nVidia To Release nForce4 Soon

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.theInquirer.net/?article=16874' target='_blank'>http://www.theInquirer.net/?article=16874</a><br /><br /></div><i>"NFORCE 4 will be the name of the project that will finally bring PCI Express to the Athlon K8 market. This chipset will be socket 754/939 ready and 940 compatible and all CPUs Athlon 64s, FX, Sempr0ns and Opterons will work on it. The platform will have one to two PCI express 16 slots making this Geforce 6800 SLI mode possible for not quite as much crazy money as you'll have to invest in Tumwater and Xeon CPU."</i><br /><br />The news comes in conjunction with the announcements about SLI support in the NV40 chip by nVidia yesterday. Due to be released later on this year (Q4 2004), this motherboard will be capable of supporting 64 bit AMD processors. It is unclear to me as to whether there will be an on board GeForce 6800, but I certainly hope so. Another piece of good news is that the nForce chipset will come with Sound Storm 2 support. I don't know if any of you installed nForce boards in your computers but I find them to be ideal boards for multimedia machines that I want to set up really quickly. nForce motherboards (for those of you that don't know) come with on-board graphics, sounds, network and USB support. This also helps in setting up small form factor machines as the number of additional cards to be installed in a machine is greatly reduced.

[Richard OKane]

I have one of these mobo with nForce on it and it is nice.
However beware if you install the MS drivers that are provided on Windows Update...it crashes the SoundStorm app on my box.

[Jason Dunn]

Awesome! I'm really leaning towards making my next box an nForce-based AMD rig.

However beware if you install the MS drivers that are provided on Windows Update...it crashes the SoundStorm app on my box.

Yeah, generally speaking it's best to avoid driver updates from Windows Update - get the critical patches and Windows OS-related updates, and apps such as Movie Maker, but go directly to the company that makes the hardware to get the drivers. Microsoft still hasn't quite figured out the driver distribution. :?

[Jason Dunn]

I'm 99% sure if will not have a GeForce 6800 on board - likely something closer in performance to a GeForce4 generation product, which 'aint half bad. But they'd never cannibalize their GPU sales by doing a high-end on-board part.

[Suhit Gupta]

I definitely avoid the driver updates from Windows Update in general. Usually best to go to the source unless there is some known issue. In fact, I don't think it is always localized to Windows Update either. I remember having problems with the up2date on Redhat Linux as well. I had a linux install with an nForce mobo and everytime I did an up2date on it, it would stop working with my Belkin KVM. I had to basically recompile the video driver by itself everytime.

Suhit

[Suhit Gupta]

I'm 99% sure if will not have a GeForce 6800 on board - likely something closer in performance to a GeForce4 generation product, which 'aint half bad. But they'd never cannibalize their GPU sales by doing a high-end on-board part.
I would tend to agree with you here beacuse they always go with the generation before the latest graphics chips for their nForce mobos.

Suhit