nForce4 is the second evolution of the Media Communications Processor (MCP)[citation needed] and incorporates both Northbridge and Southbridge on a single die (the first was nForce3).

Motherboards based on early revisions are mostly referred to as "nForce4-4x" (relating with their ability to handle HT speeds of 4x).

[4] Unlike its AMD Athlon 64 sibling, the Intel Edition is an older chipset as it has both a northbridge and southbridge.

This change in design was necessitated because, unlike the Athlon 64/Opteron, the Pentium 4 does not have an on-board memory controller thus requiring Nvidia to include one in the chipset like in older nForce2.

Also like Nvidia's older chipsets, the MCP and SPP communicate through a Hypertransport link, in this case only at (1.6 GB/s.

Attempting to boot an Intel Edition board with an 820 will cause it to shut down so as to avoid damaging the processor.

The nForce400/405/410/430 refer to nForce4 based southbridges which are used together with GeForce 6100/6150 series northbridges to form a chipset with integrated graphics.

Installing ActiveArmor can cause BSODs for users of certain software, especially peer-to-peer file sharing applications.

RME Audio, a maker of professional audio equipment, has stated that the latency of the PCI bus is unreliable and that the chipset's PCI Express interface can "hog" system data transfer resources when intense video card usage is occurring.