NVIDIA's reference board came in a standard ATX form factor found in the vast majority of motherboards today. The BTX form factor will be released very soon into the retail market, but ATX will probably be around for quite a while. The nForce4 for Intel supports all current Intel LGA-775 CPUs. This includes btw the new dual-core 840 that was recently announced, the 1066MHz FSB Extreme Edition CPUs and the 800MHz FSB Prescott CPUs. The reference board comes equipped with 4 240-pin DIMM (Dual In-line Memory Modules) slots. These support DDR2 memory up to the DDR2 667MHz standard, the highest announced DDR2 memory speed available.

The reference motherboard comes with a slew of expansion options. Two PCI Express X16 slots populate the motherboard, giving the option for SLI mode. Two PCI Express X1 slots allow you to install the newer PCI Express cards. If you use SLI, be aware that the video card cooler if it is a 2-slot design like the 6800 Ultra may take one of the PCI Express X1 slots up. Also present on the reference board is 2 regular PCI slots. Drive expansion on the reference board is varied as well. NVIDIA provided 4 SATA II ports, giving support for the next generation storage technologies the nForce4 chipset supports. Also present is an IDE port and a floppy disk drive port.

Onboard sound is provided by the standard NVIDIA sound CODEC. This offers support for 7.1 AC’97 based surround sound. I’m a bit disappointed that NVIDIA didn’t provide HDA (High Definition Audio) support on their first Intel chipset. The CODEC supports the various audio APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) like DirectSound, and EAX 2.0. Sound was adequate, but the competition has HDA sound on their chipset the replacement for the AC’97 standard.

The back panel I/O ports on the reference board are standard for a motherboard today. Present on the back panel are 4 USB 2.0 ports, a COM1 port, a parallel port, a PS/2 Mouse and Keyboard port, and SPDIF-Out ports make up the back panel. A retail board will have brackets to add up to the 10 USB ports supported by the chipset.