Introduction

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.