NVIDIA nForce2 Preview

Final Words

NVIDIA has been a PC chipset manufacturer for over a year now, and although they don’t command a large part of the market their nForce platform continues to draw significant amounts of attention. The success of nForce2 will be determined primarily on NVIDIA’s ability to correct the problems the original nForce posed:

• Cost – The first nForce boards were noticeably more expensive than competing solutions from VIA, which was to be expected considering VIA’s very cost oriented manufacturing stance. By the end of the original nForce’s life we saw motherboard prices come down significantly, hopefully some of the combinations of the nForce2 SPP and the new MCP/MCP-T will find their way into cost competitive motherboard solutions.

• Performance – According to NVIDIA, nForce2 is the fastest Socket-A chipset currently available. That is a very bold claim considering that there isn’t a single nForce2 motherboard available to even reviewers for evaluation. NVIDIA is currently in a performance optimization stage with their nForce2 reference boards, and they are quoting performance improvements over KT333 by a few percent at minimum. It would be impressive if NVIDIA can pull it off, but we’re holding all judgments until we see what the third party manufacturers can do come September.

• Time to Market – NVIDIA says it will be September for board availability; if nForce2 is late it definitely won’t bode well for NVIDIA’s chipset track record. While a delayed chipset isn’t nearly as deadly as a missed graphics cycle, enough of these gaps between chipset launches and motherboard releases could be detrimental to NVIDIA’s credibility in the chipset business.

Provided that NVIDIA can address those issues with nForce2 and given that we can trust their performance expectations for the chipset, VIA could finally face some reasonable competition in the Socket-A market. Let’s not forget that NVIDIA’s Hammer solution, codenamed CK8, will be a very close derivative of nForce2 and thus a successful nForce2 launch could translate into promising results with Hammer.

Looking towards the future, NVIDIA does have some very aggressive plans for tomorrow’s nForce chipsets. The highly anticipated successor to the GeForce4 MX, NV31, will find its way into an nForce chipset shortly after its introduction at the beginning of next year. A NV31 equipped nForce chipset could seriously raise the bar of integrated graphics performance beyond what NVIDIA has already been able to do with their latest IGP. While NVIDIA has to play catch-up in garnering market share, it is VIA that will be in a difficult situation if they don’t speed up development of their elusive Columbia GPU.

For now VIA is riding on their experience in developing memory controllers as well as their ability to deliver low-cost solutions to a plethora of customers, but a higher performance integrated graphics core will be necessary moving forward. With Microsoft’s Longhorn OS driven by a 3D GUI, it is very important that the major chipset vendors have powerful integrated graphics cores to suit the needs of the market.

With SiS focusing mainly on the Pentium 4 market and ALi still a no-show, the final chipset battle in the Socket-A market may come down to VIA vs. NVIDIA. With VIA already maintaining such a significant lead over NVIDIA, true market success for the nForce platform may not come along until Hammer makes it big.