Conclusion

For just around five months AMD enthusiasts have had SLI technology all to themselves. With the debut of NVIDIA’s nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset, these gamers are about to get some serious company.

The Intel Edition of the nForce4 SLI chipset incorporates all the major features found on its AMD counterpart, including GigE with native Firewall, 10 USB ports, NVIDIA’s impressive storage subsystem, and even AMD HyperTransport, which links the North Bridge and the South Bridge together. The only difference is that NVIDIA has adapted the chipset for Intel’s Pentium processors, this includes adding a new memory controller with support of the latest DDR2-667 memory, and of course Intel’s 1066MHz FSB. From a features perspective, NVIDIA’s nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset is in a unique class of its own, even excluding SLI support.

But of course, no gamer willing to fork over $200 for a motherboard and another $400 or more for two graphics cards will forget about SLI. We witnessed performance gains that were comparable to the improvements seen on NVIDIA’s SLI platform for AMD users, sometimes in the order of just over 1.7X at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF, but there were even multiple cases where we were pushing a 2X performance improvement under the same settings! Based on these kinds of results, clearly NVIDIA’s driver team has implemented quite a few performance enhancements inside their latest ForceWare release for SLI.

At the same time however, there’s still a lot of work to be done. NVIDIA currently boasts SLI support for over games, but this is a small selection of the overall gaming market. In addition, some of the titles on the existing list aren’t quite up to snuff. Chronicles of Riddick is a perfect example of this, with SLI enabled, stability is severely compromised, and when you do get numbers, they’re below a single card configuration. We also ran into performance problems with the GeForce 6600 GT running in SLI mode in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Performance would consistently begin to hitch in the same area of the timedemo, so we’re pretty sure the problem wasn’t overheating.

Speaking of overheating, this is one aspect you’ll definitely have to take into account when building an nForce4 SLI Intel Edition system, especially if you plan on outfitting your system with a fast processor. Under load with our Pentium 4 3.73GHz Extreme Edition CPU, the GeForce 6800 GT cards running in SLI mode would begin to overheat when running looped demos in Far Cry for more than 10 minutes, causing the system to crash and a full reboot. We ultimately rectified the problem by removing the case cover our system shipped in (a CoolerMaster WaveMaster chassis with an NVIDIA case window on one side) so we could install an additional case fan to act as a blowhole, blowing cool air directly onto the graphics cards.

The problem is caused by inadequate airflow. NVIDIA’s cards feature ducted cooling designs. These coolers work great when they have a steady supply of fresh air, but with the secondary “slave” graphics card in the way, airflow to the primary “master” graphics card is constrained – it’s literally sucking up the hot air off the card below it! As a result, the primary card typically operates 5-10 degrees Celsius higher than the secondary card.

Teething problems aside though, NVIDIA’s SLI platform processors have brought quite a bit of excitement to the normally mundane chipset world. Obviously Intel recognizes that as well, why else would they sign NVIDIA so quickly after years of dismissing them previously? If you’re a hardcore gamer looking to get the most performance out of the Intel platform as possible, a motherboard based on NVIDIA’s nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset should be at the top of your list of components to purchase.