NForce 4 Chipset Firewall - What a nightmare.

[[AK]Sonic Boom]

Blew up the USB ports on my mobo (which is an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe) and replaced it under warranty. Decided to do the CPU upgrade at the same time and opened up a huge can of worms.

I Ended up having virtually all of my downloaded files corrupted as well as having my Ethernet randomly die. What a PITA.

After much research and pulling my hair out, I found that the software for Nvidia's chip-based firewall is/was incredibly buggy, particularly Active Armor. I Finally decided to use the newest drivers from Nvidia, which aren't recommended by ASUS, and it seems to have fixed the problem.

In theory, a chipset-based firewall should relieve the CPU of packet handing duties and give a performance increase, but I suspect with an FX-60 CPU it won't make that much difference.

Just a FYI in case any of you try the NForce 4 chipset in the future.

On a brighter note, almost everything else is working well and I'm installing BF2 this morning. Should be seeing you on the server as early as tonight and can start getting back into things by next week.

[[AK]Sonic Boom]

Well, it looks like the new Nforce 4 drivers are indeed stable... unfortunately they also brought my video performance to its knees.

I didn't even bother to benchmark the latest because when I tried Doom 3 (still haven't finished it) I had an old-school slideshow.

Looks like Nvidia's chipset firewall is another good idea gone terribly wrong. The theory was that the chipset firewall could offload packet sorting from the CPU and save clock cycles.

From the research I've done, here's the best I can discern:

In reality, the product interfered horribly with a SATA IRQ and at first, in grand corporate style, they refused to acknowledge there was a problem. By the time the bad pub had steamrolled them, they had already committed major resources to the Nforce 5 chipset, so I imagine they dumped the problem on to some poor SOB who didn't know what hit him. They probably just hired him from Ford after he did anti-lock brakes for fifteen years...

Anywho, I'm calling it official. The Nforce 4 "firewall" is a POS. Now that I've stripped the bells and whistles from their software, all systems are go once again and the new rocketship is no longer grounded.

Looks like someone took a page out of the Microsoft playbook.

I just can't wait for Nforce 5... it'll be great!