ActiveArmor

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ActiveArmor is a hardware firewall designed by Nvidia that's built into their higher range nForce4 Ultra chipset motherboards.

It can reduce CPU load by making some simple layer 2 checks on incoming packets and discarding obviously malicious packets before they are sent to the CPU. It is an effective protection against some same subnet based attacks such as ARP poisoning, rogue DHCP servers and spoofed MAC addresses.

Unfortunately it is essentially broken in its current implementation, with serious issues with data corruption. It is so bad that programs such as µTorrent actually warn users at start up to disable it.^{[citation needed]}