Tom’s Hardware Guide Motherboards & RAM: NVIDIA Rushes Into PCI Express With nForce4 – SLI To Come!. A good early review of the new nForce4s. It is a tweak of the NForce3 that uses PCI Express for video cards. Actually, given that today’s graphics card don’t even push AGP at 8x, its not clear why, except for ego, you really need PCI Express running at 16x.
It means practically, the only reason is SLI. The ability to run two graphics cards together. So get the nForce3 now (best are the MSI Neo2 Platinum, DFI LanParty UT) with an AMD 3200+, Crucial 3200 Platinum Rev 2 memory and party on…
If you really want an SLI board, then here is what the big boys say that they’ll be around just about now. From mid November to early December, so it is probably best to wait. The SLI models are particularly cool. You can gang together two cheap cards (6600GTs) and get more than a 6800GTs worth of performance. Pretty cool to get the ASUS A8N-E or the MSI Neo4 EE both of which will have SLI versions.
Asus. Availability of nForce4 Ultra motherboards A8N-E (Premium/SLI): second week of November. Asus is considering bundling two GeForce 6600GT graphics cards with the A8N-E SLI.
Gigabyte. nForce4 Ultra motherboards will be ready at the beginning of November. nForce4 SLI and VIA K8T890 will not be available before the beginning of December. Product Name: Gigabyte 8 Sigma Series, e.g. GA-K8NXP-9 (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra)
MSI. The K8N Diamond (featuring nForce4 SLI) is already slated to hit the shelves in late November. The product name might be changed to K8N Neo2 Extreme Edition in the US. The K8N Neo4 Platinum will be the Ultra version, available two weeks earlier than the Diamond edition. It is supposed to be on the shelves by the middle of November.