News Headlines
- Thu, Apr 25
- Fallout 4 next-gen upgrade goes live
- Mon, Apr 22
- Take-Two confirms more layoffs, cancelled projects by December 2024
- Wed, Apr 10
- Microsoft and NetEase to (re)launch core Blizzard games in China
- Fri, Mar 22
- Helldivers II already top-selling game of 2024 in US during launch month
- Tue, Mar 05
- Final Fantasy VII Rebirth tops UK charts during launch week
nForce 4 for Intel Overview
NVIDIA has gunned for the high end straight off the bat and will initially only offer the SLI SKU on the Intel front and will be compete with Intel's 925XE for the hearts and minds of the enthusiast community. NVIDIA will actually compete with the 955X also, Intel's upcoming chipset for their dual core processor line up as the nForce 4 for Intel supports dual core chips already. More on that later though.
nForce 4 for Intel in its full glory
With the memory controller integrated on the AMD K8 line up, NVIDIA moved to a single chip solution with their MCP unit instead of the traditional northbridge/southbridge pairing that is usually seen on other chipsets. The Pentium 4 still relies on the northbridge providing memory controller functionality however so NVIDIA has moved back to a SPP / MCP combination.
The nForce 4 SPP is an interesting unit. It provides 20 lanes of PCI Express and a dual DDR2 memory controller. According to NVIDIA there are no plans for a DDR1 controller so enthusiasts hoping for a cheaper migration path may have to reevaluate the finances. The SPP communicates with the processor through a 1066 Mhz front side bus and more interestingly, it connects to the MCP unit through HyperTransport, a first for an Intel based platform. The Intel MCH/ICH6R pairing in contrast uses a DMI link to connect the two pairs. Bandwidth for HyperTransport and DMI look the same with both providing 2GB/s worth of bandwidth. The advantage of a HyperTransport link for NVIDIA is likely ease of implementation.
The MCP is not all too different than what has been seen in the nForce 4 on the AMD side; there is the GbE with ActiveArmor, 3Gb/s Serial ATA, 10 USB2.0 ports, AC'97 7.1 Audio and the RAID feature that spans across both IDE and SATA. One addition that was introduced on the nForce Pro is RAID5 support. It will be making its way to the nForce 4 on the AMD side also in an upcoming driver update (and possibly to the nForce 3).
MCP close up