Nvidia to launch Nforce 780i on Halloween

HALLOWEEN IS usually the day when we see a whole new spawn of horror movies that are meant to scare new generations of Americans.

This year we get Nvidia.

The graphics chip marketer decided to launch the C72 Frankenbridge or plain old 780i, on Halloween, meaning that your read of just freshly expired NDA reviews will be interrupted by ton of children chanting trick or treat.

C72’s Frankenbridge moniker comes from some partners, who fear that this chipset is little more than just an updated 680i chipset, which has been on a market for a year now.

The 680i features got updated with support for all the latest and greatest from Intel’s own kitchen, with improvements in memory controller and memory pre-fetching area. But the PCIe 2.0 support is rather interesting. Instead of going native, Nvidia is now introducing a third chip as a part of its chipset, the PCIe 1.1-to-2.0 bridge chip for three built-in PEG slots.

One problem of this approach is questionable bandwidth achieved by this bridge, since we all know that two main features that 2.0 brings is ability to churn 150W through the slot (in x16 variant) and increased data rate. Our sources have told us that we can expect PCIe 1.1 style bandwidth, and that new bridge chip only brings more juice to the table.

This is not as bad as it might look, since we are seeing that GPUs aren’t maxing out PCIe 1.1 x16 spec (4GB/s downstream, 4GB/s upstream), but still it will be greeted with a rather chilly looks.

What won’t be chilly is the thermal dissipation. The old 680i was known to overheat by quite a bit, since the cooling system could not dissipate enough heat from the substrate and the actual PCB, resulting in extremely high temperatures on the chip. With two closely packed chips, it was expected that power dissipation (TCP) now rose to incredible 48 Watts, or on the same level as Intel Core 2 Duo E6300.

This is very first time we have a chipset part that heats more than a possible CPU that might end on it. <P>

The cooler the company is using reminds us of old Pentium Pro coolers, so the classical heatpipe concept had to be changed... by quite a bit. If AMD needed a partner for ACP “standard”, we’re quite sure it'd have a big pal in the form of Graphzilla.

The destiny of MCP72, the new chipset for AMD is closely tied with the launch of Phenom series of processors, but a launch in Q1’08 would not surprise us. C72 however, is on a verge of being launched, with hardware reviewers getting their hands on the boards as within 10 days. When is that nForce Winter Camp, we wonder.

Now, we wonder how Daamit will react with its RD780 and RD790 series of chipsets, products that were already supposed to be on the market. AMD is currently delivering that “when Customers are ready,” line. No further comment. µ