Looking further up the board you will find the voltage regulators with heatsinks
installed on the MOSFETs. Cooling these MOSFETs has proven to enhance stability
as well as provide higher overclocks on some NF4 boards.
Drive support on the motherboard consists of 4 SATA devices, which is native for
nForce4, and EVGA has fitted the board with 4 SATA ports. The SATA ports are
located just to the right of the NF4 chipset's heatsink. A number of nForce4
boards on the market come with 8, or even 10, but 4 should be plenty for most
personal applications.
Marvell 88E1111 Gbe PHY and Realtek
ALC850
Single on-board LAN is provided by a Marvell 88E1111 GbE PHY chip while
on-board sound is provided by a Realtek ALC850 CODEC which supports 7.1 surround
sound as well as A3D 1.0, and DirectSound. While I have no problem with the
ALC850 I would personally prefer Creative's onboard PCI audio solution which
offers better 7.1 channel high definition audio (24-bit /96KHz) support plus
Dolby Digital EX and EAX 4 HD for gaming.
Rear I/O Ports
Rear input/output ports include 4 USB 2.0 ports, 2 COM ports, a parallel
port, 6 jacks for the Realtek audio, and a RJ45 jack for the onboard LAN. An
IEEE 1394a Firewire port is missing as EGVA, for some reason, elected not to go
with Firewire capability on this board.
