Introduction

NVIDIA's success as a company is as much about timing as it is about technology. During the early days of the 3D revolution, one of the reasons for their success was execution and their impeccable timing with product releases. On the platform side, NVIDIA seized upon the opportunity in the AMD market with the nForce series of motherboards, most notably the nForce 2 and nForce 3 boards which were dear to many enthusiast hearts. Roughly six months ago, NVIDIA revealed their SLI technology and as soon as SLI capable motherboards started hitting the market in late December, it has been a resounding success amongst enthusiasts and power users. NVIDIA claims that 350,000 SLI units have been shipped this quarter. With AMD producing roughly 2 million K8 processors each quarter, that's about 17.5% of sales on the AMD side going after SLI, a pretty impressive feat. 30-35% of buyers who are buying SLI motherboards are also buying a pair of SLI cards which paints a pretty rosy picture for NVIDIA on both the chipset logic and the video front. The only problem with this picture is that SLI has been a NVIDIA AMD only affair thus far. Until now.

NVIDIA has always been eyeing the Intel market. Lest we forget, the Xbox is powered by an Intel processor, not an AMD so technically this is NVIDIA's second Intel chipset, just the first for the PC. One of the big sticking points previously was the licensing of the Pentium 4 bus which in NVIDIA's eyes were cost prohibitive. The issue became moot however in November when Intel and NVIDIA announced that they had an agreement to broadly cross license patents which in effect, gave NVIDIA the green light to finally pursue an Intel chipset without any sort of strings attached. A mere five months after the announcement is today's feature presentation, the nForce 4 for Intel, based around a variant of their nForce 4 SLI AMD board that we have looked at several times already.

There is a lot of common technology between the nForce 4 for AMD and the nForce 4 for Intel. Common features include the integrated GbE/hardware assisted firewall, a very complete storage controller that now also includes RAID5 support, and nTune. In the interest of spending more time on some of the features unique or changed on the Intel platform we will avoid repeating a lot of the material covered previously.