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Blogs Why We Need New Nvidia Chipsets

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Sifter3000, 26 May 2009.

  1. Sifter3000

    Sifter3000 I used to be somebody

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  2. ch424

    ch424 Design Warrior

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    :confused:

    What would a 'revolutionary' southbridge add?

    Your point on competition driving improvements in performance and pricing is a pretty obvious one. Have you considered the other side of the coin? If nVidia started producing chipsets again, would we see Intel locked out of SLI? Crossfire disabled for people with nVidia motherboards? Surely that is worse for consumers than the pricing issues. Performance differences have always been pretty marginal anyway.
     
  3. iwod

    iwod What's a Dremel?

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    The point is, Intel Chipset are crap... with no competition we wont even see USB3 and SATA 3 anytime soon on Intel Chipset.
    Intel has worst graphics on the planet. Honestly i think even S3 is better then them.

    No one consumer will complain if i have a small, quiet, fast, new IO chipset, and decent, working HD decoding as well as good drivers support for a cheap price. The problem is we dont. They have been forcing poor designed products into our throat, and we are force to have it.

    While i love Intel's CPU, their chipset has been disappointing time after time. EU should not only punish them for 1 billion but also force them to open up QPI for other players.
     
  4. azrael-

    azrael- I'm special...

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    I'm not sure what you've been smoking, but Intel chipsets are about as good as it gets. If you were to differentiate your statement to only include Intel chipsets with integrated graphics, then at least I could agree with you on the graphics part. Other than that they're the most stable chipsets out there.
     
  5. Paradigm Shifter

    Paradigm Shifter de nihilo nihil fit

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    From my fairly limited experience of Intel chipsets... agreed. Their mobile chipsets can sometimes be a little picky (945M certainly gave me a few headaches) but their desktop chipsets - while not setting the world on fire with featureset or raw performance the way the nForce4 chipset did at the time - were solid and capable.

    I'd be a bit worried about an nVidia designed Core i7 chipset, to be honest. I know the memory controller is on the CPU die... but with how hot X58 runs normally, and how hot the old socket 775 nVidia chipsets ran... it would probably be a return to some fairly heavy active cooling. Of course, that wouldn't be a problem if they'd have chipset heatsinks that were big enough to put a fair-sized fan on.

    Of course, having 'the option' is always nice. No one likes to get stuck with Hobson's choice.
     
  6. Fod

    Fod what is the cheesecake?

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    actually the majority of the heat is generated by the memory controller. it's why the athlon64 southbridges ran so cool.
     
  7. azrael-

    azrael- I'm special...

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    My main issue with nVidia chipsets is that they're pretty flaky. Granted, nVidia has a lot of nice ideas, but for some reason those ideas usually are executed poorly.

    Case in point, I love the hardware firewall in the nForce3/4 chipsets, but you really need to fiddle with it to get it to work. Most people just gave up. It was scrapped as of the nForce5 chipset, although the hardware still seems to be in there. According to nVidia the hardware firewall was made superfluous by the Vista firewall. My money is on nVidia not being able to get it right. I worked directly with nVidia on identifying the main issues and they even wanted to buy my system.
     
  8. Paradigm Shifter

    Paradigm Shifter de nihilo nihil fit

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    Aye.

    I think it depended heavily on the exact chipset, though - my A8N32 SLI Deluxe ran quite warm on the chipset (although that might arguably have been heat from the MOSFETs travelling down the heatpipes) while an nForce4x socket 754 board I picked up barely got warm, despite having a tiny passive heatsink and next to no airflow on it.

    Given that the Intel socket 775 chipsets didn't get anywhere near as hot as the nVidia ones, there is no real reason to believe that nVidia would be able to run cooler than Intel's X58 chipset. Even so, it's an academic consideration for now. ;)
     
  9. thehippoz

    thehippoz What's a Dremel?

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    some good comments in here.. I would like to see them make chipsets for the i7 myself- I more than likely wouldn't buy it but it would bring down prices on intel
    nvidia likes to use old tech in their new stuff.. like remember the 680i had a 2 year old mcp on it- and the 780.. they just stuck a pcie 2.0 chip next to the northbridge and tried to cover it all with one heatsink- wth was that
     
  10. [PUNK] crompers

    [PUNK] crompers Dremedial

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    intel chipsets are great and certainly provide the vast majority of customers with a decent amount of choice.

    nvidia chipsets i have found to be finicky with ram and generally less stable than the intel offerings.

    this is just personal experience, despite this i agree that its important we have more than one company out there working on chipsets for intel procs
     
  11. cheeriokilla

    cheeriokilla What's a Dremel?

