Introduction

After getting off to a bumpy start with nForce3 150, NVIDIA’s platform division is now on quite a roll, churning out Athlon 64 chipsets that are without equal. Up first was nForce3 250. The nForce3 250Gb chipset combined an enhanced HyperTransport interface, dual built-in Serial ATA controllers, and for the first time in an Athlon 64 chipset, native Gigabit Ethernet networking. Meanwhile, for added security, nForce3 250Gb incorporated built-in Firewall support, another first for NVIDIA.

NVIDIA followed the nForce3 250Gb up with nForce3 Ultra. This chipset was little more than nForce3 250Gb for Socket 939 with the addition of full support for 1GHz HyperTransport, but with AMD officially recommending it for use with their Athlon 64 4000+ and Athlon 64 FX-55 review kits over VIA K8T800 Pro due to its better performance, it’s obviously no slouch either.

nForce4 reference board

nForce4 board with Athlon 4000+ cooler installed

Now NVIDIA expects to transfer that success over to the PCI Express interface in the form of nForce4. NVIDIA has plans for a top-to-bottom family of nForce4 products, ranging from $55-$80 value nForce4 motherboards for budget Athlon 64 CPUs and Sempron, all the way up to $200+ nForce4 SLI motherboards for the high-end gaming crowd that insists on having the best performance possible. NVIDIA is hoping that nForce4 will be largely responsible for kicking the PCI Express revolution into high gear for the AMD platform, while the nForce3 family will maintain its hold of the AGP market.

nForce4 core features

Fundamentally, NVIDIA’s nForce4 chipset is an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary product. NVIDIA builds largely on the features that made nForce3 so popular, with a few enhancements here and there to keep it ahead of competing offerings from ATI and VIA, and tops everything off with PCI Express interface support.

MSI nForce4 SLI board

The bottom half of the nForce4 board

The key features that nForce4 supports are 20 lanes of PCI Express devices (one x16 lane for graphics, and three x1 lanes for peripherals, the last lane is left unused), 8-channel AC’97 audio, Serial ATA II (3 Gigabytes/second) support with RAID morphing, Gigabit Ethernet networking with an enhanced Firewall, support for up to 10 USB 2.0 ports, and more robust nTune software for overclocking (although this particular feature is also rolled back into older nForce chipsets as well, including nForce3 250Gb and nForce2). Of course, not all of these features are found in the low-end nForce4 value variant, but we can’t think of many decked-out $70 motherboards that we’ve come across recently.

Let’s take a look at the nForce4’s feature set in more detail.