AM2: AMD Reinvents Itself

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The New nForce5 Chipset For AM2

AMD is introducing Socket AM2 together with Nvidia's new Nforce5 chipset. Compared to its predecessor Nforce4, Nvidia has armed its latest model with brand-new functions.

Block diagram of the Nforce5 chipset

The Nforce5 chipset

IDE Controller

Nvidia has overhauled the IDE controller in three important respects. It now has six SATA connections, but loses one IDE port. This means you can only use two parallel ATA (IDE) devices.

The six SATA connections let you connect two more drives.

A special feature is the RAID configuration, allowing you to connect six hard drives to a RAID network, for example. RAID levels 0, 1 and 5 are supported.

The Editors of Tom's Hardware
The Editors of Tom's Hardware

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