The 21st Century PC

NVIDIA nForce Chipset Preview

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

After meeting with representatives of NVIDIA earlier last week, I decided to write my findings and thoughts on the technology that will be behind the nForce power motherboards that you might see as soon as October. While some of this information may seem to be well known, there were many rumors circulating that the nForce chipset was having delays and that features were being dropped in order to meet deadlines. NVIDIA assured me that this was not the case, and the data they provided me with, and that I am sharing with you, is an assurance of that.

Our story starts off by NVIDIA showing us the status of the 20th century (read, old or current) PCs work. The majority of last generation PCs were mainly used for presentations, spreadsheets or word processing. Even things like email and the Internet do not require a lot of speed, bandwidth or optimization to run their best.

However, jobs of PCs for the 21st century are vastly different, and include video editing, 3D graphics, image processing, dolby digital audio and more on top of the standard word processing and Internet work. Home networking, DVD and MP3 playback and broadband connections all add in to the mix as well.

NVIDIA feels that for the vast majority of users, the motherboard chipsets have only acted as”glue” between the major system components, not fully utilizing them, and have not been helping to push those components to their limit. The nForce is hoping to change all that as a distributed processing architecture will many of the advanced devices being built into it.

Which brings us to the NVIDIA nForce Platform Processor Architecture (see image below). NVIDIA is making many claims for its first and flagship jump into the motherboard chipset market. That includes having five to ten times the performance of any other integrated PC graphics accelerator, having the industry’s highest performance broadband networking and the world’s most advanced 3D audio with real-time Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding. Can they back the claims? Read on to find out.

NVIDIA nForce Chipset Preview - Chipsets 15
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