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Networking
Just like the AMD 590 SLI board, this 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 ia a 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 and t
he main and thus "teamed" PC was functioning as a server and from 6 other clients massive amounts of data where send 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.) Anther 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 (courtesy of our 590 SLI AMD review.
Let's have a look at a couple of photo's on the mainboard and what we're going to do with it.
