Nvidia to present Intel Nforce 4 at IDF

NVIDIA IS preparing to launch its new Nforce 4 chipset for Intel. Just as our German friends suggested, there is a big implication that Nvidia chose Nforce 4 for Intel as the official name for its new chipset. The company will present it and show it to the world at the Intel Developer Forum, which starts this coming Tuesday.

This will be a high end chipset only, and will work in two possible configurations. It will work as a SLI where it will have two PCIe 8X ports working together, but it will be possible to make a board with just one 16X PCIe port. I believe that most will chose a SLI version of the board.

Nvidia chipset, codenamed C19 SLI, is teamed with its south bridge MCP04 chip supporting the Pentium 4 Socket 775 chipset with a 1066MHz front side bus (FSB). The chipset supports FSB 800 Pentiums as well.

The CPU is connected to the north bridge with Hypertransport working at 1066MHz. This is the first time that someone used this AMD-driven marchitecture for Intel platforms. The chipset only supports DDR 2, and it will drive DDR 2 memory to 667MHz. Memory wise it will be a direct competitor to Intel's next generation 945 chipset.

The C19SLI Northbridge allows you to have three PCIe 1X slots. The MCP04 south bridge is connected to the north bridge with an 800MHz Hypertransport link and will provide quite a lot of features. You will get four S-ATA II drive support, four IDE drive support, five PCI slots, 1 Gbit Ethernet Nvidia Active armour network with firewall, ten USB 2.0 slots and 7.1 Audio with SPDIF. Nvidia decided to use Azalia compatible audio, but its next Nvidia south bridge is suppose to bring the Sound Storm audio back.

Boards will also be demonstrated at CeBIT and the official launch is expected at that show. µ