Other Comments

There were a few more tidbits of information that may be of interest that just has not come up in the right place as of yet.

• The nForce 4 for Intel does support the upcoming Intel dual core chips BUT it is dependent on the manufacturer of the board. Apparently there was some miscommunication between Intel and some board partners regarding the specifications of the dual core chips and not every board will be compatible and it does not sound like that a simple BIOS update will fix this. For those thinking of migrating to dual cores this is something that must be checked before a board purchase.
• Azalia is not supported because OEMs do not want it. OEMs feel that the cost of implementation is too high and most users who care enough about sound will get an aftermarket solution. For those that always complain about onboard sound quality, this is your cue to start making some more noise for better implementations of onboard sound and integrated codecs
• On the Longhorn front, Firewall acceleration will be extended to ALL firewall applications, not just the NV firewall so conceivably, Zonealarm or whatever end users prefer then will receive the benefits of TCP offloading through the MCP
• nTune will go through a make over in May and nTune 2.5 which we have not covered in this preview is supposed to be a lot more user friendly with an application profile scheme much like game profiles in the Forceware drivers
• NVIDIA Intel lineup will extend to notebooks, media PCs, commercial PCs, servers and workstations in the future
• Pricing for Intel SLI boards will be higher initially but is expected to fall to current AMD SLI levels shortly

Conclusions

NVIDIA has been quoted in the past that their biggest competitor in the computer industry is Intel and the results of the nForce 4 for Intel speaks volumes about why they should be confident that they can go after Intel successfully. Eventually the moniker 'for Intel' will be dropped and the nForce 4 will be marketed on its own merits as a platform. NVIDIA's stated goal is to have people think of nForce as a platform to build around rather than having the processor as the central component. Most of the magic seems to be the result of a great engineering effort on the SPP unit and shows that NVIDIA has not forgotten about the ingredients of efficient memory controller and is dominant against the 925XE northbridge from Intel especially in gaming. The MCP unit is no slouch either and is very competive against the ICH6R from Intel with the only real weakness being the AC97 audio. ActiveArmor and the NVIDIA firewall should be welcome features for the end user and it will likely remain to be an NVIDIA exclusive for some time.

The biggest news of course is the most obvious and that is the availability of SLI on the Intel side. For those that are interested in SLI there should be few surprises as the results shown today differ very little from our previous experience with SLI. There are a few kinks that need to be worked out but with more graphically intensive games coming out of the pipe, the benefits of SLI should be fairly obvious. The case is less clear cut with older titles or ones that utilize some funny rendering tricks. SLI does not automatically make Intel the top choice for gamers but it does provide an alternative for the discerning power user who is for whatever reason unhappy with AMD. NVIDIA has certainly made a splash with their debut on the Intel side with a solid product.