NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition Chipset Review :: NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI Intel Edition Chipset

Features	nForce4SLI	nForce4SLI	nForce4Ultra	nForce4
Platform Support	INTEL	AMD	AMD	AMD
CPU	Intel P4 Socket 775	Athlon 64 FX Athlon 64	Athlon 64 FX Athlon 64 Sempron	Athlon 64 FX Athlon 64 Sempron
PCI Express # Lanes/ Configuration	20 lanes Flexible	20 lanes Flexible	20 lanes Fixed (16,1,1,1)	20 lanes Fixed (16,1,1,1)
NVIDIA SLI Dual GPU Support	Yes	Yes	--	--
NVIDIA DualDDR2	Yes	--	--	--
SATA drive Support	4 (3Gb/s)	4 (3Gb/s)	4 (3Gb/s)	4 (1.5Gb/s)
PATA Drive Support	4	4	4	4
MediaShield Storage	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
RAID 5	Yes	--	--	--
RAID Morphing and Cross Controller RAID	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
ActiveArmor Secure Networking Engine	Yes	Yes	Yes	--
ActiveArmor Firewall	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Native Gigabit Ethernet	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
nTune Utility	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

What you get with NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset is essentially, what you get with the nForce4 chipset for the AMD platform with a few small changes. All the great things that went into the entire nForce4 platform are included on the Intel Edition as well. You can look on NVIDIA's site if you want to check out their web site and if you care to see their SLI site, you can peek at it as well. All the things like nTune, NVIDIA Firewall, nVraid and Active Armor are available here as well and offer the same functionality as the nForce4 for AMD. One thing that you get now that was not available before the SLI Intel Edition is the addition of RAID 5 capability. RAID 5 offers the user the fastest and safest configuration as it adopts the features of both RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays offering the speed of a striped array and the dependability of a mirroring array combined in one. This does take a hefty amount of hard drives to configure, but is really worth it if you want a fast system that has redundant backup.

The new nVraid, NVIDAI Firewall and Active Armor are very good features that are some of the best that the nForce4 chipset has to offer so I will reiterate this a bit in this review. The Firewall has so many options screens to work within it might take you a wee bit of time to familiarize yourself with them all as the Firewall is very thorough and covers more areas than any built in Firewall seen yet. There are custom options for LAN gaming, for file and system sharing as well as solid protection from would-be intruders than can be custom tailored to fit your need. nVraid offers the user a variety of setup options and array configurations. The nVraid support offers the following, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, JBOD, cross controller RAID, spare disk allocation and bootable RAID 5. The best thing about this in my opinion is the hot-swappable capability of the nVraid environment as this can come in very handy when having drive problems and need to change a drive on the fly. The nVraid automatically tells you when a drive is not functioning and allows you to swap out the drive while the system is still on and in the Windows environment.

On-board sound is adequate at best and has the basic features for an eight speaker 7.1 surround sound environment using the AC97 Codec. That said, it is still one of the most basic and oldest chipsets around and needs some serious updating to qualify for enthusiasts sound. There is the 10-band equalizer and a few basic sound environments for modifying the type of room you are in along with the nvMixer that has the standard treble, bass and overall system volume. The speaker wizard helps you with the setup of your audio speakers and will let you control the volume on all speakers connected in your surround sound environment. You can also handle the task of choosing the type of speakers you are using such as a 5.1 or 7.1 surround system. Being that the board and chipset are now Intel, DDR2 memory comes into play and the chipset supports a Dual Channel DDR2 128-Bit Memory Interface that offers two independent 64-bit memory controllers and can in theory support up to 16GB of memory, which equates to four 4GB memory sticks occupying all four 240-pin DIMM slots. Support for 400 MT/s (200MHz), 533 MT/s (266MHz), and 667 MT/s (333 MHz) for a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 10.6 GB/s is conceivable.

The next generation Dual-Core CPUs are coming very shortly and the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset will allow the use of these chips by the time they ship out to the public. As it is now, all the Intel LGA775 CPUs are supported, all the way up to the current 3.76GHz EE@1066MHz. SATA support offers the user dual controller architecture, two separate and independent controllers and Four (4) integrated SATA 3GB ports. There is full support for both Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ) and Native Command Queuing (NCQ) so whether you use Maxtor or Western Digital hard drives you will get the best support for quick access times in things like loading games and launching some software applications. There is support for up to ten USB 2.0 ports that will probably come via brackets that connect to headers on the board and should be provided by your motherboard manufacturer. Most mainstream motherboards come with a maximum of four USB ports located on the rear I/O.

Yes, old-school PATA connections are still available and the nForce4 for Intel has an Ultra ATA-133 Disk Drive Controller that supports Ultra-DMA modes 6-0, DMA modes 2-0, and PIO modes 4-0. There are two available PATA controllers, a 5V-tolerant primary and secondary channel, with support for up to four devices. Obviously, SLI support is here and there are five independent PCI Express controllers with 20 total lanes that configure in the following manner: One X16 and 4 X1 PCI Express lane (Single card) or 2 X 8 and 3 X1 PCI Express lanes (SLI Mode). What this means is that one card uses all 16 of its pipelines when used singularly and that when you use two cards in an SLI configuration each card handles eight pipelines each, which together make up 16 pipelines. I get many people asking why 16 pipelines and not 32 using the 16 in each card, and the answer to that is that NVIDIA has done research that shows 16 pipelines split into an SLI dual 8-channel configuration to be the best performance attainable in the current state of things. There is full support for networking and LAN connectivity and the nForce4 platform supports Gigabit Ethernet that functions in the 10/100/1000mbps environment. Large transfer of files over the network has never been faster and the nForce4 chipset offers ultra fast packet transfers so that transferring large bits of data takes less than previously available. Well, that about covers what features and options are available on the new nForce4 SLI Intel Edition and there are a few more we will talk about later in the review so keep reading.

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