Date:
Tuesday , April 05, 2005
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Google +1

NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition

NVIDIA today officially enters a new market. They will now be going head to head with Intel, building motherboard chipsets for Intel processors. NVIDIA comes out swinging firmly at the high end with an SLI chipset that looks to be very strong.

Introduction

I remember sitting in a hotel room a few years ago writing about NVIDIA’s first nForce motherboard chipset and having high hopes for it. It let many of us down, but not necessarily because it was bad technology, but rather because there were some not-so-solid business practices behind the sales of the chipset. NVIDIA's AMD based chipset business has been a rocky road over the years, but things have changed in the last year and NVIDIA is simply getting much more traction in the chipset market. Couple this with SiS and VIA vacating the high end retail motherboard space in the last few quarters and there is certainly room for NVIDIA expansion in what has already been a very nice percentage of overall market business.

Today it looks as though NVIDIA is applying a lot of their hard learned lessons to their new Intel based motherboard chipsets, officially dubbed the “NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition.” Some will complain on the nomenclature as they will undoubtedly say that it will likely dilute and somewhat confuse the current nForce 4 market, but suffice it to say that we are happy that they did not brand it the same as their video cards as another tech company has done.

Article Image

In order for NVIDIA to produce motherboard chipsets for Intel processors, NVIDIA of course has to pay Intel a licensing fee, normally a specific dollar amount per chip. This of course lines Intel’s pocket even if they lose an i925XE chipset sale to NVIDIA. Still though, and make no argument about it, Intel is inviting competition into a market place that they have basically owned for well over a year now. And it looks as though NVIDIA might possibly be positioned to give Intel a good bit of competition in terms of chipset performance as well as pricing and delivery. Only time will tell though.

Our NVIDIA Reference Motherboard

Keep in mind that this motherboard is a sample directly from NVIDIA and will be a product that you will never be able to buy in retail form. So all the testing you see here should be taken with a grain of salt. There have been countless times that sample motherboards from fabless technology companies have not truly represented retail product. It is always interesting to see if what shows up from ASUS, ABIT, and MSI is anything close to our sample motherboards.

That said, I have a very good feeling about this NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition motherboard. It has exhibited some very solid qualities and looks to be a platform that should be the basis of some great retail product. Again, only time will tell.

This sample came to us in an entirely prebuilt system lacking only an Intel processor, that was shipped separate. As we usually do for motherboard testing, we stripped out the motherboard, and in this case the Corsair XMS2-5400UL (675MHz) DDR2 Ram, and went to work. However for our SLI gaming evaluations we used the system as it was shipped with two GeForce 6800 GT video cards, except we overclocked them to Ultra speeds. Only a 24” box fan was needed to accomplish that.

Here are some shots of the motherboard and the chipset itself. Do notice that the chipset we are using is an engineering sample and not a retail sample, as we would see on production motherboards.

Article Image Article Image Article Image

From the pictures above you can see the codename of our new nForce 4 chipset which is “C19 SLI.”