SUMMARY: When nVidia first launched their dual graphics platform, it initially come under some scrutiny for only offering two 8x PCI-E ports. Many months later nVidia announced their nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset which offers two full speed PCI-E slots, each with 16 lanes. Today we've got a very exclusive look at the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. We closely examine the performance of the two different PCI Express port lane configurations to determine if it's actually worth upgrading to the new chipset or not!
nVidia’s nForce 4 SLI X16 is the latest variant of the nForce 4 chipset series to hit the market, offering full speed SLI – that is, two full bandwidth 16 lane PCI Express graphics slots instead of the regular 8 lane slots which we had to sacrifice if we wanted to use SLI.
From what we were told when we were briefed on the SLI X16 chipset a couple months ago, nVidia didn’t plan on releasing the new core logic so soon. From what we understand, Dell put a little pressure on nVidia to come up with a full speed SLI solution for use in Dell’s new performance PC, the XPS 600 – Dell’s first system to use nVidia core logic over Intel. If it wasn’t for Dell, we might not have seen this chipset from nVidia for another 12 – 18 months since it’s questionable if we even need full speed PCI Express graphics slots at this stage.
Just because there isn’t some big NDA or a huge marketing campaign, it doesn’t mean we don’t want to know about it and thanks to our good friends over at ASUS, we are going to be having a look at their latest motherboard exclusively here at TweakTown.
This article won’t be so much of a motherboard review but a direct comparison of the nForce 4 SLI (two 8x PCI Express slots) and nForce 4 SLI X16 (two 16x PCI Express slots in terms of graphics card performance with a pair of GeForce 7800 GTX’s.
