October 19, 2004 - NVIDIA today is unveiling its nForce 4 chipset, the newest in its family of motherboard controller solutions. The feature set contained therein is extremely impressive as you'll find out in the following preview.

We had time to check out a reference board recently and the tech demonstrations we witnessed showed us that everyone from the casual websurfer up to the hardcore system tweaker should find something to like here. In fact, a few of the nForce 4's most impressive features are geared towards saving system modders precious time tuning their systems, both in the initial setup as well as problem solving.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's cover the basics. The nForce 4 is a PCI-Express-based chipset supporting AMD Athlon 64, 64 FX and Sempron processors. Boards will come in three flavors with the "vanilla" nForce 4 being the mainstream board with Ultra and SLI boards accounting for the higher-end markets.


There are four major features that NVIDIA is pimping this time around, the first of which is SLI.

Scalable Link Interface

Scalable Link Interface, or SLI, has been talked about for some time now by NVIDIA and SLI-capable boards are finally about to hit the street, including the nForce 4. Some old-school readers may remember SLI back from the 3Dfx days (who NVIDIA ended up purchasing in late 2000), but NVIDIA's SLI differs from 3Dfx's in many ways.

Without getting into the technical details on that, which you probably already know if you care, the idea is the same; link up two identical cards and let them share the processing load. The best-case scenario is a two-times increase in framerate, though the early numbers we're seeing at this point vary widely from game to game and card to card. It's very likely that those numbers will increase as driver support becomes more refined, though they'll likely be shy of the 100% mark until 16x16 pipeline PCI-Express boards become available.

NVIDIA's SLI support uses 8x8 bus pipelines, splitting the 16 available for a single PCI-Express card into two symmetrical pipes. NVIDIA claims that some other chipset makers split them asymmetrically, say 12x4, which isn't as clean and speedy of a solution as its 8x8 support.

ActiveArmor

The second major feature is ActiveArmor, NVIDIA's hardware-accelerated firewall protection. Along with NVIDIA's own firewall software, ActiveArmor makes use of the nForce 4's Secure Networking Engine (SNE) to weed through incoming data packets and take a lot of the processing work off of the CPU.

While that may not sound like a big deal to some people, in reality your PC could be processing a ton of traffic at any given time. A good example of this would be at a large LAN party. Some gamers will shut off their firewall software in order to cut down on framerate hits, but that's really one of the last places you want to be turning off your firewall protection.