The new X16 SLI motherboards sound faster, but do they really make any difference, or is it simply a marketing ploy?

When NVIDIA released the nForce 4 chipset to the world, AMD fans rejoiced. It had higher performance than the previous VIA chipsets, had more features, and looked to be what nForce 2 was to the K7 platform. Later, nForce 4 proved to be so popular NVIDIA decided to let Intel users in on the action, and proved itself to be very competitive with Intel’s latest and greatest chipsets. The most recent version of the nForce 4 chipset is the nForce 4 SLI X16.



To understand what the SLI X16 is all about, we need to get educated on PCI Express. PCI Express is a motherboard connection that is set to take over the places of both AGP and PCI. It is faster, and there is always the possibility of even greater speed because of the way it works.

PCI Express works by using lanes, lanes are like “paths” to the chipset. Each one runs at 250MBps. Right now we have X1 and X16 ports on motherboards. Those numbers are how many lanes there are on that particular port. So, a X1 port will run at 250MBps while a X16 port will run at 4000MBps. For this article that is all you need to know, but if you want to know more about the PCI Express standard you can check out this Wikipedia page.