CES 2005 nForce4 SLI & Ultra: ASUS K8N4-E Deluxe & A8N-SLI Deluxe ++ ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 ++ DFI NF4 ++ MSI

Asus was at the Venetian showrooms this year, and their booth was stocked full of their various product lines. As far as motherboards went, we really didn’t see too much that was new, but there were a few interesting pieces of news. We have already done a full review of the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard, which you can read here. The above picture is of the Asus K8N4-E Deluxe motherboard based around the nForce4 chipset. This iteration shows the board as a 754-pin processor motherboard, though I think we’ll see a 939-pin version as well.

..Probably the most interesting thing I saw was a very early mock up of the new [ABIT] Fatal1ty AN8 motherboard based on the nForce4 Ultra chipset. The first board for the AMD platform that will sport the AN8 and the Fatal1ty name is going to be a single GPU motherboard with all the features that you would expect to find on an Abit or Fatal1ty product. That means lots of overclocking and tweaking options. Abit did tell us that they are planning on having an SLI board with the Fatal1ty name with it later on down the line. After all, there is no denying that for now the ultimate gaming machine would have to use dual NVIDIA graphics cards..

..DFI has also been raising eyebrows with their launch into the nForce4 SLI front. They have two separate products that they plan to bring to the market that both support dual graphics cards.. ..The second motherboard that DFI is releasing is actually an nForce4 Ultra chipset motherboard that DFI claims can support SLI graphics cards as well.

The two boards look nearly identical, with the NF4 Ultra board lacking the additional SATA controller and a few other minor things. While in single card mode, this board runs the first x16 connector at full x16 PCIe lanes, while in dual card mode, both the GPU slots are actually running at x2 lanes of PCI Express. While DFI’s reps are saying this does cause a very slight performance degradation of around 5%, I talked to a few graphics cards vendors that don’t see that as the case. Though none of them have tested the board, they think that a 15% difference is much more likely. As soon as I get one, you’ll know for sure.

No vendor’s booth would be complete without their SLI solution on display, so here is MSI’s.. ..First, if you look closely at the on-board audio on this motherboard, you’ll see that MSI has gone with a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! audio solution over any of the other competing products. The Live!-based chip offers full 24-bit audio quality. In my eyes, this gives MSI’s motherboard a huge advantage over the Asus and Gigabyte boards right off the bat, having not compared their performance or other features yet. In addition, though I couldn’t get a clear shot of the chip, MSI has included a Silicon Image 3132 chip that offers two channels of SATA2 support that runs off the PCI Express bus, not the PCI bus. MSI claims that this can give the users as much as a 20% increase in performance on storage. And without the additional storage chip on the PCI bus, the sound quality on the PCI-based Creative audio chip should be improved as well. ..MSI also told me about their plans for an nForce4 Ultra motherboard that would feature standard on-board audio, not the Creative chip, and would also leave the SATA2 Silicon Image chip off of it as well.

..Finally, we learned from MSI that they have scraped their VIA-based K8T890 motherboard projects completely due to the success of the nForce4 platform and that they were having problems getting chips. While this is very bad news for VIA, MSI did say they would rethink the projects once the new Pro version of the chipset was ready.

PCPerspective
CES 2005 - The PC Industry Gets a New Home