NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition

It’s been a long time coming and fi nally NVIDIA have given life to the new ‘Crush 19’ chipset, which is now known as the wordy ‘nForce4 SLI Intel Edition’.

It’s been a long time coming and fi nally NVIDIA have given life to the new ‘Crush 19’ chipset, which is now known as the wordy ‘nForce4 SLI Intel Edition’, giving Pentium owners an nForce alternative and bringing with it the steaming SLI capability.

 NVIDIA has been particularly popular in the AMD paddock, with its nForce chip dominating the market for some time now. It has come a long way too, though recently the chip took a wildly confusing step backward by having the SoundStorm audio controller chomped out and replaced with a hugely disappointing AC’97 chip.

 The AMD and Intel solution, when compared, are not all that different. The major changes are the creation of a memory controller and the obvious support of a different processor. There are also some interesting additions such as ActiveArmour, NVIDIA’s newly CPU-independent fi rewall with a dedicated hardware engine for the integrated Gigabit Ethernet. The southbridge, known as the MCP (Media and Communications Processor), has had a face lift in the RAID department, with its four SATA ports now also sporting RAID 0+1 and RAID 5. It also now packs support for Native Command Queuing, which many new hard drives are beginning to use to speed access time.

 The memory controller is found within the new northbridge, dubbed the System Platform Processor, or SPP. NVIDIA had phased the northbridge out with AMD, as its primary use was no longer necessary. However, NVIDIA has brought it back to support Intel’s CPUs, due to their lack of an on-die memory controller – as is present on the Athlon 64 and FX-55.

 As a result, the memory controller is where we were expecting to see a performance difference. Considering it’s been developed by a third party, this is where a bottleneck can build up and where we expect NVIDIA focussed a lot of its resources.

 NVIDIA designed the chipset to only support DDR2 memory and is made up of two independent 64-bit controllers that can operate as a 128-bit controller in ‘ganged mode’ (no, you dirty people, it’s special-speak for dual-channel). It also supports up to 16GB of RAM by using 4GB non-ECC sticks in each of the DIMMS. Beastly, if you like having insane amounts of RAM – and who are we kidding? We tested with a Pentium 4 EE 3.73GHz, Athlon 64 3500+, two 512MB sticks of DDR2 675MHz, two 512MB sticks of DDR400 and two 6800 GTs running in SLI. Judging by the results, it’s apparent AMD won’t be giving away its trophy chipset with ease. Though the FX55 wasn’t available, the 3500+ managed to keep up with the P4EE much of the time.

 That said, it does pull away with some nice scores, though not as high as we’ve seen on Intel’s own 925XE chipset.

 It’s a decent result, but the AC’97 audio partially douses the excitement factor. On the other hand some ingenious companies are coming up with methods to include slightly better chips, such as the Creative Live 7.1 chip on the MSI K8N Diamond mobo.

 Next month, we’ll look at some fi nal retail nForce4 SLI Intel Edition mobos and see how they stack up in performance.

 Features will likely be, as usual, the biggest decision maker in choosing one particular motherboard over another.