Announcement Summary
NVIDIA will allow board vendors to pair the 6150 with the nForce4 430 MCP with the 6100 able to be paired with either 430 or 410 depending on the SKU the board vendor wishes to engineer.Today's launch is marked as such by NVIDIA as 'another hard launch' and while, yes, you can pick up boards built with the new products in Akihabara today, the world-wide launch and mass retail availability is in early October. NVIDIA are pushing the "NVIDIA GPU Motherboard Solution" into the media center PC market first and foremost and as supported MCE2005 accelerators, boards that carry the 6100 or 6150 integrated graphics chips make a fine pairing for that operating system on the face of it.
NVIDIA hinted that Linux support shouldn't be too far away which is crucial to the ever growing market for media centre software built around that OS. Overall, the new product pairings bring the good parts of nForce4 to Athlon 64 and Sempron yet again but this time with an integrated graphics chip in tow. NVIDIA's GeForce6-series architecture has been gagging to be used in such a product since launch and indeed I spoke those very works when we reviewed 6200 with TurboCache last December.
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.The new products bring the TurboCache technology to exactly that space.
Tarinder will have the full review for you very soon. Today's announcement merely whets the appetite for an on-paper product with lots of promise. How it fares in an MCE environment is the key question which we hope to answer for you in October. Pop to the HEXUS.community using the link at the top of the page to discuss the new products with us, if you have any questions you don't see answered here.
