MSI and Asus Nforce 4 boards

El_MUERkO

MSI

We are proud to share one of the first pictures of MSI Nforce 4 motherboard. You will notice that board has only one chip covered with active cooler, PCIe 16X slot and two PCIe 1X slots, four PCI slots where one is possibly 266 MB/s fast, four memory slots, marvels eight SATA ports four of them controlled or helped by silicon image chip. The board still has two IDE channels and a floppy connector. A Via chip in front of PCIe 16X slot was one of the things that created a nice smile on my face. What an irony.

What you simply can not miss on this motherboard is its yellow socket. Well enough of talk, see for yourself.

Asus A8N-E

Asus decided to cool its Nforce 4 chipset by passive means, and this is also Nforce 4 Ultra version just like the MSI board. We are sure it's not Nforce 4 SLI since it has only one PCIe 16X graphic slot. As you possibly know Nforce 4 SLI will have two graphic PCIe slots possibly working at 8X each.

You will find three PCIe 1X slots then PCIe 16X slot in the middle and three PCI lots from its left side. I have to say that ATX connector is quite strangely placed close to first PCI-e 1X slot close to its 12V four pin power brother.

I noticed eight S-ATA slots and four of them are controlled through a Silicon Image chip while four have been taken care of by Nforce 4. You will still find legacy floppy and IDE connectors and just below them four memory slots.

This small tin box and golden connector indicates that this motherboard has wireless LAN integrated. We can add that board has USB 2.0, LAN card likely 1 Gb Nvidia one and audio stuff.

Here is that picture.

YUM YUM

grimloch

very nice, i wonder how much one of those would set you back