nForce4 Ultra is the latest chipset for Athlon 64 processors and PCI Express support. It comes with four Serial ATA ports now, supporting 3 Gb/s transfer speed and command queuing, which allows for reordering commands in order to boost performance.
It is still a single-chip solution, making it more energy-efficient than nForce4 Intel Edition, which consists of two chips due to the DDR2 memory controller that is part of the Northbridge.
We used the standard nForce4 Ultra chipset. There is the SLI version with dual graphics option around, but this does not make a difference in terms of power consumption as long as it is equipped with a single graphics card. Two cards will of course accelerate energy consumption quite a bit.
Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
