NVIDIA Plans nForce-7 Series PCI Express 2.0 Chipsets

Nvidia is planning to begin designing chipsets around the PCI Express 2.0 interface, with the goal of making sure their newer hardware has an advantage when paired with AMD’s upcoming processors. Along with that, it makes perfect sense that their new video cards will also be designed around PCI Express 2.0. In particular, their new nForce-7 chipsets will be working with the AMD Phenom class processors.

Once the chipset is released later this year, they will start production of two chipsets, then begin producing a third in 2008. While it is too early to speculate on much, especially since Nvidia doesn’t comment much on products in-development, the featuresets are already beginning to look nice:

TechSpot

Initially three versions of the new Nvidia nForce 7-series chipsets will be available: MCP72XE, MCP72P, MCP72 Ultra and MCP72V. Mass production of the first two will start in October, according to sources familiar with Nvidia’s plans, the schedule for MCP72 Ultra is undecided, whereas MCP72V will be produced only in 2008, in time for mass production of AMD’s new processors for mainstream and entry-level systems.

The most powerful flavour of the new core-logic series – MCP72XE – is projected to consist of two chips so that to support two PCI Express 2.0 x16 lanes for two (or more) add-on graphics cards and three PCIe 2.0 x1 lanes for other expansions. The enthusiast-oriented MCP72XE will also support memory modules with enhanced performance profiles (EPP), 1GbE network controller, six Serial ATA ports with RAID capabilities, two Parallel ATA drives, twelve USB 2.0 and other capabilities.

The less advanced version of Nvidia nForce 700a-series – MCP72P – will consist of one chips and will feature similar I/O capabilities compared to the higher-performance version, but will not support EPP memory modules, will only have two PCI Express 2.0 x8 lanes for multi-GPU capability and two PCI Express 2.0 x1 lanes for other add-in cards.

X-bit labs