nForce 400 Series

The C51 MCPs are a little less exciting since they are basically derivatives of the already well-known nForce4 family of chipsets. The nForce 410 and 430 look very much like scaled down nForce4 Ultra parts as they both have support for NVIDIA's MediaShield, SATA II (300MB/s) with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and RAID support. However, there are subtle differences between the nForce 430 from the nForce 410. The nForce 430 will feature four SATA II ports with support for RAID levels 0,1, 0+1 and 5, while the nForce 410 will only come with two SATA II ports and basic array creation of RAID 0 and 1.


Another differentiating factor between the two chipsets is their networking support. The higher end nForce 430 will have full Gigabit Ethernet and NVIDIA ActiveArmor firewall support while the nForce 410 has a basic Fast Ethernet MAC and no built-in firewall.

The good news is that the nForce 400 series now offers Azalia audio support in conjunction with regular AC'97, which means that integrated AMD platform will be getting HD Audio when the chipset is paired with a corresponding HD CODEC such as Realtek's ALC880. This would again reduce the total ownership cost of having a C51 system since users are actually get powerful 6 or 8-channel audio capabilities without requiring a discreet sound card to power their home entertainment systems.