Nvidia was quick to point out yesterday that motherboard maker Biostar has begun shipping a board based on its recently announced nForce 4 Ultra for Intel chipset. Nvidia announced the part mid-January, and its debut in retail comes a year after the first nForce Intel chipset - aka 'C19' - was granted PCI Express certification.

Biostar's TForce4U-775 has a PCI-E x16 slot for a graphics card, two more PCI-E x1 slots for other add-ins - there's no SLI support here - and three PCI slots. It has Nvidia's dual-channel DDR 2 SDRAM controller which can address up to 4GB of memory in four DIMM slots. The board supports Intel's P4 and Celeron D CPUs across either an 800MHz or 1066GHz frontside bus.

The board can take up to four 3Gbps Serial ATA drives with RAID 0, 1 and 5, and four parallel ATA peripherals. On the networking side, the chipset incorporates Nvidia's ActiveArmor hardware firewall and Gigabit Ethernet. Sound comes courtesy of an eight-channel Realtek ALC850 codec. There are four USB 2.0, with on-board connectors for two more.

The TForce4U-775 retails for under $100 - Nvidia nodded toward its availability at e-tailer newegg.com for $95. ®