Product Reviews

We've all been there, or at least know an unfortunate soul who has. You buy a PC with 16Mb AGP 3D graphics, to find that it not only swipes 16Mb of your system memory, but also grinds to a halt as soon as you run any current games on it, and in many cases you can't even upgrade it. This could all be coming to an end though - Nvidia's integrated nForce chipset is finally here, and we've tested boards from Asus and MSI, as well as Nvidia's reference board.

The nForce chipset is split into two major parts - the Media Communications Processor and Integrated Graphics Processor, which utilise AMD's HyperTransport technology to communicate with each other.

At the time of going to press, we couldn't hear the Dolby audio up and running, but we tested the graphics power on offer. There's a choice of 8Mb, 16Mb and 32Mb graphic configurations in the BIOS, and with a 256Mb PC2100 DIMM and a 1.2GHz Athlon installed, we tested the 3D performance with the latter.

Running in 32-bit at 1,024 x 768 the nForce produced a very commendable 3DMark2000 score that was only 13 per cent slower than the GeForce2 MX-based Mesh Matrix 1.2GHz Plus (see Reviews, issue 79, p164). Even its 3DMark2001 performance was only 10.8 per cent behind the GeForce2 MX400-based Evesham Axis 1.33SK (see Reviews, issue 81, p141). This is streaks ahead of any other integrated chipset we've seen, and is a welcome improvement.

As with Nvidia's mobile GeForce2 Go chipset, the nForce performs

OpenGL performance was also impressive, and at the same test resolution we managed to achieve Quake III frame rates fast enough to fool the human eye. While this isn't going to steal the market from Nvidia's high-end standalone cards, it still provides respectable enough performance to keep up with today's 3D applications, and at high resolutions too.

Both the reference and MSI board performed similarly, but Asus' full-size ATX board was slightly slower. This was mainly because it uses the nForce220 (Crush11), while the others use the higher-end nForce 420 (Crush12).

The only downer at the moment is 2D performance, with a few glitches that need ironing out, particularly on the Asus board, where white flashes appeared on the screen when scrolling down windows. This is an early sample of the board, BIOS and drivers though, and these issues will no doubt be sorted out.

The board layout is also interesting. All the AGP and PCI standards are there with three 184-pin DDR DIMM sockets, but there's also an ACR slot at the bottom of the Asus and reference board. This looks like a reversed PCI slot and houses the optional Dolby surround riser card that utilises the nForce's on-board audio codec. The riser will come in at around $6 (£4) as it requires no hardware of its own, and there are also plans for DVI and TV-out risers that plug into the AGP slot. The MSI board had a more traditional AMR.

Although nForce won't replace a standalone GeForce3 in terms of power, it's a giant leap for integrated graphics, and is good news for future notebooks too. Furthermore, it's good to see an integrated graphics solution for AMD processors, so a value nForce and Duron combination could easily be a Celeron and i815 killer. With serious players like Asus, MSI and Gigabyte having nForce boards in the pipeline, integrated 3D graphics should become a meaningful specification.