Nforce FX dual board shows shape of things to shift

Nvidia denied such a project for a long time but obviously they figured that there is not much competition around that that some extra bucks could be made in this market segment.

We believe that company counts that it can now get some extra popularity since we estimate that it will squeeze some relevant performance increase from Dual Athlon marchitecture.

This looks to us very attractive, specially combined with two FSB 333 Athlon 2600+ MP and we can be quite sure that Nvidia will use two memory controllers just as with the Nforce 2 chipset and it's quite obvious as they separated two memory modules from each other.

This board will need some extra power like P4 boards and it will use a 12V connector apart from ATX one, it will have AGP 8X PRO since it targets workstation market, USB 2.0 Gigabit Ethernet, two Firewires, and two S-ATA connectors run by an external chip.

One more interesting fact is it's called the Nforce FX chipset that implies that it will use Geforce FX derived marchitecture based on NV34 mainstream part that is sent from Graphics Heaven to replace NV17 and 18 chips, but as usual we assume that the performance of this chip will be lower than the discrete part.

Real question is when this chipset will be available, and we assume that it would be quite surprising for us to see it before Computex or to say early June this year.

We reckon that a single Athlon supporting Nforce FX chipset might be the IGP version since SSP or non integrated version makes no sense. There are not many things that can be improved from Nforce 2. The only area of growth is the new south bridge with more USB 2.0 and S-ATA and RAID support and -- who knows -- maybe even Wireless LAN.

We imagine that developing the crippled FX core and putting it into a chipset that is able to handle two CPUs is not an easy thing to do but Nvidia proved itself as a great learner regarding chipsets. The [H]ardOCP image. µ