Introduction
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S/PDIF
S/PDIF is a standard audio file transfer format that transfers digital
audio signals to a device without having to be converted first to an
analog format. This prevents the quality of the audio signal from
degrading whenever it is converted to analog. S/PDIF is usually
found on digital audio equipment such as a DAT machine or audio
processing device. The S/PDIF connector on the system board sends
surround sound and 3D audio signal outputs to amplifiers and
speakers and to digital recording devices like CD recorders.
Serial ATA Interface
Serial ATA is a storage interface that is compliant with SATA 1.0
specification. nForce4 SLI and nForce4 Ultra support 4 Serial ATA
ports with speed of up to 3Gb/s which is twice as fast as the
standard 1.5Gb/s speed supported by Silicon Image that controls
another 4 Serial ATA por ts. Serial ATA it improves hard drive
performance faster than the standard parallel ATA whose data
transfer rate is 100MB/s.
RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk)
The NVIDIA nForce4 chipset supports NVIDIA RAID that allows
RAID arrays spanning across 4 Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drives. It
supports RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1.
The Silicon Image Sil 3114 chip (for “DR” models only) allows
configuring RAID on another 4 Serial ATA ports. It supports RAID
0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5.
IEEE 1394 Interface
IEEE 1394 is fully compliant with the 1394 OHCI (Open Host
Controller Interface) 1.1 specification. It supports up to 63 devices
that can run simultaneously on a system. 1394 is a fast external bus
standard that supports data transfer rates of up to 400Mbps. In
addition to its high speed, it also supports isochronous data transfer
which is ideal for video devices that need to transfer high levels of
data in real-time. 1394 suppor ts both Plug-and-Play and hot
plugging.
