No SoundStorm For nForce4 - Too Expensive

MANY OF you have asked us about the sound capabilities of Nforce 4 chipsets. We can now confirm that Nforce 4 won’t have Dolby digital compliant Sound Storm support. We are informed that it’s simply too expensive to pay the hefty licence fee to Dolby Labs. If they included a Dolby chip inside, that would make Nvidia’s chips too expensive and, worst of all, non competitive with Via, ATI and SIS chipsets. It doesn’t want that as Nforce is something that makes it good money and boosts its good name. The Nforce brand is tres populaire these days, in some circles.

However, and you cannot call it a but, it’s a however, Nvidia will have AC97 support but you might need an external chip for that. You can expect 5.1 support and even 7.1 support and I believe that many of the boards will end up with Realtek or even Via sound chips.

Sound Storm was excluded from Nforce 3 150 and Nforce 3 250 Gb as well and NVDA didn’t give us any good explanation why, but as we said it’s too expensive to license it and it certainly takes quite a large portion of chip.

Nvidia wants to make a big market "noise" about its "superb" network support and its "firewall", but we somehow get the feeling that people care more about audio than about the famous NICs.

No Sound Storm expected in Nforce 4
A Dolby licence is very expensive@ the Inquirer