It's sometimes easy to forget how far we've come in computer equipment since the introduction of the x86 architecture way back in 1978. Names like ATI, NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft and Intel did not exist at the time, or they were small companies just starting out. Founded in 1974 Foxconn began to produce plastic products. They introduced their first PC part in 1996. Today, they are the largest manufacturer of connectors for use in PCs in Taiwan. Their market capitalization is over $6 billion USD, making them a bigger company in market cap than NVIDIA or ATI.
NVIDIA announced their nForce4 chipset late last year to coincide with the first PCI Express motherboards for the AMD Athlon 64 platform. The nForce4 came in three flavors, the nForce4, and the nForce4 Ultra and the finally the nForce4 SLI. Much attention was placed on the nForce4 SLI boards, and rightly so. The opportunity to double your graphics card performance by adding a video card to an existing system is a dream that many enthusiasts have embraced since the days of 3dfx. Foxconn tends to release products based upon available chipsets from a variety of manufacturers including SIS, NVIDIA, Intel, and VIA. With the announcement of NVIDIA's nForce4, Foxconn has released three different models of this chipset, the CK804K8MA-KRS, the NF4K8MC-ERS the NF4K8MC-RS, and the NF4UK8AA-8EKRS, which uses the Ultra chipset. They have not announced a SLI board as of yet, but the boards are differentiated by the onboard sound (5.1 or 7.1), number of SATA ports or number of onboard IEEE1394 ports.
