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Hardware nForce Pro 3600, 3050 Info
Sven Olsen (Blog) - May 26, 2006 2:13 PM

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6 comment(s) - last by josmala.. on May 28 at 5:17 PM

NVIDIA's newest is a server chipset

NVIDIA has begun disclosing information to its partners on the upcoming nForce Pro 3600 and nForce Pro 3050 chipsets. These new chipsets, based on MCP55, will act as the chipsets of choice for AMD's Opteron Socket F. nForce Pro 3600 is the stand alone core logic and nForce Pro 3050 is the additional I/O controller -- similar to nForce Pro 2200 and nForce Pro 2050.

nForce Pro 3600 can be used alone or in conjunction with nForce Pro 3050. The MCP55-based nForce Pro 3xxx core logics offer the same PCIe, Ethernet and SATA support found on nForce 590, but with additional tweaks for Opteron, including a separate networking and storage driver suite. NVIDIA's material claims MCP55 Pro has substantially more throughput than HT2000 devices for PCIe and BCM 5721 for Ethernet.

Revision F Opteron uses DDR2 memory and the upcoming LGA-1207 socket. The platform, scheduled for launch on July 11, will enable AMD to develop quad-core Revision G processors next year.

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Awesome

By AggressorPrime on 5/26/2006 5:15:55 PM , Rating: 2

So each nForce Pro, 3600 or 3050, has 28 PCIe lanes, 6 SATA 2.0, 1 PATA (2 drives), 2 Gigabit, 10 USB 2.0, and 5 PCI.

That means that 4 of them will have this list of features:
4 PCIe 16x
4 PCIe 8x
4 PCIe 4x (OR 8 PCIe 2x OR 16 PCIe 1x)
20 PCI
24 SATA 2.0
4 PATA (8 drives)
8 Gigabit
40 USB 2.0

Of course I think we might never see a motherboard with 4 of these. We never saw 4 nForce Pro 2000s.

RE: Awesome

By ProviaFan on 5/26/2006 5:36:11 PM , Rating: 2

Realistically, if you used two of them, you could have two PCIe 16x with enough lanes left over for three PCIe 8x (or three 16x and one 8x). Hopefully someone will actually make a board that has a decent number of PCIe slots on it (Supermicro's H8DCE, with its two 16x and two 4x electrical / 8x physical slots is pretty good already, IMHO).

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RE: Awesome

By Trisped on 5/26/2006 7:32:15 PM , Rating: 2

I don't think the chips are meant to work that way. Either use a 3600, 3050, or 3600+3050.

Yes, more PCIe slots would be nice. I think it would also be nice to have more 2x slots rather then just 1x.

Still, people need those legacy PCI slots since there are no PCIe Sound Blaster cards and most other peripherals are still on PCI only.

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RE: Awesome

By AggressorPrime on 5/26/2006 10:37:19 PM , Rating: 2

If you have the HT links, you can run 4. Both dual, quad, and eight-way Opteron setups have 4 extra HT links. As long as the nForce 3000s work like the nForce 2000s (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...), then it'll work.

"As each MCP makes a HT connection to a processor, a dual or quad processor setup is required for a server to take advantage of 3 2050 MCPs (in addition to the 2200), but in the case where such I/O power is needed, the processing power would be an obvious match."

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Two chipsets or one

By electriple9 on 5/26/2006 3:15:55 PM , Rating: 2

If two chipsets, it would be nice to provide 12 sata that allow raid 0/1/10/5
Thanks

This is quite interesting chipset...

By josmala on 5/28/2006 5:17:21 PM , Rating: 2

To fix first misconseption.
Atleast with previous nforce pro you couldn't mix the lines from multiple chips to single slot.
So the BEST you can have per chip is 16x + 8x + 4x . And you just cannot add the 8x components on two different chips to create single additional 16x slot.

However there is still a potential for really good server/workstation configuration.

16x *2
8x *2
2 * PCI each have separate bus to chipsets, so both have full pci bandwith.
12 SATA drives can be used to create raid 5 array(s).
4x 1Gb ethernet ports.

Now lets make quess what additional feature nforce 3600 pro gives I'll guess support for SAS drives.