What are you talking about?
nVidia has problems - check
http://forums.nvidia.com/. The recent nForce4
has had corruption problems with some hard disks on SATA. nVidia still
denies it and says Maxtor has fessed up but Maxtor denies it - similar
probs have been seen on Western Digital drives; either way there *is* a
problem and one could hope for better discussion of the issue than posting
on nVidia's forum, with the hope that just *maybe* an nVidia employee
*might* happen by and notice and *might* feel inclined to do something.
Their silence is aggravating.
The nForce chipsets with Gb NIs have a hardware bug which seems to only
manifest in a few situations. I've seen it when working as a nForce3 & 4
client to some mail servers: 1) with Eudora as a mail client, sendmail just
eventually fails with a 10053 or 10054 Eudora error code (a Google search
on "Eudora 10053" will turn up the complaints); 2) trying to upload HDTach
results eventually fails silently. In both cases the fix is to disable
checksum offload in the network driver which, of course, cancels out their
wild performance claims. Actually I'd appreciate it if anyone who has an
nForce3/4 chipset could try an HDTach results upload and post their
experience, just to confirm reproducibility. The error only seems to
happen with large e-mails (HDTach just e-mails its results to Simpli's
mailserver) so it could the length or it could be content sensitive.
Also check out the table of "compatibility" here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/motherboards.html. It's a bloody mess and is
apparently not the whole story: nVidia's Network Access Manager rarely
works at all - the hardware firewall, is basically unuseable for most
people. In the above table, the "Hardware Network Engine" does not work
with any nForce3 mbrd and several nForce4 mbrds but nowhere on their site,
that I can find, does nVidia tell what "Hardware Network Engine" really
does. There's some suggestion that it's the mechanism which allows
bypassing the OS network stack and performing DMA directly to the
application memory space but it's hard to pin down and impossible to figure
what (not) to do to avoid problems or which software to (not) use.
On top of all the above, the nVidia drivers are going from bad to worse -
every new iteration brings new problems and may or may not fix old ones; it
reminds me of the way video drivers were rigged to wring out extravagant
performance numbers at the expense of system stability.
Quite honestly I'm getting fed-up with this, especially nVidia's refusal to
even listen to end users. I hope VIA makes a comeback - at least they
listen.
