Nvidia NF4 Chipset Review :: nForce4 Features

There are five key elements that take the nForce4 platform to new levels and that is what we are going to talk about here in this press release/preview. The first is the introduction of PCI-X graphics to the AMD platform, but that's not all NVIDIA also will have their first SLI based systems to support dual-VGA cards that will shake the foundations of the gaming platform. We got to see first hand how well the new SLI feature worked and we were impressed to say the least as it topped the scores of any single card solution we have yet to see. Scores can be seen above the ten thousand barrier on 3Dmark 2003, which is quite impressive especially in light of the fact that the resolution was set to a whopping 1600X1200.

What is SLI? Well SLI is the blending of the power of two GPUs into one source, meaning two cards will be hooked together by a little bracket and be run as one card. How does that help? Well picture this; the cards both will take on the task of rendering graphics with the task of handling all these chores to be split between the two cards equaling more overall power. Each card will use 8 pipelines of its 16 to create one super fast 16 pipeline card that has twice the GPU power of any single solution currently available. The cards connect via an SLI bridge that will be custom made by each manufacture for their cards that enables the cards to be read in SLI mode. NVIDIA's research showed that two cards running at 8 pipelines each was the most coefficient way to get the maximum results.

The next feature that comes to the table is the new nTune features that helps to custom tailor or overclock your system. Depending on what applications you are running the system uses more or less system resources and with nTune you can control how your system functions. You can overclock the system for playing games or underclock it for running word or less system intensive programs and then create a custom setting that can be adjusted on the fly. For overclocking, nTune automatically tries to set the parameters of your system to their maximum capabilities and then creates a setting at the topmost stable settings. This can be a very handy tool for the beginner or expert who wants to quickly see what their system does without a lot of hassle. Remember though, results will vary depending on system specs and proper cooling, just the same as when you attempt overclocking manually.

Safety for your computer has become the forefront issue when people think or talk about the internet, but software firewalls usually have a high demand on system resources. This results in slower frame rates in games and lagging performance in programs like Photoshop and Auto-Cad, which frankly really stinks. NVIDIA has gone all out to enhance your systems performance as well as address the security issues in a better way than previously seen. Their Answer; ActiveArmor, a well designed and implemented networking utility that not only offers superior protection against, hackers, viruses and other would be invaders, it also uses about 70% less CPU power than Microsoft's own version of a watered down Firewall. The ActiveArmor works in conjunction with NVIDIA's Firewall, which has features of its own that also, offer the user amazing control over the network domain. Gamers and those hosting LAN parties will be the most impressed by the ability to block out unwanted users and custom configure their environment to their own satisfaction.

nVraid is NVIDIA's Windows based application used for monitoring and creating RAID arrays using hard drives based off the SATA or Serial ATA interface using the NF4 platform. nVraid offers many features that have yet to see light on the desktop platform and seeing hot-swappable drives on the desktop platform without a separate controller was pretty impressive. We watched as Peter first removed a hard drive from the system, then the system recognizing the drive was missing without stopping and finally replacing the drive back into the system, and all this while running in the Windows mode. RAID options are abundant and you can add new drives or change the way the RAID is configured on the fly. That's right, you can change a RAID 1 array into a RAID 0 array or vice versa on the fly, drives can also be added and integrated into the RAID using the nVraid tools Hot-Plug Array feature. Morphing is something we have yet to see done successfully in the desktop environment, but using the nVraid tool you can now see solid results.

You can also rebuild or delete a defunct array, which never really has worked well for me in past situations, but technically should have more potential for success than previous solutions. You can view which drives are being removed or attached using the NVIDIA Disk Alert System (DAS) and this is also part of the technology that allows hot swapping of system drives through the SATA channels on the NF4. Dual controller architecture provides two independent transfer paths to-and-from the system memory resulting in twice the bandwidth available to the disks. Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which was introduced by Intel, is fully supported by NVIDIA's MCP. If you are unfamiliar with how NCQ works, this feature is something that can only be found in native SATA hard drives that follow SATA II specifications. Unlike Legacy Command Queuing (LCQ), NCQ works by allowing a drive to process multiple commands at the same time. Maxtor has drives that allow this feature and others will follow you can be sure. For now no proof shows this feature to offer better performance, but in the future we may see more improvement.

Okay, it all sounds good on paper, but how well it performs is very important to us all so let us move on to the setup and then subsequent testing phase of this review.