Nvidia nForce
The nForce is the first PC chipset from Nvidia (code name Crush ), presented in June 2001 at Computex in Taiwan, and a classic design consisting of North (IGP or SPP = System Platform Processor) and Southbridge (MCP = Media and Communication Processor). It is suitable for AMD K7 processors.
development
It was originally designed as a pure Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP), but it offered some innovations: The two chips were connected via the HyperTransport developed by AMD and, in addition, dual channel for PC2100 memory (called Twinbank ) was used for the first time in the mass market. The real reason for this architecture, however, was the bandwidth requirements of the integrated GeForce2 MX graphics core . A version without an integrated graphics core followed a little later. The nForce generally offers AGP 4 × and supports a front side bus of 266 MHz (133 MHz EV6 ).
Northbridges
There are the following variants of the northbridge:
- nForce 220D
- nForce 415D
- nForce 420D
The nForce 420D (code name Crush 12 ) is the original version with an integrated graphics core and dual channel , while the nForce 220D (code name Crush 11 ) only has single channel as the basic version . Accordingly, these two variants only differ in their performance. The nForce 415D, on the other hand, does not have an integrated graphics core.
model | Integrated graphics core |
Front side bus |
Storage controller | AGP |
---|---|---|---|---|
nForce 220D IGP | GeForce2 MX | 133 MHz EV6 | Single-channel DDR / 266 | 4 × |
nForce 415D SPP | - | Dual-channel DDR / 266 | ||
nForce 420D IGP | GeForce2 MX |
Southbridges
There are also two Southbridges available: MCP and MCP-D. Both have an Ultra DMA / 100 controller with two channels, integrated 10/100 MBit Ethernet , six USB 1.1 ports and support for the AC'97 audio standard . The MCP-D also offers an audio processor (APU), called SoundStorm .
model | P-ATA (ATA-100) |
S-ATA | RAID modes |
Ethernet | Audio | USB 1.1 | PCI slots |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
nForce MCP | 4th | - | - | 100 Mbit | AC97 | 6th | ? |
nForce MCP-D | SoundStorm | ? |
See also
Web links
- nForce platform processors
- Relationship between nForce and AMD-760 ( Memento from March 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive )