Dual core Pentium D won't work on Nforce4-IE

ALTHOUGH NVIDIA took the AMD chipset market by storm, it took almost five years to see the first chipset for Intel. And yet, the Nforce4-SLI Intel Edition isn't perfectly compatible.

When the first batch of reference motherboards was run, journos were told that while reference boards do not support dual-core, the retail ones were supposed to fit "like a glove".

However, we have received several nForce4-SLI Intel Edition motherboards, and somewhat to our surprise, dual core has aroused mixed emotions.

While the Pentium XE 840 just flies on MSI's P4N Diamond and the GigaByte GA-8N-SLI, two other CPUs in the lab, the Pentium D 820 and 830, boot up and work with no problem but in single core mode.

At first, I thought I'd done something wrong, but plugging each CPU into GigaByte's GA-8I955X Royal resulted in both cores working with no problems at all.

We contacted Nvidia about this, and its Euro spinner came back with the answer that Nforce4-SLI Intel Edition supports Dual-Core Pentium CPU's only if they come from the Extreme Edition family, like the XE 840. Plain vanilla Pentium D support is in the same place as ATI chipset USB 2.0 speed.

But the thing is you won't know whether both cores work or not, since one core on Pentium D runs with Hyperthreading enabled. As Intel planned, if you own Extreme Edition CPU, you have four threads - both cores have Hyperthreading on. If you own Pentium D - you have two threads, in both cores, Hyperthreading is off.

But on the Nforce4-SLI-IE boards, Pentium D has two threads in Task Manager (one core, Hyperthreading on), and the second core isn't available for playing Solitaire, never mind some multithreaded app.

So, if you're in the market for affordable dual core systems, and would rather spend the difference between D840 and XE840 on, let's say... GeForce 7800GTX?, for now you'll have to avoid the Nforce4. Sadly. µ