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NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition Launched

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the coming-to-you-live-from-the-third-dimension dept.

Spinnerbait writes "NVIDIA took the wraps off their nForce 4 SLI chipset platform for Intel Processors today and there's a full review and showcase with benchmarks up at HotHardware. As with NVIDIA's AMD version of this chipset, motherboards based on the technology will support dual PCI Express graphics cards for load sharing in 3D Gaming applications. What's perhaps even more interesting is how the new NVIDIA memory controller actually allows the platform to out-pace Intel's own i925XE in virtually all of the benchmarks."

3 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. I heard that its isn't supposed to be as good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I remember reading on the Inquirer, that on a one on one comparison, the nForce Intel boards weren't able to keep up to the AMD ones, on more than just a processor basis. Was a few weeks ago though, so possible could have been fixed, i.e. driver probs

  2. RAID 5 by gallard · · Score: 5, Informative

    The one thing the Intel version has over the AMD version of this chipset is RAID 5 support. A RAID 5 controller card by itself is over 100 bucks. Dammit this is going to make me want to turn over to the dark side.

  3. Re:And what of... by pantherace · · Score: 4, Informative
    The Opteron/Nforce4 boards are still the only 16x/16x sli solutions available.

    I just double checked on Intel's website, and the best I could find was 8x/8x (3 x8 and 1 x4 PCI express slots (28 lanes total)) And with that it is not possible to have multiple x16 slots (Heck, it's impossible to have 1) (It's possible I missed a better one. I was looking in the server section.)

    The main reason that Tyan can do that is because of AMD's superior Hypertransport-based bus design in Opterons, over the shared bus favored by Intel. It's also the reason why Opteron scales a lot better than Xeon.

    The other reason Tyan can do that is that Nvidia realized how easy it would be to make very slightly different chipsets that facilitated that. Basically they are just Nforce 4 chipsets, that can operate in parallel, giving 40 Pci express lanes (2-way) or 80 PCI express lanes for a 4-way Opteron. (Note a maximum of 4 x16s, as the other 16 can only be a max of x4, due to the 20 lanes per nforce4)

    You can't do x16/x16 with any Intel Processor, as of now. (Though having seen how little x16/x4 or x16/x2 hurts benchmarks (vs standard x8/x8) I'm not convinced it's a big deal at all.)