BFG nForce 4 Ultra Motherboard

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
BFG
Mar. 22, 2006

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Bundle and Extras

While the BFG nForce4 Ultra is not a value board, it doesn't fall under the category of deluxe either. The accessories it comes with include everything the average user would need to get their system up and running, and not much more.

Flat ribbon cables are used for the two IDE cables and the floppy cable. I would like to see rounded cables in any board package, but these will certainly work. (I actually prefer ribbon cables to the fat rounded cables. - Ed)

Two SATA cables are included also to accommodate newer drives. There are four ports available on the board, but again, the average user probably won't have more than two drives in their setup. And even with only two cables, you can setup a stripe RAID array for added performance.

Still moving that old power supply from system to system? Then you're in luck! A power adapter is included to convert the four pin power into two SATA style power connectors.

Two USB ports are mounted on a bracket for a little more external connectivity. That will leave another four ports available on the board for the front-mounted port on your case or some other device.

An I/O shield is included as well as some CPU grease in case you are running low or your heatsink didn't come with any.

You get some useful software in the BFG nForce 4 Ultra bundle. A copy of Intervideo's WinDVD is included as well as a copy of Roxio Easy Media Creator Basic VCD. The WinDVD software is the full version software for DVD playback on your PC. The Roxio Media Creator is version 7 which is a full revision behind and it's also the VCD edition meaning you can create VCDs but not DVDs (as in DVD video). The software will work fine for standard data burning to DVDs, though. Roxio wants $100 for the current full version of their Media Creator software, so you can hardly blame BFG for not including it, regardless of whatever volume discount they may get.

There is also a driver disc and manual included with the BFG nForce 4 Ultra, although my driver disc was cracked and thus non-functional. I wasn't too worried about this as I could simply download drivers from their website, right? Wrong. Only BIOS updates are hosted on their main site. That's quite odd in my opinion although looking for their video card drivers reveals a similar situation; for video drivers BFG simply redirects to NVIDIA's website!

Well, I don't need video drivers so I called BFG tech support to find where I could download drivers for the board. BFG tech support is freely available 24/7, although I called at about 2pm on a weekday. I waited about 20 minutes on hold before getting a tech and when I asked about motherboard drivers I was promptly placed back on hold while he asked someone else. I was eventually told that I needed to go to bfggaming.com, register for an account (free) and then go to the downloads section and the driver would be there. First of all, it's quite odd to host your product drivers on the site where you post information about your hosted gaming servers. Second, I tried registering twice from two separate machines and email accounts and never got the registration confirmation email to activate the account so I still couldn't download the drivers.

Luckily, it turns out I really didn't need any drivers from BFG. Most motherboard companies that add components like a firewire controller will have to provide their own drivers. Since the BFG nForce4 Ultra sticks tightly to the NVIDIA reference hardware and doesn't have anything in the way of "extra' features, the NVIDIA forceware driver package included all the necessary drivers for chipset, sound, network, etc... Installing them will take care of all the devices on the board and you only need to worry about XP SP2 and any add-in cards such as video.

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Page 3 of 7

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Board Layout
Page 3: Bundle and Extras
Page 4: Test Setup and Synthetic Benchmarks
Page 5: Real-World Benchmarks
Page 6: Overclocking
Page 7: Conclusion

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