X-bit labs

NVIDIA nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) Platform Review (page 9)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/13/2005 | 07:07 PM ]

Overclocking-Friendly Features

Contemporary Intel chipsets cannot be called the best overclocker’s choice, unfortunately. The owners of LGA775 mainboards based on i925/i915 chipsets can hardly increase the FSB frequency without facing some unpleasant problems. They owe these problems to the relatively “sensitive” arbitration block of Intel’s chipsets, which cannot work with certain combinations of the FSB and PCI Express busses frequencies.

Now that the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) based mainboards are coming, the Pentium 4 system owners can forget about their problems once and for all. Just like nForce4 based mainboards for Athlon 64 systems are known to support super-high working frequencies of the clock generator, the new nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) based mainboards will feel at home working with high FSB frequencies. The thing is that all nForce4 chipsets including the new Intel Edition ones feature a built-in clock generator that allows clocking all the busses in the system (FSB, PCI Express and PCI) absolutely asynchronously. At the same time, no arbitration problems arise.

Right now it is still too early to speak of the real overclocking potential of the mass mainboards built on the new nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) chipset. However, the results we obtained on the reference mainboard so far make us quite optimistic about it. This mainboard we had at our disposal allowed adjusting the FSB frequency from 200MHz to 700MHz with 1MHz increment.

Another overclocking-friendly advantage of nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) is the extreme flexibility of the memory controller that allows clocking DDR2 SDRAM at a great variety of frequencies. In other words, you have much more options than just a couple of the memory bus frequency dividers. For example, the reference board based on the new NVIDIA chipset allows setting the memory frequencies to any value between 400MHz and 900MHz with 10-20MHz increments.

Some enthusiastic users should be pleased to see nTune utility working just fine with the new NVIDIA nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) chipset. As you know from the older nForce3/nForce4 solutions, this utility boasts pretty rich features. Among its major functions we should certainly list the following:

• Hardware monitoring;
• FSB and PCI Express frequencies adjustable from the OS;
• Adjustable memory timings;
• Adjustable Vcore and Vmem;
• Fan rotation speeds control;
• System BIOS update, etc.