Nvidia presented to a small gathering of media and industry people their current thrust into the motherboard chipset market that has been neglected, to say the least, the past few years as Nvidia concentrated on expanding and dominating the consumer graphics arena, as well as anything graphics related.

                                             Mark Chen, APAC Channel Sales Manager

Specifically, Nvidia showed off the “7 series” chipsets with integrated GeForce 7-series motherboard Graphics Processing Units (mGPUs) video already integrated. As can be expected, performance is far and away the best among all currently available on-board video based graphics, barring some laptop-based semi-discrete video solutions from both ATI and Nvidia.

This is a bold move by the graphics giant, if not totally unexpected. Nvidia has been in the motherboard chipsets business since the old AMD Athlon days, and have worked closely with AMD on many award-winning chipset motherboards that were constantly on enthusiast’s lips. Up to now, Nvidia dominates sales of AMD – based systems, the only problem being the fact that AMD market share these days is far from overwhelming. This also results in Nvidia’s lopsided market penetration in regards to motherboard chipsets on new systems, as the majority of systems sold these days are Intel based, and Nvidia has only a few chipsets dedicated to Intel systems.

                                             The Nvidia 7150 MCP

All that’s about to change with Nvidia’s introduction of the GeForce 7150, 7100, and 7050 mGPUs. These are designed to support the full range of Intel CPUs (Core 2, Pentium, and Celeron CPU families), including upcoming 45nm Intel "Penryn" processors. At the same time, Nvidia made sure to include support for the hottest spec-numbers available, such as 1,333MHz FSB (except for the 7050), optional HDMI / DVI connectivity, support for dual channel DDR2 at high memory clocks (for some mGPUs), Serial-ATA raid, an x16 PCI-X slots, Direct-X 9.0, Gigabit LAN, and USB 2.0.

These features, previously only found in high-end discrete video solutions, are now being made available due to the advanced requirements of many increasingly common applications not of the gaming variety – Microsoft’s Windows Vista being the primary example. Other applications like Google Maps, Adobe Illustrator, certain 3D planning software, and even iTunes – require more processing power than what “mere” on-board video could provide.

                                             Crysis pre-release demo was also on display.

So the briefing primarily presented a two-pronged assault – one addressing Nvidia’s absence from the Intel platform, and the second representing Nvidia’s answer to the lack of processing power for increasingly demanding applications. For both “prongs”, the 7 series presents a viable solution, one that I can foresee having a very good reception from the budget-minded buyers in our local market.

This assumption is mainly based on the fact that the majority of new PC buyers buy “affordable” first, “performance” second. With the Nvidia based Intel motherboards starting to crop up on store shelves, these same buyers will have an option that gives them affordability with performance capable of daily applications oft-used by casual (non-gaming) buyers. As such, Nvidia will most probably enjoy an increase in their market share due both to the desirability of their products (as built-in video – affordable motherboards) and the increased sales of Intel based systems (as opposed to AMD based systems).

                                              Bruce Tai, MCP Sales Manager

Best yet, it is all but confirmed that this is simply a precursor to Nvidia’s more powerful 8-series based motherboards with support out of the box for Direct-X 10 and good gaming performance even for relatively new games – with an integrated video chipset! Interesting times are ahead, and Nvidia will undoubtedly be at the center of it.