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Introduction

The nForce 4 has been very successful since it has hit the market in December and for good reason - it is the only widely available PCIe solution available on the K8 platform. VIA, SiS and ATI all have some boards out but they are far and few between compared to the gamut of both the nForce 4 SLI and the nForce 4 Ultra. While we have taken a look at a couple of the cheaper K8T890 boards, both the Soltek SL-K890 and the Gigabyte, put up some good numbers versus the nForce 4 boards both of them were decidedly barebone as far as the feature set goes. NVIDIA has most of the bases covered on a well designed MCP unit with GbE and a hardware firewall and an up to date disk controller. VIA, NVIDIA's biggest competitor on the AMD side at this point, falls flat with the southbridge unit on current K8T890 boards which has features more akin to what was seen in first generation K8 boards.

Today will be the first time where we take a peek at a lower cost nForce 4 Ultra board with Chaintech's VNF4 Ultra Zenith as the test subject. It has been a while since we last looked at a Chaintech board and that was the 7NJS Ultra Zenith which garnered praise for using a C-Media audio codec and the now infamous LanParty approach with a lot of extras aimed at enthusiasts. The Ultra Zenith however is aimed towards the more mainstream power user with a decidedly barebones approach. Let's see how it makes out.