nForce4: PCI Express and SLI for Athlon 64

Final Words

nVidia did quite a turnaround with the nForce3-250 chipset family back in April. The nF3-250 updated the much-criticized original nForce3-150 chipset and moved what had been the worst of the Athlon 64 chipsets to the front of the Athlon 64 pack. The plethora of new features that were introduced with nF3-250 have proven to be useful and reliable over the last six months. nVidia also navigated the move to Socket 939 in the nForce3 Ultra version without any glaring problems. The on-chip Ethernet, hardware Firewall, solid PCI/AGP lock, and "any-drive" SATA/IDE RAID have been well received in the market and remain as desirable today as they were 6 months ago.

It is not a surprise, then, given the massive updating that went into the nForce3-250 chipsets, to find the nForce4 more evolutionary than revolutionary. The new 4 name is certainly justified by the addition of PCI Express and SLI capabilities, but nForce4 is still underneath the excellent nForce3 Ultra chipset that we have come to trust. Except for PCIe and SLI, the new features generally refine those first seen in nForce3-250, and that is a good thing. The RAID controllers are now faster, more flexible, and even easier to manage than the last generation. The nTune Performance Configuration Utility does more, and does it better, than the previous utility, and 10 USB 2.0 ports must be better than 8. The performance also breaks no new ground, nor did we expect it to. The nForce3-250 was very fast and the nForce4 is just as fast, but not really any faster than the nF3 Ultra at this point.

The major new features, PCI Express and SLI, are the real sizzle here. It is difficult to argue with what appears to be a very successful move by nVidia to PCI Express, even if there is really no current performance advantage that we could find to a PCIe video card compared to the same card in AGP clothes. Certainly, the potential for better performance is there, and nForce4 certainly protects the end-user for a while longer from video card obsolescence.

However, nForce4 is exciting mostly because of the incredible performance potential of SLI, which combines two top nVidia video cards into a monster video performance engine. It's not for everybody - SLI is undeniably expensive - but the prospect of a 40% to 85% leap in the performance of the most demanding games that you can run today will be too much for some enthusiasts to resist. No, you don't absolutely need SLI, but it sure is cool! Consider nForce 4 an evolution and refinement of the progress that nVidia realized with the nForce3 Ultra, and that's a very good thing indeed.