The NVIDIA firewall is executed for the most part in hardware, so this approach should in principle use less processing time as packet inspection requires a lot of CPU power. To do this, NVIDIA made hired brainpower from network specialist 3COM. Seen in this light, it is not surprising that the result makes sense.
The ForceWare Network Access Manager is a costly configuration program for the NVIDIA firewall. During installation, components of the manager can be selected or left out. At the end, the user is immediately asked whether the firewall should start up right away.
The Network Access Manager is basically a Web front-end, and an instance of the Apache web server is actually running on our test computer. Most interesting is the "Basic Configuration" menu - the properties of the network controller can be changed there, otherwise only possible in the properties window in Windows.
Under Profiles, NVIDIA's default security levels, which should meet most needs, can be selected. In addition, three individual security profiles can be configured.
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Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
