Pricing of GeForce 8800GTX >>>

Introduction

Last week, I attended a press briefing on the upcoming desktop chipsets for AMD platform and Intel platform. The two new chipsets promises more than previous generation 500 Series SLI chipsets. Mr Tom Peterson Director of Technical Marketing for MCP production was the speaker of the day and he showed us some of the capabilities of these two new chipsets.

First, we will take a look at the AMD platform, the nForce 680a SLI.

nForce 680a SLI

The nForce 680a SLI chipset is meant for the enthusiast multimedia people. It can support 4 PCIe display using 2 Dual Core CPUs (4x4). It will have 12 SATA II ports support 4 raid volumes, It will support nVIDIA SLI and Quad Gigabit Ethernet with First Packet, it can also support 20 USB 2.0 ports

As you can see from the architecture diagram below, the two Socket F1207 CPUs talk to each other via a x16 link and first CPU will talk to the two identical chipsets which is labelled 680a SLI. Each chipset supports 6 SATA II ports and dual GbE. You have 2 chipsets, there by you can support 12 SATA II, 4 GbE and 20 USB 2.0 ports. It will be able to support 4 PCIe x16 lanes for graphics cards running in SLI mode.

Hardware Firewall Active Armor will be dropped from 680 series of chipsets. Currently, there aren't much news from manufacturers that are working on Socket F. It is probably still early for production. It is way too high end as I would see it. Do you really need 20 USB ports and 4 GbE Ports?

Discuss in Forum

Next >>>