While NVIDIA still battling out ATI with the discreet graphics card, for the mean time the performance king is ATI with their 4870X2 plus the availability of Intel and AMD boards to support crossfire or dual 4870X2’s like the P45 or AMD’s 700 series for at least $150. For those people who are going green in the banner, NVIDIA however can still pick a fight with some mid-ranged and semi-performance video cards. Like the 9800GTX+ to the 3870 and the GTX260 against the 4870, with the upside of better power consumption than ATi and runs much cooler and quieter than some offerings of ATI. It is a good choice to have a near silent gaming but still have a bit of performance in some high resource games.
With that I represent you with the family motherboards of NVIDIA, in way back in 2000, with the support on only the AMD Athlon CPU’s with the design to support only a single performance GPU, and the support on the old ATA connectors and with the compatibility of the FX series of NVIDIA is the nForce. With the introduction o the DDR memory to double the speed of the CPU and the memory, while some draw backs like the stability with the newer ATA support and also the sound device keeps clattering when under load. With the development of the nForce2, with the support of the new AMD Socket A and the Dual channel DDR memory, but still doesn’t support in the AMD Athlon XP so the second channel is 100% go to the GPU for improved performance, also the first Dolby Digital 5.1 decoder the first of its kind not to need to have an external decoder.
While still plagued by compatibility issues and driver instability, while this still goes some gamers still choose the nForce for an easy and stable overclock and a lock frequency of the AGP and PCI graphics with individual overclock.
With the next gen the nForce 3 is the first board chipset to sport an onboard firewall and also RAID 0+1 stripping and mirroring and also the intro of the gigabit Ethernet while still with AMD CPU’s the rest of the newer nForce will support the Intel range. Then the nForce 4 and 5 now support the Intel Pentium 4 and also AMD 64x processors, with PCIex and with the technology from Voodoo is the SLI (scalable Link Interface) in having Dual graphics rendering, while AGP is good, but it cannot have two ports, only one because of the chipset device that controls the single AGP port.
While the PCIex is more popular now for multi-GPU upgrade, with the 500 series and the 600 are a more successful chipset, that NVIDA has made, a more support on the much faster Intel Core 2 Duo’s while still having the support on AMD but for the mean time we don’t we or NVIDIA advertising any more NVIDIA chipset for AMD, because the move of AMD to merge with its rival ATI, in a more ways NVIDIA is siding with Intel, with the move of actually having SLI support on the Intel Skull trail motherboard. But in the mean time NVIDIA nForce 600 series is a good buy and also the new 700 series like the 790I ultra now supports DDR3 memory, and also the NVIDIA mass driver security from its family. While NVIDIA is the only chip that support tri- and Dual SLI, the price of having the board is in the hurting point.