While Intel continues to release chipsets with integrated video for the Pentium 4 platform, the activity on the AMD front has been quite low. We do have chipsets from ATI and VIA with integrated video for the AMD platform but its mostly nVidia that you think about when buying a motherboard for your AMD processor.
Now nVidia did have an integrated chipset for the AMD platform back in the days on AthlonXP with the nForce2 IGP however, the sales on AthlonXP have pretty much halted and AMD has the Athlon64 and Sempron on the forefront now. That changes today as nVidia unveils their new nForce 410 and 430 chipsets with the integrated GeForce 6100 and 6150 GPUs. We don’t have the actual boards with us yet and thus we don’t have any benchmarks for you. Instead, this article is a technology preview for these upcoming chipsets with a focus on their feature set.
Basically, nVidia will be releasing two versions of the chipset (nForce 410 and nForce 430) as well as two versions of the GPU (GeForce 6100 and GeForce 6150) and either of the chipset can work with either of the GPU. Lets take a look at what separates the two chipsets and GPUs starting of with the chipset
Based on 0.14u both of these chipsets support integrated graphics along with a PCI-E x16 slot for adding an external graphics card. They will both feature HD Azalia onboard audio and support for IDE and SATA drives in RAID configurations. Eight USB 2.0 ports and two PCI-E x1 slots along with built-in Networking complete the chipset. nVidia has kept the HT bandwidth between the GeForce 6100 and nForce 400 series at 1.6GBps in each direction. Finally, good news for tweakers as the ntune utility will be compatible with the nForce 400 series, Now lets take a look at what’s different:
