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Introduction
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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 is a storage interface
that is compliant with SATA 1.0
specification. nForce4 SLI supports 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 ports. Serial ATA it improves hard drive
performance faster than the standard parallel ATA whose data
transfer rate is 100MB/s.
The NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset supports NVIDIA RAID
(Redundant Array of Independent Disk) that allows RAID
arrays spanning across 4 Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drives.
It supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD.
The Silicon Image Sil 3114 chip (LANPARTY UT NF4
SLI-DR Venus only) allows configuring RAID on another 4
Serial ATA ports. It supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID
0+1 and RAID 5.
The Vitesse VSC8201 Gigabit Phy and Marvell 88E8001
Gigabit PCI support up to 1Gbps.
