The first new feature to talk about on NVIDIA's chipset is DualDDR2 support. This is NVIDIA's trademark for dual-channel DDR2 support; much like their nForce architecture had a DualDDR trademark. The Intel Pentium4 Extreme Edition CPU has a FSB of 1066MHz. This requires the CPU to have about 8.6GB of memory bandwidth for the CPU alone at peak usage. DDR2 at 667MHz provides a bandwidth of 10.6GB per second of memory bandwidth. In order for the CPU to operate most efficiently, dual-channel memory is required. NVIDIA's DualDDR2 is appreciably better than other solutions because it operates in dual channel (128-bit) mode all of the time. Some of the other solutions on the Intel platform operate at 64-bit or 128-bit memory interface.

NVIDIA was one of the first companies to include a hardware Firewall with their MCP (Media Communications Processor). Today, many worms and viruses are spread through networks. Computer security is an ever-increasing concern. Part of the solution is a Firewall. A Firewall determines what network data is allowed through the network of a computer. Microsoft Windows is known to have many security holes that malicious software can try to exploit. A Firewall can filter the network traffic based upon the packet type. There are several types of Firewall: Stateless Firewall, Stateful Firewall, Application Level Gateway and Firewall as Anti-Hacker Defense. Stateless Firewall only allows packets that match a permit condition through. A Statefull Firewall checks the packets at the beginning. After the initial packet is verified, an entry is added to a connection state tracking table. Future packets that match this entry can be verified against the table of permitted connections. An application-level gateway acts as a proxy server for each connection. NVIDIA's Firewall does not support application level gateways. Hackers can attack computers with an IP spoof causing DDoS attacks. NVIDIA's Firewall technology protects against this.

ActiveArmor is an integral complement of NVIDIA's Firewall protection scheme. It's a hardware-based secure networking engine. One of the benefits of ActiveArmor over other solutions is the reduced CPU utilization when activated. ActiveArmor is an instant-on application. As soon as the computer is turned on, it is protected. ActiveArmor provides a higher level of security compared to software based engines. ActiveArmor also fully supports the new Microsoft TCP Chimney Architecture. NVIDIA provides native support for Gigabit Ethernet with the nForce4 architecture.

SATA stands for Serial ATA (AT Attachment). The first implementation of SATA provided theoretical transfer rates of 150MB/ second. SATA II doubles that to provide up to 3GB/second of transfer. This compares quite favorably with the hdd transfer rates of 133MB/second on the most advanced IDE hard disk. The other advantages of SATA include Hot-plug support (unplug the hard disk while system is running), NCQ support (Native Command Queuing), and no need to share bandwidth with other drives on the interface. NVIDIA was the first motherboard company to support SATAII.

Media Shield is NVIDIA's trademark name for their Multi-disk techniques also known as nVRAID. NVIDIA's nForce4 for Intel supports RAID 5, RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 0+1. RAID 5 stripes data and distributes parity information and provides excellent error correction across three or more disk drives. RAID 0 stripes data across multiple drives allowing for increased performance due to the increased access times of two drives operating at 300MB/second. RAID 1 mirrors data across two or more drives. RAID 0+1 stripes and mirrors data across three or more drives.

nTune is NVIDIA’s automatic overclocking program. With this program you can benchmark and automatically tune the system, monitor the system, troubleshoot performance or create a bug log, get online support or update your BIOS from one easy to use application.