NVIDIA is introducing the nForce 500 product family that features full support for the new AMD AM2 processor series along with a bevy of features. The nForce chipsets were highly successful for nVidia, now the latest 5 series offers several new features for performance improvements for the gamer. The nForce 5 will be available for socket AM2 CPUs. New features: LinkBoost - If the new chipset detects a Geforce 7900GTX card, then it will automaticaly increase the PCI-E and Hypertransport bus speeds by 25%. At the moment, the 7900GTX is the only card certified to operate at that speed. FirstPacket is a feature which prioritises outgoing packets for applications which are latency sensitive, ie. games, VoIP. The technology allows a separate network queue for these user set applications and offers an average of 25% improvement in game server ping rates. This only affects outgoing packets. Dualnet Teaming allows the chipset to combine two separate Gigabit ethernet links into one 2Gbit link for intensive network applications. TCP/IP acceleration reduces CPU utilization rates by offloading CPU-intensive packet processing tasks to hardware using a dedicated processor for accelerating traffic processing combined with optimized driver support... We noticed CPU utilization rates near 14% with the TCP/IP offload engine enabled and rates above 30% without it. The storage controller has also been improved. The new chipset allows 3 SATA controllers, allowing 6 SATA devices for massive RAID5. nVidia have also ditched the long serving AC97 audio chipset, and now use a new High Definition Audio chip. While the choice of which HDA codec along with the associated circuitry can still greatly impact audio quality and performance, any of these options are better than the AC'97 solutions previously offered. Overall however, this doesn't translate to great real world improvements, as in one case the nForce4 outperforms the newer chipset on gaming, not by much. Full Anandtech Article
