NVIDIA has been around making video card chips and motherboard chipsets for almost 10 years now. Best known for their video chips, NVIDIA a few years ago branched off into other areas including motherboard chipsets and consoles (XBox). nForce was NVIDIA's first foray into the motherboard chipset world, with NVIDIA having a lot of success in the AMD market place.

NVIDIA really came into its own with the nForce2 series of motherboard chipsets. This chipset became the most popular Athlon chipset on the market, beating the likes of VIA and SIS. NVIDIA subsequently released the nForce2 Ultra and nForce3 series of motherboard chipsets. The nForce3 was the first NVIDIA chipset to support the Athlon 64 series of CPUs from AMD. Last year NVIDIA released two new chipsets for the Athlon 64 platform, the nForce3 250Gb and the nForce4 series.

April of last year NVIDIA announced the Geforce 6800 Ultra, the high-end card based upon their NV40 chip. In September, NVIDIA announced that they would release a motherboard, which would give the capability of running the video cards in dual mode, nForce4 SLI. At the time, NVIDIA said they would have boards in retail, and in fact, the nForce4 SLI boards were the only AMD PCI Express boards to hit retail.