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    WRONG

    WRONG! every time I go for intel I end up regretting it, but no more. Had DBT2 think it was(P4) and now 2 X48 and they are buggy as hell. Recently went for asus + AMD 720 BE and haven't touched one of my other rigs which are "better" but have intel chipsets.
     
  12. Elton

    Elton Officially a Whisky Nerd

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    I'm not fond of intel's chipsets, but they are better than say, the SB200(anyone remember that huge load of P4 failure?) or the 750a which was, frankly, atrocious.

    But I agree we do need competition, if at least competent competition, so far Nvidia's NB/SB chips have been mostly bullseye or entire miss, partly because as someone mentioned before, they're excellent ideas, just executed poorly.
     
  13. remixme

    remixme Own a Dremel, but not used it yet!

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    I think in the enthusiast space; where things tend to be at the cutting edge anyway, the flakiness of chipsets is hard to compare.

    But from anecdotal experience in the mainstream space, I have definitely been burned on the handful of occasions I have gone for third party chipsets. In particular VIA. But nvidia have had their moments.
     
  14. ChaosDefinesOrder

    ChaosDefinesOrder Vapourmodder

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    so, Intel are pursuing a lawsuit against nVidia saying that nV don't have the right to make i5 or i7 chipsets, resulting in Intel having a pure monopoly on i5 and i7.

    Shouldn't this EU anti-competition fine be doing something about that?

    I suppose in a way I shouldn't complain really, I have an i7 rig, and my memory of all nVidia chipsets in recent years has been an over-riding "they're f****ng expensive" message

    Still, Intel has a monopoly for this latest (and emerging) CPU generation, and this needs to stop
     
  15. Elton

    Elton Officially a Whisky Nerd

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    The Same could be said for AM2+ + AM3 boards.
     
  16. Ending Credits

    Ending Credits Bunned

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    But at least Nvidia are still actually producing boards for AM2+.
     
  17. Dreaming

    Dreaming What's a Dremel?

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    I think with regards to the case, is that Nvidia and Intel drew up an agreement whereby Nvidia would be permitted for some fee no doubt to produce chipsets for Intel motherboards. Intel created the i7 series and Nvidia got to work on creating the motherboard, then Intel turned round and said 'hold on a minute... we never spoke about i7 before!' so it's now going through the courts to work out if Nvidia are permitted to make i7 chipsets. In the meantime 100% of i7 boards are Intel.

    It would probably cost them less in the court fees keeping this in court as long as possible, compared to the profit they would lose if they didn't have a monopoly. Oh, Intel and it's wicked ways...
     
  18. Dr. Strangelove

    Dr. Strangelove What's a Dremel?

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    I agree competition is a good thing, and at the end of the day nVidia (or some other 3rd party) doesn't even have to make a great chipset, just one that has some really cool and innovative features. I think the biggest problem is not that we might be lacking 1-3% performance or something like that, it's more a question of us loosing innovation. With no competition, why should Intel bother putting feature X into a chipset that already works and sells.. on the other hand if someone else makes a chipset with feature X then maybe Intel will put into their next chipset. *Rinse and repeat*

    -> Tim: Just call it SATA 3, none of that stupid SATA 6Gbps, I'm quite sure none of your readers will mistaken SATA 3 for SATA 3Gbps ;)

    With regard to the anti-competition / monopoly stuff.. there is not illegal in being a monopoly, its abusing your status as a monopoly that is "illegal" (as far as I understand it). Hence if Intel does not want nVidia to make i5, i7 chipsets its fully in its rights. If nVidia had a "legal" chipset out and Intel bribed or bullied MB makers into not using it, then that would be anti-competitive.
     
  19. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    i want HybridSLi!

    imagine: Intel i5 CPU on nVidia south bridge, SATA3, g200 integrated desktop graphics with HDMI 1.4 support paired with GTX380 hybrid SLi card that only kicks in when needed, otherwise power consumption is 0w.
     
  20. D-Cyph3r

    D-Cyph3r Gay for Yunosuke

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    God no we DO NOT need nVidia chipsets. AMD and Intel have had the best chipsets for their respective platforms for a good few years now, all Nvidia have brought us are stupidly overpriced high end boards (trying to whore SLI) and inferior IGP boards.

    Yes you could argue that more competition drives the likes of Intel and AMD to make better chips, but to be frank I think they are more bothered about trying to sway people to their platforms, rather than trying to better Nvidia.
     
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