: URcdkey Black Friday Windows 10 Pro for $12

New Downloads
3DMark Download v2.11.6846 + Port Royale
HWiNFO64 Download v6.20
AMD Radeon Adrenalin Edition 19.12.1 driver download
Crystal DiskMark Download v7.0.0f
AMD Ryzen Master Utility Download v2.1.0.1424
Quake II RTX Download v1.2
GeForce 441.41 WHQL driver download
Oculus TrayTool download v0.86.3.1
AMD Chipset Drivers Download v1.11.22.0454
Download AMD RAID Driver (SATA, NVMe RAID) v9.3.0.38


New Forum Topics
Review: Corsair QL120 and QL140 RGB fans New Upcoming ATI/AMD GPU's Thread: Leaks, Hopes & Aftermarket GPU's Part 2 Download: AMD chipset driver revision 1.9.27.1033 Windows 10 random shutdown MSI RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio watercooled getting spool coils Review: Core i9 10980XE processor (Intel 18-core galore) AMD Radeon Adrenalin Edition 19.12.1 driver download & discussion Guru3D 2019 December 6th contest: Win a Ryzen 5 3600X (6c/12t) processor The AMD Ryzen All In One Tread /Overclocking/Memory Speeds & Timings/Tweaking/Cooling Part 2 SanDisk SSD Plus Goes 2 TB on SATA3




Guru3D.com » Review » eVGA nForce 680i SLI mainboard review » Page 4

eVGA nForce 680i SLI mainboard review - Page 4

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 03/03/2007 02:00 PM [ ] 0 comment(s)

Tweet

Storage Features

Evidently you already noticed that the nFORCE series 500 now can support six native SATA 3Gb/s drives, which previously was four. Why is that number six important you ask ? Well, you can make a dual RAID 5 solution as RAID 5 requires a minimum of three drives. Obviously it is recommended that all drives on the system should be of the same size. The more drives you have on the server, the better RAID 5 will perform.

RAID 5 is the version most often recommended. Because the price of disk drives have drastically dropped, the cost of implementing RAID 5 is now within most enthusiast and companies budgets. The only time RAID 5 could fail is if two drives were to fail at the same time. The loss of disk space is basically 100 divided by the number of disk drives. With 3 drives, there is a 33% loss of disk space. With 5 drives, there is a 20% loss of disk space.
[Ed - RAID 5 takes n number of disks, stripes them together, and puts a parity section on each disk. Therefore if one drive went down, the information is still stored on another disk using parity. Performance is very close to RAID 0 / Striping]

Also I should mention the MediaShield 3.0 UI, the RAID unit/SATA connections are hot swappable, meaning you can pull out or insert the plug when the system is powered on. The minute a driver fails or will get unplugged the NVIDIA MediaShield sentinel will pop up and show you what drive/connection has gone bad.

The image shows the hard drive connector ports and provides a visual indication of the location and status of the drives as follows:

  • Red rectangle—red denotes a failed drive.
  • Green rectangle—green denotes a healthy hard drive.
  • Yellow rectangle—yellow denotes a member of a failed RAID array, but is not the cause of the failure.
  • No color rectangle—unconnected ports have no visual indication.

And now then there is the power of RAID 5... if one of the drives fails, the system can continue to run by just writing to one drive. Since you have hot swappable drives, you could pull out the bad drive, plug in a new one and the system is back to its normal state. So you have the media shield alerting you what drive is broken, without disabling the system you swap the driver and bam, it's rebuilding the storage array.

Pretty cool stuff as you can now setup two RAID 5 units.

Networking

Just like the AMD and Intel 590 SLI board, the 680i board has a couple of other rather interesting features found in the networking solution as there are three things rather noteworthy in the Intel edition as well. First up this, remember that I told you that the platform will have two 1Gbit/s NICs? NVIDIA calls this DualNet.

You can now also bridge the two together, NVIDIA calls this Teaming. So basically both NICs will work as one 2 GBit/s controller and it actually works pretty darn good. I'm surprised they did not call it an SLI-network ;)

You simply hook up both connections to a switch and in the CP (Control panel) enable Network Teaming, which binds the two NIC's as one.

I once witnessed a test of this: the main (and thus "teamed") PC was functioning as a server, and from 6 other clients, massive amounts of data were sent bi-directionally. Extremely impressive as the network speed indeed neared 2GBit/sec. Teaming also provides network redundancy through fail-over capability. By hooking up Ethernet connections to both gigabit ports, not only is performance increased by combining the two pipes, but the network is immediately sheltered against a port or cable malfunction (such as a network wire getting kicked loose.) Another great thing I just have to mention has to be the TCP/IP engine which now also runs over the nForce chipset. The trick here is that it offloads your CPU. During massive amounts of data transport very little processor time is being utilized.

Good stuff for sure, NVIDIA calls this TCP/IP Acceleration engine. See an example below.

Copyright 2006 - Guru3D.com

Let's have a look at a couple of photo's on the mainboard and what we're going to do with it.




19 pages « 3 4 5 6 next »



Related Articles
EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW For The Win review
eVGA decided to make a new cheaper mainboard opposed to 780/790, designed it l33t, sexy yet offer two or maybe three features less than these sub 300 USD counterparts. And they named their new baby the eVGA nForce 750 FTW. Where FTW literally means "For The Win". Now if you send a product with "FTW" in the actual name then as a company you need to have some pretty big balls, as any reviewer will see if that product lives up-to the reputation. You know what, you need balls as big as an NVIDIA colored bull.

NVIDIA eVGA nFORCE 680i LT SLI
Let me put it simple .. The 68i SLI LT mainboard is a regular 680i SLI mainboard in all it's ways yet to cut costs there have been several functions stripped. For example .. you'll have to miss out on the 3rd "graphics" PCI-Express slot (the 8x one), you'll only have one GBit/s Ethernet connector, you lost the passively cooled SSP and MCP, it's now done with active fans, you loose LinkBoost and some tweaking options in the BIOS. Other stuff you'll miss are the black PCB, diagnostic LEDs, reset and power off/on micro switches in the mainboard PCB and some other small stuff. We'll explain ... click me !

eVGA nForce 680i SLI mainboard review
We started using this mainboard pretty much the minute we received it which was early November and ever since it has become the #1 mainboard for testing graphics cards. Intense stability, hefty tweaking features and massive performance. These are the three things I immediately think about when we talk about the 680i mainboards.

© 2019