Now here is a company that can turn a press conference into their own trade show. While NVIDIA had a lot more than VIA to say about their chipsets they seemed to be avoiding the products that we all came to hear about. Those products would be the NVIDIA GPUs. There was little mention about any new FX cards or the current ones. The NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun made it quite clear that the graphics industry would no longer be the primary focus point of the company. They then continued to demonstrate a wide range of new multimedia products.

NVIDIA GoForce 2150 enables next generation of cellular handsets with embedded cameras featuring complete support for 1.3 Megapixel photo quality. Although this is not exactly the kind of technology I would review at Legion Hardware it is nonetheless impressive and should be very practical.

Camera phones are the fastest growing segments in the cellular handset market, with sales approaching 50 million units worldwide, as manufacturers are turning to high-resolution megapixel cameras to differentiate their handset designs, stated Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Tiburon-based Jon Peddie Research, a multimedia and graphics research firm. The new NVIDIA GoForce 2150, which is specifically designed to support these upcoming megapixel camera requirements, has a tremendous opportunity. With these new capabilities, end users can take higher quality pictures using their camera phones, ultimately encouraging end users to snap and send photos more frequently.

NVIDIA also discussed the new AMD 64-bit processors for the desktop and mobile market. Of course this included how the nForce3 would support these processors with its MCPs. This was fairly standard stuff and nothing new was really said. They really kept the hard facts to a minimum. The NVIDIA talkers acted really excited over the whole nForce range, but failed to show us much of the actual chipset. However, NVIDIA did demonstrate some impressive overclocking software that was run on an nForce3 platform.

In the press kit NVIDIA outlined their AMD 64-bit chipsets. As it stands they have a product to cater for the four main market segments (Enthusiast, Performance, Mainstream & Mobile). All up there is a total of five different nForce3 chipsets. There are two nForce3 chipsets designed to accommodate the enthusiast users, these are the nForce3 Pro 150 and nForce3 250Gb. The nForce3 250Gb supports two extra USB 2.0 connections along with X4 Serial ATA and both the Athlon 64 and 64 FX.

The performance market segment is covered by three chipsets being the nForce3 250Gb which is also an enthusiast chipset. The other two are the nForce3 250 which lacks Athlon 64 FX support and the nForce3 150 which is even more basic again. Both the nForce3 250 and nForce3 150 are also designed to accommodate for the mainstream market as well. Finally the nForce3 Go150 is the mobile chipset designed to compete with the VIA K8N800 and Intel P4M.

As NVIDIA were emphasizing that they were not just a graphics company, they also demonstrated some new software. Named ForceWave this comprehensive software suite delivers industry-leading features for graphics, audio, video, communications, storage, and security.

With the introduction of ForceWare, NVIDIA is expanding its technology leadership into the software world, said Ujesh Desai, director of software product management at NVIDIA. By delivering industry-leading features, innovative new features, and a unified driver architecture for all of our product lines, end users are able to achieve higher levels of productivity and functionality from their NVIDIA-based systems.

An impressive feature of this software suite was the inbuilt overclocking software. NVIDIA offer a system utility that allows the user to overclock their processor and memory in the Windows XP O/S. When demonstrated the software appeared to work very efficiently. Ujesh Desai who was demonstrating the ForceWave software, did not seem to mind showing off the softwares overclocking abilities. Naturally the settings used to demonstrate the software were tested many times before we saw the system run them as there were no errors encountered.

Before finishing, NVIDIA quickly teased the crowd with a peak at two future products. The first being a Dual Opteron board using the nForce3 chipset, the other a GeForceFX 5950 reference board, neither of which were exactly demonstrated to us. The GeForceFX 5950 was said to be running a NVIDIA demo that we watched at the end, but this gave no real performance indication.

Reviewed By Steven Walton