I’m impressed by NVIDIA’s first entry into the Intel chipset market. At the moment there is no other dual video card motherboard chipset available in this market except the Intel Turnwater chipset used primarily for the workstation market. In most instances the nForce4 for Intel SLI motherboard outperformed the 925XE board from Foxconn.

Feature-wise, the nForce4 for Intel SLI chipset is nearly unmatched in virtually every respect. When paired with 2 NVIDIA video cards in SLI mode, the motherboard has the ability to have higher performance than any other equivalent Intel system at the moment. The one area where NVIDIA needs to work on is their onboard audio, bring it up to the HDA standard or improve it and this chipset will be unmatched.

The downside of this chipset is that it’s tied to the Intel CPUs. An equivalent AMD platform with an nForce4 SLI and Athlon64 CPU will outperform this chipset with the fastest Intel CPU. If you have a Intel LGA-775 CPU or purchase such a CPU, this is the chipset for you. As we move further into 2005, I hope to see multiple video card chipsets from ATI, NVIDIA VIA and SIS for both the Intel and AMD markets.