nForce4 Variants

NVIDIA will offer three nForce4 variants: nForce4, nForce4 Ultra, and nForce4 SLI.

nForce4

At the bottom end of the spectrum lies nForce4. This chipset is essentially nothing more than nForce3 250Gb migrated over to the PCI Express platform. You’ve got the same 20 fixed lane PCI Express capability as nForce4 Ultra, with support for 10 USB ports (the highest in the industry), NVIDIA’s dual Serial ATA controller architecture with support for RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 and support for up to 4 Serial ATA/parallel ATA hard drives, but lacks support for Serial ATA 3GB/sec technology.

You’ll also get Gigabit Ethernet capability, but nForce4 lacks ActiveArmor support and is limited to 800MHz HyperTransport. Motherboards based on this chipset will likely come in both Socket 754 and 939 varieties and should be priced between $55-$80.

nForce4 Ultra

nForce4 Ultra is the motherboard for the mainstream gaming community. It supports all the features we’ve discussed on the previous pages, namely ActiveArmor, Serial ATA 3GB/sec, and 1GHz HyperTransport. NVIDIA expects motherboards based on this chipset to sell for between $100-$150.

nForce4 SLI

This is the high-end, take-no-prisoners board for the consumer who wants to build the fastest gaming rig on the planet. You’ve got all the features found in nForce4 Ultra, with the inclusion of NVIDIA’s scaleable link interface, more commonly known as SLI.

SLI allows you to pair two graphics cards together, cutting the workload in half for each card and providing for nearly double the performance. Like the other nForce4 chipsets, nForce4 supports 20 PCI Express lanes, contradicting some of the earlier rumors that were out there about NVIDIA’s own native SLI solution.

Unlike Intel’s Tumwater platform, where one PCI Express graphics card operates at x16 and the other at x8 when two cards are used, NVIDIA runs both cards at x8 on nForce4 SLI. NVIDIA found that on Tumwater, the x16 PCI-E “Master” card ran faster than the x8 “Slave” card. By running both cards at x8 on nForce4, games run more synchronously providing a better overall experience. If the second card is removed, the remaining PCI Express card automatically switches back to the full bandwidth x16 mode.

In the current NVIDIA driver, SLI can be turned on or off at the flick of a button in the control panel. This provides end user’s with a quick way to turn SLI off if they do encounter problems with a game, although NVIDIA is working hard right now to make sure that never happens. NVIDIA would like to see nForce4 SLI motherboards start as low as $190, although we’d expect board prices to hover in the $200-$250 range. This still isn’t bad considering the six-layer board requirement needed for all nForce4 SLI boards.