nVidia's latest chipset for motherboards, the nForce4, is the most feature-rich chipset the company has produced thus far. It brings the long-awaited PCI-E (PCI Express) support for AMD processors as well as a host of other goodies, and is available in three flavours; the basic nForce4 for the value/mainstream market, the more advanced nForce4 Ultra for the enthusiast and the nForce4 SLI for the high-end enthusiast with its support for two SLI-capable graphics cards.

The basic nForce4 features a HyperTransport link of 800MHz and four SATA ports with single controllers supporting transfer rates of up to 1.5Gb/s bandwidth. Both the nForce4 Ultra and the nForce4 SLI have HyperTransport links of 1GHz and have dual SATA disk controllers capable of supporting transfer rates of 3Gb/s as well as hot swapping and NCQ (Native Command Queueing).

The first retail board we have seen is Gigabyte's GA-K8NXP-9, the flagship model of the range, which uses the nForce4 Ultra version of the chipset and is built around a Socket 939. It's crammed to gills with features.

As usual with Gigabyte boards it looks busy, but on closer inspection there is plenty of room around the components, and around the socket itself too, should you wish to use a larger than normal cooler for overclocking purposes. By the side of the socket sit the four DIMM slots which support up to 4GB of DDR400/333/266/200 memory.

A lot of thought has gone into the placement of the power and drive connectors which are all mounted on the board's edges in positions that are easy to run cables to.

Feature-wise, the board is crammed full. You get dual BIOS chips, a 16x PCI-E graphics slot, sitting above which are the two 1x PCI-E slots while below it are three standard PCI slots. There are three USB 2.0 headers on the board (for up to six ports) in addition to the four on the back I/O panel, plus two FireWire 2 (800MB/s) headers.

Gigabyte has equipped the board with dual Gigabit (10/100/1000Mbps) LAN adapters, one of which sits on the fast PCI-E bus while the other uses the standard PCI bus. These are the new versions of Gigabit Ethernet which now have an integrated hardware firewall; the first to do so, based around what nVidia calls 'Active Armour secure networking'. If this isn't enough for you, there's also a bundled 802.11g Wireless LAN card.

If you have a lot of drives, the GA-K8NXP-9 offers plenty of support for them. Aside from two ATA-133 ports there are also eight SATA ports, four controlled by the chipset, offering 3Gb/s transfer rates which can be set up in RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 1+0 (mirrored stripe) and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) arrays.

The second group of four are controlled by a Sillicon Image chip (1.5Gb/s) which supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1 or JBOD. A clever touch is the nVidia utility which allows RAID arrays to be constructed using both SATA and IDE drives.

The integrated Sound Storm controller of the nForce3 has gone but Gigabyte has used Realtek's ALC850 chip to provide the board with integrated 7.1-channel audio which uses the six programmable mini jacks and SPDIF in and out ports on the rear panel.

As normal with a Gigabyte board there's a host of software utilities provided, including Xpress Installation, Xpress Recovery, Smart FAN and EasyTune 5.

As befits a flagship board, Gigabyte's GA-K8NXP-9 is loaded with features, some of which - such as the SATA II support - offer a degree of future proofing. And with the nForce4 Ultra chipset it offers performance as well as stability.