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Soundstorm, I Hardly Knew Ye, I Bid You Adieu

One of the big features of the original nForce and the Xbox was Soundstorm. What made Soundstorm special was real time Dolby Digital encoding courtesy of the DSP on the MCP-T unit. With a backlash against Creative, Soundstorm was one of the few viable non-Creative solutions available to gamers. Unfortunately Soundstorm is officially dead for the foreseeable future. NVIDIA claimed that there was not enough interest either from the media (don't blame me I voted for Kang) or from the OEMs - there were not enough OEMs who wanted to pick up the more expensive MCP-T. All in all it was a business solution and it did not make sense for NVIDIA financially so it was axed. There is no conspiracy - it was not a licensing issue (Creative bought out Sensuara who provided a 3D Audio Algorithms to most third party sound manufacturers including NVIDIA). The nForce 4 will support 7.1 channel audio, there just will not be any DSP as with Soundstorm.

Pricing

Like with the GeForce 6 family, NVIDIA has set up a tiered pricing scheme for the nForce 4 series. The socket 754 based nForce 4 will be priced between 50-80$ which is slightly below the average price of a 250Gb board; the 939 Ultra will be in the 100-150$ range which is comparable to the cost of the Socket 939 250 ULTRA boards. SLI should be available for under 200$. This is getting to the upper end of motherboard pricing and is encroaching on Intel territory but considering the only other SLI capable board right now is Intel's Tumwater which requires Xeons and registered memory, this is a steal. For those who are not looking to move to PCIe yet, the release of the nForce 4 series will only help drive down the prices of the nForce 3 which remains a very viable upgrade solution for those still residing on slower P4s or Socket A.

Conclusions

The big news is that PCI Express is finally arriving on the AMD platform. The other news is that NVIDIA is doing it in style with three new chipsets in the nForce 4, the Ultra and the SLI. Socket 754 users will be stuck with just the nForce 4 losing out on the SATA 3Gb/s and ActiveArmor. The nForce 4 Ultra will give end users the full meal deal sans SLI. And of course we have the Nforce 4 SLI, adding SLI support for the GeForce 6 series and beyond, and potentially the overwhelming high performance chipset of choice for hardcore gamers.

NVIDIA has taken a deep bite out of the AMD market since they entered the core logic market and the nForce 4 should help them solidify their place in the K8 market which they already have a firm grasp on. I do not think that there will be many complaints from OEMs about the feature set of the nForce 4 as it seems that NVIDIA has all the bases covered including improvements to the disk controllers and a fuller implementation of their firewall beyond the PCIe slot. SLI looks like it is shaping up to be a must have feature for gamers - NVIDIA has basically single handedly pushed every other chipset manufacturer to follow in its wake and dictated the featureset needed to compete in this upcoming generation of motherboards. The other guys in the market, VIA, ALi, newcomer ATI have a large challenge ahead when trying to claim market share from NVIDIA as the nForce 4 seems to have all the bases covered from pricing to features.