X-bit labs

X-bit labs CeBIT 2005 Coverage: Day 1 (page 5)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/11/2005 | 01:38 PM ]

NVIDIA Corp: SLI Shipments Break Records, nForce4 Intel Edition Shows Up

At NVIDIA’s booth everyone is excited about the performance of the company’s Multi-GPU initiative: so far the firm has shipped about 350 thousand of NVIDIA nForce4 SLI media and communication processors (MCPs). According to the company’s probes, 80% of systems equipped with mainboards based on the nForce4 SLI actually featured two graphics cards. Furthermore, the most successful Multi-GPU configuration on the market is relatively expensive dual NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT setup, which was installed in the majority of the SLI-enabled systems, according to NVIDIA.

NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition core-logic chipset is NVIDIA’s forthcoming high-end product for Intel-based computers. The new platform processors are expected to feature a number of capabilities that will differentiate them from currently shipping Intel Pentium 4 chipsets and provide some additional performance.

Leading memory maker Corsair Memory indicated that its forthcoming DDR2 667MHz memory modules with extremely low latencies of CL3 2-2 can overclock to 800MHz without much hassles on NVIDIA’s nForce4 SLI Intel Edition reference platform. At the same time another top memory maker OCZ Technology said it could not achieve overclocking results higher than those on i925XE-powered platforms on NVIDIA’s reference nForce4 SLI Intel Edition, which may indicate certain peculiarities of NVIDIA’s new memory controller.

ABIT, ASUS, Biostar, DFI, ECS, EPoX, Foxconn, Gigabyte and MSI are expected to start selling the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition mainboards once the chipset is formally unveiled within the coming weeks.