nForce4 Technology Overview @ Viper Lair

Now NVIDIA is gearing up to release their new nForce 4 chipset. Following with their tradition of adding at least a little something new to the mix, the nForce 4 chipset will be AMD’s first PCI Express chipset for the Athlon 64 family of CPU’s. Alongside the new PCI Express base of the nForce 4, other major features include that ability to use SLI with supporting NVIDIA graphics cards, a continuation of the built-in hardware firewall, methods to easily optimize the performance of your PC, and also methods for safely storing your electronic information. There are three versions of the nForce 4 that will be released.

…A couple of items some of you may have noticed that were not mentioned were DDR-II and SoundStorm. As it stands now, the memory controller is integrated into AMD’s CPUs, so until we see a change there, ALL motherboards for AMD’s Athlon FX/64 will be limited to DDR-I. Based on our reviews, this should not be a huge knock on AMD at the moment. SoundStorm was dropped with the nForce 3 because of the cost issue and return on investment. While we would like to see this feature come back, we wouldn’t hold our breath for it. For those of you who have AGP cards, unfortunently, you will not be able to carry them over to the new platform. Before tossing those cards aside though, keep in mind that the nForce 3 250Gb will still be supported by NVIDIA, and although some hardware features differ, the software will be cross platform, thus keeping the previous generation viable for the time being.

We think that NVIDIA has a pretty firm grasp on how to make good quality, stable, and high performing chipsets for the AMD platform. Some of the features that are going to be available with the nForce 4 chipset sound quite promising, including the dual disk controllers for the SATA drives, the ActiveArmor networking security, and the wealth of options afforded by the nTune software. If all of this technology turns out to function as well when it is transferred from paper to silicon and applied to real-world applications, I believe that the nForce 4 will be well worth a look when you are looking at your options in the future. While it will require that you purchase a couple of other high ticket items such as a new CPU and video card, it looks like it should be a solid platform on which to build a truly awesome system.

nForce 4 Technology Overview @ Viper Lair