nForce4: PCI Express and SLI for Athlon 64

nTune: Performance Configuration Utility

While nVidia has provided configuration utilities with past nForce chipsets, their implementation was dependent on the manufacturer building the necessary hooks into the BIOS for the nForce board. In the new nForce4, nVidia has made a much stronger commitment to the Performance Configuration utility, which nVidia calls nTune. All 3 versions of the nF4 chipset, even the basic nForce4 value version, support nTune.

nTune provides performance configuration features - with as little or as much automation as you want.

The main menu has options for benchmarking, performance tuning, updating BIOS, monitoring the system, and managing profiles, which are configuration utilities that can be loaded when the system boots.

The Performance menu allows automatic tuning of the memory, disk performance, and graphics performance.

You can also benchmark these three areas and compare performance at various settings.

For those who prefer to dial their own settings, a click on the clock icon at the bottom of the main screen brings up the settings screen.

Here, you can check and/or adjust a variety of settings like the memory speed, PCI Express speed, memory timings, and GPU settings for core bus and memory bus. With the ability to save and load profiles at boot, these adjustments provide much more flexibility than the coolbits Registry tweak used by many enthusiasts.