Product Review: Corrent S3500 TurboCard

Main	1. Photos	2. Features	3. Licensing	4. Installation
5. Putting It To Work	6. Under The Hood	7. Conclusions	8. Pricing And Ordering	More Information

1. Photos:

I love it when I get big boxes like this! Steve Yurkunis and Jeff Douglass of Corrent promised they'd send me one of their S3500 TurboCards. But could a large PCI card really be this big, or be padded this well? You could fit a 1U server in this box!

Whoops, I spoke too soon! I guess the easiest way to ship a big PCI card (and to make it easy to use when it gets here) is to wrap it up in an IBM rack-mount server. I'm lucky I get to play with stuff like this!

Here I've opened the top of the case. You can see the four RAM modules (256 MB each). Just below them, with about a dozen major chips on it, is the back of the S3500 TurboCard. It's a full-sized PCI card that fits into a vertical backplane. The two shiny units in the top center (they're actually aluminum but are reflecting a copper color in this photo) are the dual Xeon 2.8Ghz processors.

I've pulled the card (yes, before I even started it up) and gave it a thorough examination. That's a serious-looking heat sink over there on the right, but I guess you'd need it if you were running multi-Gigabit traffic. Beneath that heat sink is the IBM NPU (Network Processing Unit), an ASIC purpose-built to process network traffic.

Here's a closer look at the left hand side. On the left edge are the three Gigabit Ethernet ports (copper). That's the Corrent CR7120 Security Processor there under the black aluminum porcupine heat sink. The PCI bus is 64-bit and runs at 33/66 MHz.

Here's a look at the reverse side.

Here's a much better photo that I stole fair and square from Corrent's web site. You can see the three Gigabit NIC's clearly here. When the OS recognizes these NIC's, they appear on the list in order from right to left in this photo (this will help you match cables to NIC's when configuring).

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