eVGA is one of the top manufacturers of NVIDIA video cards on the market today. If NVIDIA releases a new video chipset, eVGA is likely to have a video card based upon it. Founded 6 years ago (If you haven't yet, I would suggest entering eVGA's 6th Anniversary Scavanger Hunt with a lot of cool prizes including full SLI systems), eVGA is known for quality products, excellent service and their unique Step-Up program for video cards.

In any event, I digress. NVIDIA entered the motherboard chipset market in 2001 with the release of the nForce chipset. Today NVIDIA is the number one chipset manufacturer of AMD Athlon 64 motherboards. Late last year NVIDIA released the nForce4 SLI, the nForce4 Ultra and the nForce4 chipsets for the AMD platform. They've had a lot of success with this chipset, selling well over a million nForce4 SLI chipsets in the first fiscal quarter of 2006.nForce4 SLI motherboards tend to be the most feature-rich, highest performing motherboard chipsets on the market. eVGA started selling their own branded motherboards last year with the nForce3 250Gb series. Today, I have a preview of their new nForce4 motherboard.

The Board
The 133-K8-NF43-AX board is a standard ATX form-factor motherboard. Sporting the nForce4 chipset, this board supports all current Socket 939 CPUs from AMD including the dual-core CPUs, the FX CPUs and the Athlon 64 CPUs.. eVGA provides plenty of space around the CPU Socket for after-market cooling system. eVGA outfits the board with 4 184-pin DIMM slots providing support for up to 4GB of unbuffered non-ECC DDR400 memory.

      CPU Socket                        Memory Slots

Expansion on the board is rather interesting. There are not one, not two, but three PCI Express long slots on the motherboard, 2 PCI Express x8 slots and a PCI Express x16 slot in the middle. nForce4 does not support SLI mode officially, however, eVGA decided to include several PCI Express x1 slots on the board. I'll cover the reason why a little later in this preview. Other expansion on this motherboard includes 3 PCI 2.3 slots, providing support for legacy PCI devices and a PCI Express x1 slot above the PCI Express x8 slot.

                          
      Exp. Slots                      PCIe x1 slot+EZ Plug             PCI Slots                 PCIe x16 Slot 1

Drive support on the eVGA motherboard is robust, as you'd expect from an nForce4 motherboard. nForce4 supports 4 SATA devices natively and eVGA outfits the board with 4 SATA ports. Personally, 4 SATA drives is enough for my uses. Some manufacturers put 10 ports on their boards, but that seems a bit nuts as no case I've seen has 10 drives bays or even close to that many. IDE drive support is provided by 2 IDE ports and a floppy drive connector.

eVGA includes a Realtek ALC850 CODEC for the on-board sound on the board. NVIDIA has not announced support for the HDA standard as of yet on their motherboards. The 850 supports 7.1 surround sound and is a decent on-board solution for audio. 850 supports EAX 1.0 and 2.0 (Unfortunately, Creative Labs has not licensed EAX 3.0 or 4.0 HD out to other manufacturers. The Realtek CODEC also supports A3D 1.0, and DirectSound. For the audiophile in me, I prefer a HDA solution.


I/O

Rear input/output ports on the nForce4 motherboard from eVGA include 4 USB 2.0 ports, 2 COM ports, a parallel port, 6 jacks for the Realtek audio and a RJ45 jack for the onboard LAN. eVGA provides a Marvell 88E1111Gigabit Ethernet PHY for the onboard LAN. I don't have the retail package as of yet, so am unsure as to what accessories and bundle the motherboard will come with.