NVIDIA nForce4 Chipset Preview @ Hot Hardware

NVIDIA is determined to earn back the favor of enthusiasts with an entirely new family of chipsets called the nForce4. And they’re not just regurgitations of old hardware either. No, these are the first products to support PCI Express’ serial link topology, instead of the aging PCI bus, amongst a host of other advancements.

…NVIDIA’s nForce4 chipset is exciting in several regards and disappointing in a couple. To begin, there’s no denying that the inclusion of PCI Express support is a much-needed boon for AMD. In fact, it can certainly be argued that NVIDIA’s own optimizations top Intel’s best work.

SLI is the big news, of course. The ability to support two of NVIDIA’s graphics cards is purportedly enabled by Intel’s E7525 workstation chipset and VIA claims that its upcoming K8T890 Pro will also work with two graphics cards; however, nForce4 is obviously NVIDIA’s platform of choice.

Then there are the storage features. It’s hard to imagine that 3 Gbps Serial ATA drives will do much for performance; that standard is most effective when multiple drives are connected to a port expander - a feature of Serial ATA II that nForce4 doesn’t support. But the combined effect of NVIDIA’s comprehensive RAID support, the troubleshooting features, and RAID morphing out-class any other chipset. The platform’s networking features are also impressive and the inclusion of an accelerated hardware firewall is a welcome addition for those who were already impressed with nForce3 250Gb’s super-fast networking controller.

Unfortunately, there’s still nothing in the way of tricked out audio. SoundStorm was an integral part of the nForce and nForce2 chipsets. It didn’t make a return with nForce3 and again, those who opt for nForce4 will have to do with standard AC’97. Then there’s the issue of integrated graphics, though the potential market for that feature has to be relatively small. Regardless, all told, the nForce 4 is an impressive offering to say the least, that will continue to drive NVIDIA’s presence in the mainstream chipset market moving forward. Motherboard OEMs are already lining boards up for us here in the testing queue. Stick around as we’ll have benchmark numbers from our reference system following here shortly as well.

NVIDIA nForce4 Chipset Preview @ Hot Hardware