Nivida getting into Chipset market???

[GT98]

I've been checking out on Voodooextreme and Sharkyextreme about Nvidia's work on doing two chips for the M$ Xbox and now it looks like they want to get into doing South bridge and Northbridge controllers for PC Motherboards. Anyone care to comment on this? I or am I getting pariond thinking that Nvidia is gonna be taking over more of the computer market or they gonna be just biting themselfs in the ass in a year or two??

Scott


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[Nuno]

In order to make their cards to work properly with more than 50% of the motherboards, they had to design their own chipset. Nothing wrong with that.
But I bet they only will get it working in the 3rd driver revision or so (the one that will disable AGP 4x and sidebanding).

[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 27 September 2000).]

[Thundrchez]

Doing chipsets is a huge task, especially to be competitive performance-wise with the likes of Intel, VIA, et al.

Do yourself a favor and stay away from the first silicon of the nVidia chipset. It'll take them a couple of revisions to get all of the gremlins worked out of the silicon. Additionally, what are the odds of EVER getting a non-nVidia video card to work with a mobo with a nVidia chipset? Probably zilch. Will I ever buy a nVidia chipset based mobo? Probably not.

It'll be good to get a little more competition in the chipset market, IMHO. The chipsets are a fairly substantial part of the cost of a mobo these days.

[isochar]

There is flip-side to that coin, Thunderchez.

That nVidia chipset will be optimized for the NVxx architectures. Nvidia will also have a bit of help from Microsoft thanks to their X-box partnership.

In the end I expect it to deliver the best "experience" for an nvidia graphics board.

[DuRaNgO]

and the worst for any other vid card
jim

[isochar]

I think it's a smart move on nVidia's part.

Most would agree that nVidia is the undisputable graphics leader. Now what'll happen:

1. nvidia owners will see huge performance stability gains by using an nvidia chipset

2. nvidia owners know that nvidia is definately going to have the "best" card out there due to the 6 month product cycle

3. nvidia owners will buy the motherboards with nvidia chipsets

Now, owners of other graphics boards will see that their graphics card with intel/via/amd chipset are getting romped by comparable nvidia products.

Reviews will tell people that the way to go is to buy nvidia graphics/chipset.

In the end, more money for nvidia.

I realize there's a few assumptions in there, but nVidia has a lot of momentum in their favor. I really don't see Matrox, ATI, 3dfx putting nVidia in their place. Only way nVidia will lose the lead is if they screw up....

which the company seems infallible.

[DuRaNgO]

It's human nature NOT to want one person/company rule the roost, for instance:

Intel HAD the best chip for a very long time, yet people continued to buy AMD chips, now, we all know which 1G chip we'd all want to own
jim

[isochar]

Yes, I agree. However, American capitalism seems to disagree with us


[This message has been edited by isochar (edited 30 September 2000).]

[DuRaNgO]

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