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Introduction

When it rains, it pours. Those that reside in the Northwest or in the tropical climes can understand that age old adage. PCI Express (PCIe) has been one of the significant developments in consumer desktop graphics in the last year and will be slowly uprooting AGP as the interface of choice for high end graphics cards. Until now however, PCIe has only been available on Intel's 915 and 925x chipsets, but in the last few weeks there has been a monsoon-like series of announcements with every chipset company claiming to have PCIe support in product that will appear very soon.

NVIDIA has made quite the splash in the AMD market since the introduction of the original nForce for Socket A. The nForce 2 especially was the darling of Socket A enthusiasts around the world. nForce 3 150 for the Socket 754 was a bit more coolly received; a perceived lack of integrated features made many OEMs wary of picking it up. NVIDIA, never ones to sit idly back, hit back strong with the nForce 3 250Gb - quashing all the criticisms that dogged the 150 introducing features such as GbE, a hardware firewall and NVRAID. Since the introduction of the Athlon 64, NVIDIA has managed to gobble up 47% of the Athlon 64 chipset market.

Today NVIDIA looks to extend that lead with the introduction of the nForce 4 series comprising of not one, but three chipsets: the nForce 4 SLI, nForce 4 Ultra and the nForce 4.

Below is a chart comparing the feature sets of the three boards

The nForce 4 introduces a lot of features across the board. Socket 754 users do not have to fret as NVIDIA will support PCIe on Socket 754 with the regular nForce 4. Socket 939 is where things get a little more interesting and power users will want to opt for the Ultra or the SLI boards. Note that there is no AGP version of the nForce 4 - those who are not prepared to upgrade their videocards should stay put with the current nForce 3 250Gb or the K8T800 Pro. On that note, we'll immediately jump into SLI.