Related Articles

With relatively little fanfare, NVIDIA announced in August of 2005 that they had updated their nForce4 SLI chipset. Dubbed the "nForce4 SLI x16", the key feature of this new chipset was the addition of another 16 PCI-Express lanes, finally allowing SLI operation with both cards running in x16 mode. Before the existance of this chipset, SLI was achieved by splitting up the 16 lanes originally intended for a single PCI-E x16 slot into a set of two 8-laned x16 slots.

Even though it was available for both the Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 platforms, most hardware manufacturers seemed to stay hush-hush about the nForce4 SLI x16. Dell was really the only manufacturer that showed some enthusiasm right off the bat -- they immediately snatched the chipset up for inclusion in their flagship XPS gaming line of desktop PCs.

Since then, a number of manufacturers have picked up the chipset, and we're finally seeing some definitive products making it to the shelves. The first of those products was ASUSTek Computer's A8N32-SLI Deluxe, and we are happy to say that ASUS has kindly sent us a retail box sample of the board.

Let's see what this motherboard, and its chipset, have in store for us!