Thoughts
Do you know what excites me most about TurboCache 6200 in the reference board form I've evaluated it in, as it is with small PCB, passive heatsink and decent, if unexciting performance? The prospect of a PCI Express EPIA, so I can build a silent MCE2005 system around one, or a thin and light laptop for gaming on the move that won't cause me to visit a chiropractor. Pricing for the 32MB board is €89 (£60 or so in the UK) with the 16MB board slightly cheaper at €74 (£50 or so). At that cost, I'd be looking to pick up a 32MB board, especially if an AIB shipped a component output dongle with the board for not much more money.Performance, although not shown explicitly, sits usefully above a £60 or so Radeon X300, and while neither TurboCache model will blow your hair off with Half-Life 2 at 1600x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic texture filtering, they'll play recent games at basic TV resolutions just fine, perfect for that MCE2005 box.
Cute little boards, interesting technology that might make it into high-end hardware in the future (what about a 256MB board that can texture into system memory when needed, saving you the massive cost of a jump to a 512MB variant?), along with all the attractions of a well engineered small PCB and passive cooling, mean they're well worth considering if you're looking for low-cost PCI Express thrills and spills.
The TurboCache technology and NV44 definitely need to make their way into notebook or IGP solutions provided by NVIDIA, for integrated and portable (not DTR) graphics that start to make good performance sense, rather than passable performance sense.
As for the NV43-based board, I showed you that for completeness and it's a curiosity at best now. It's basically a dead SKU, NVIDIA pushing a low volume of them out of the door to satisfy a couple of OEM customers that wanted a low-cost PCI Express part for certain system builds before this NV44 version. You'd be very lucky to find one in general retail.
The TurboCache boards are a step up from integrated graphics and the very low end on PCI Express, by quite some margin. At their price points, the 32MB version sits proud and it's well worth a look if you've no more than about £60 to drop on a discrete graphics card.
