nForce 590 SLI
LinkBoost
DualNet
FirstPacket
EPP

NVIDIA has basically been in a holding pattern with their AMD chipsets since the release of the nForce4 SLI in 2004. Things like High Definition Audio were not supported in the latest nForce4 chipset from NVIDIA until this launch. NVIDIA is announcing a full lineup of products, the nForce 590 SLI, the nForce 570 SLI, the nForce 570 Ultra, the nForce 550 and the nForce 530.

nForce 590 SLI is the high-end chipset of the new lineup. It was designed for high-end gamers by high-end gamers. The new technologies on nForce 590 SLI include LinkBoost , support SLI-Ready Memory, FirstPacket, DualNet, TCP/IP acceleration, MediaShield technology, two full-bandwidth 16-lane PCI Express links, Extreme overclockability and High Definition Audio. So let’s take a look at each of these new features. This new chipset has 48 lanes for the PCI Express bus, allowing two video cards to work in x16 mode. One advantage of the 590 chipset is the removal of the “Paddle” switch to operate in SLI mode.

LinkBoost is a new technology that is designed to automatically overclock the PCI Express bus by up to 25% when a LinkBoost-enabled video card like the 7900GTX is used in an NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI motherboard. If a 7900GTX is present on a nForce 590 motherboard the system overclocks the PCI Express bus to 125MHz increasing the bandwidth of HyperTransport to 10GB/second from 8GB normal.

EPP or Enhanced Performance Profiles is an open standard PC initiative by NVIDIA to provide higher levels of system performance by integrating additional memory specifications and performance capabilities into their SDRAM DIMM modules. nForce 590 SLI detects SLI ready memory automatically, but the end-user has to set the Memory overclock in the BIOS themselves.

FirstPacket is NVIDIA’s new feature to improve performance in networked games and other latency-sensitive traffic by defining a high-priority transmit queue dedicated to user-defined applications. Previously, bandwidth was more important, as the standard consumer would use a dial-up modem with a maximum transfer rate of 56Kbps. Today almost everyone has a high-speed connection with 768Kbps or even 3Mbps connections being standard, meaning bandwidth is not as much a concern as is latency. Firstpacket technology adds a second lane for low-latency applications allowing the slower lane to handle latency tolerant applications without tying up the bandwidth.

DualNet integrates dual Ethernet MACs that by design, eliminate network bottlenecks and improve overall system efficiency and performance. Most motherboard chipsets use two chips to use dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, but the nForce5 series integrates the controller onto the nForce MCP. DualNet allows teaming, to give the effect of a high-speed 2-Gigabit Ethernet connection allowing multiple computers to be connected to a server computer. It has the features like Fail-Over (nForce MCP switches over to a redundant or standby connection if one of the gigabit ports fail, drop out or is disconnected).

Media Shield is NVIDIA’s trademark for their storage technologies. The nForce MCP (Media Communications Processor) supports up to 6 SATA drives natively, a increase of 2 over the previous generation. nForce 5 supports RAID 0 (Stripping), RAID 1 (Mirroring) RAID 0+1 (Stripping and mirroring) and a new mode Massive RAID 5 Array. The Massive RAID 5 mode allows you to do stripping across 6 drives, make a stripped array out of 3 drives and a mirrored array of 3 drives, or make an array of 5 drives and a free drive to take up the slack if one in the array fails.

High Definition Audio (Azalia) was introduced in 2004 with the release of Intel’s LGA-775 platform. The replacement for the ever-present AC’97 specification, Azalia is present on almost every chipset on the market today. HDA supports up 7.1 Surround sound, virtually every sound API on the market (with the exception of the Creative Labs EAX 3.0, 4.0 and HD which are only supported by Creative sound cards.)

The nForce 570 SLI chipset is similar to NVIDIA’s 590 SLI but does not feature LinkBoost technology. The other issue with the 570 is the use of 2x8 lanes for SLI mode, while the 590 SLI uses 2x16 modes. There is a maximum of 28 lanes of PCI Express on this chipset. There are few if any applications that fully max out the PCI Express x8 bus and the enthusiast will be on the 590 SLI platform.

nForce 570 Ultra is obviously the non-SLI version of the nForce 570 chipset, designed for the single card enthusiast. Not every user wants or needs dual video cards. It’s also a good chipset for someone wanting to use another video card manufacturer besides NVIDIA. The 570 Ultra chipset has 20 lanes for PCI Express and is optimized for the single video card user,

nForce 550 is the mainstream version of the nForce 5 family. This chipset has none of the new features of the rest of the nForce 5 family, no LinkBoost, no FirstPacket, no EPP, no SLI, and only 4 SATA devices supported by the chip. NVIDIA is targeting the 550 at the under $90 price range. One thing 550 has is support for HDA (Azalia), common with it’s bigger and badder brothers.