Introduction

Having a very strong relationship with NVIDIA and their chipset department, and being the largest Tier 1 motherboard manufacturer in the world, it is no surprise that the first NVIDIA C19 nForce4 SLI Intel Edition motherbard we are reviewing is from Asus.  The chipset was released just one month ago and getting a retail product ready in such short notice is quite a feat in its own right.  Asus has never been a slouch when it comes to get quality motherboard out to the enthusiast, so it's no surprise they have a retail board for us so quickly.

The C19 chipset has a few drawbacks to it that may hinder many of the motherboard manufacturer's early attempts at selling boards by being an Intel platform chipset. While that may sound like a knock on Intel's parts, it really means that the enthusiast community has been strongly drawn to the Athlon 64 platform by its performance lead in gaming applications, and thus selling Intel motherboards to the enthusiast had become somewhat more difficult.  Another hurdle C19 manufacturers need to jump over is that it's NOT an Intel chipset.  While NVIDIA has become the dominant chipset vendor in the AMD market with their nForce brand, Intel still is very much in command of their own chipset destiny.  It would really take a spectacular chipset product from NVIDIA to even hope of creeping up on Intel's territory. 

Specifications (from Asus.com)