NVIDIA nTune

And of final note is the nTune software that will be available on the nForce 4. nTune allows you to easily optimize the performance of your system through a number of different paths. The nTune software allows you to create profiles for the types of tasks you are doing with your PC, which means that you can create a hardware profile for gaming, and another one for writing word documents or watching DVDs. Each of these hardware profiles will adjust your system performance so that it is at an optimal level for each of these tasks.

Also available is the ability to have the nTune software benchmark your system and automatically tune your settings based on the results of the benchmark. While I can see this as being a useful feature for the average computer user who just wants to get a little extra out of his system, or a casual gamer who wishes the same but doesn't want to go through and play with all the settings manually, I don't know that it will be of great use to computer enthusiasts. My reasoning for this is based on other such software that has been available, and also due to the way that NVIDIA has to have this software set up. First of all, one such similar software application as this that comes to mind is the ATI Overdrive technology. Using this, you can allow your video card drivers to automatically adjust the GPU core speed based on the temperature of the GPU core. While this gives a slight boost in performance, most enthusiast will realize that their GPU is capable of running at much higher speeds and remain stable, and as such, I'm sure that few enthusiast actually make use of this technology. NVIDIA has to make sure that they don't push a system too far with this software, because if system components started to overheat and die because a user used the nTune software, there would be a lot of angry consumers and this would most likely end up causing NVIDIA quite a bit of money to remedy.

By the same token, using the nTune software, NVIDIA does take a lot of the guess work out of tweaking, and while we're certain enthusiasts will want to do things manually, the software does do optimizations that a user normally may not think about, such as tweaking the MCP registry settings. NVIDIA claims that 90% of optimizations can be done via their software, so what else can it do?

The nTune software allows you to alter in real time settings pertaining to your GPU, CPU, MCP, RAM, Voltage, and system fans. Using this, you can overclock your CPU, GPU and set memory and system bus timings just as easily as you can use software like Powerstrip to overclock your video card. Simply drag the sliders, select a few options, and press apply. The software gives recommendations as to what you should set the various settings to, and uses a database of thousands of possible configurations to, if nothing else, give you a reference point on where to start tweaking. The built-in monitoring functionality also allows you to keep track of temperatures, speeds, and voltages that have been applied using the software to make sure that nothing gets out of hand.

One of the features of the nTune software that is stated is called Safe State Recovery. Safe State Recovery is all about pushing the system to the limits, and if a reboot happens restoring things back to working order. This works much the same way as MSI's CoreCenter and ABIT's µGuru software, except a little more advanced.

To better explain the above, think of it this way. Traditional overclocking by nature requires a user to edit a BIOS setting one at a time (at least, that is how it should be done). Once the desired tweaks are done, your PC is in an overclocked state from the get go. Now honestly, for the POST process and loading of Windows, do you really need the maximum OC? That is of course assuming you found the right settings. In the cases of a bad overclock, there is a strong chance of corrupting system files, forcing a possible repair or reinstall of the OS and repeating the whole process. Since the software is Windows based, the overclocked settings only kick in once Windows loads. If the system cannot handle the OC, it reverts to a stable setting, which is the whole point of the nTune tweaks.

Profiles can be setup in the nTune software as well. Just like the question posed earlier, do you need your maximum overclock and fans blazing at full speed when surfing the Internet? Likely not, and the nTune software allows you to setup a "quiet" mode for these tasks. At the same time, a profile can be set where fans can spin up when the CPU reaches a certain temperature.

System monitoring, the troubleshooting log, and the BIOS flash utility are all unique to NVIDIA and although individual apps might be able to do the same work, those other apps are not as extensive, nor as inclusive (and safe) as what they've built into nTune.

Once again though, this is all based on white papers and discussions with NVIDIA and I have no idea how well it works. We will have to wait until we are sent a review unit to actually test these features.

Board Partners

It's safe to say that you can expect boards from the usual suspects such as MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte and others. Basically, if they offered the nForce 3 250Gb, you should see nForce 4 models. While we're still waiting for official release dates, MSI has gone on record as saying they'll have products out by mid-November. Pictured above is a working sample of MSI's SLI K8N Diamond board.

Final Words

A couple of items some of you may have noticed that were not mentioned were DDR-II and SoundStorm. As it stands now, the memory controller is integrated into AMD's CPUs, so until we see a change there, ALL motherboards for AMD's Athlon FX/64 will be limited to DDR-I. Based on our reviews, this should not be a huge knock on AMD at the moment. SoundStorm was dropped with the nForce 3 because of the cost issue and return on investment. While we would like to see this feature come back, we wouldn't hold our breath for it. For those of you who have AGP cards, unfortunently, you will not be able to carry them over to the new platform. Before tossing those cards aside though, keep in mind that the nForce 3 250Gb will still be supported by NVIDIA, and although some hardware features differ, the software will be cross platform, thus keeping the previous generation viable for the time being.

We think that NVIDIA has a pretty firm grasp on how to make good quality, stable, and high performing chipsets for the AMD platform. Some of the features that are going to be available with the nForce 4 chipset sound quite promising, including the dual disk controllers for the SATA drives, the ActiveArmor networking security, and the wealth of options afforded by the nTune software. If all of this technology turns out to function as well when it is transferred from paper to silicon and applied to real-world applications, I believe that the nForce 4 will be well worth a look when you are looking at your options in the future. While it will require that you purchase a couple of other high ticket items such as a new CPU and video card, it looks like it should be a solid platform on which to build a truly awesome system.