Computex 2002 Day 2: ATI's R300, nForce2 & XScale PDAs

nForce2 - Not Repeating the Same Mistakes

Last year's Computex was almost entirely NVIDIA-centric with the announcement of their nForce chipset that was supposed to revolutionize the chipset industry; fast-forward to the present day and it's clear that it hasn't. One of the problems with the nForce launch was that the chipset was "launched" so much earlier than the actual date when you could buy motherboards based on it; the chipset was announced at Computex and we didn't see boards until the very end of last year and no real design wins until just recently.

nForce2 Motherboards

While a number of the architectural improvements that went into nForce's successor (nForce2) improve on weaknesses with the original product, NVIDIA's marketing strategy also reflects this approach. The chipset won't officially be launched until later this summer and although NVIDIA is letting manufacturers show off board designs they are not allowing us to release detailed information on the chipset itself. Here is what we can share with you:

- There is obviously a new Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP) - Crush 18. There will be two derivatives of the Crush 18 IGP, a version with integrated graphics and one without. The integrated graphics core is NV17 derived (with a core clock around the 250MHz clock of the GeForce4 MX 420) and the rest of the IGP will be relatively similar to the previous IGP with a few improvements.

- DDR333 and DDR400 are both supported by the new IGP.

- MCP2 is the new MCP for nForce2 and will be made available in a couple of versions. The APU and basic features of the original MCP remain unchanged.

NVIDIA had a number of nForce2 boards on display in their suite which you can see below; the boards should be available in an August-October timeframe.

nForce2 Motherboards - Click the Images to Enlarge
ASUS	Chaintech
EPoX	Leadtek
Soltek