Introduction

NVIDIA today announced the new nForce 500 core-logic family. The entire nForce series has been a huge success for NVIDIA. As was the case with the last chipset from NVIDIA at launch, the nForce 500 series is currently only available for AMD. Keep in mind that there may be Intel solutions out there using the nForce 500 core-logic, none of these can be bought seperately and are not available thru normal retail channels. This will certainly change in the near future, as there will Intel based offerings as well. NVIDIA has built a reputation for bringing new features and technology to the market with their core-logic. SLI capability has become of greater importance to the budget user, because the entire GeForce 7 series now features this technology. With the release of AMD's new AM2 platform, NVIDIA has added some very interesting new technologies to make them stand out. Let's take a look at what NVIDIA has announced today.

The NVIDIA nForce 500 family of MCPs support dual-core AMD Socket AM2 processors and are available in four different versions:

• NVIDIA nForce 550 MCP for the mainstream segment
• NVIDIA nForce 570 Ultra MCP for the single GPU performance segment
• NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP for the performance, dual GPU segment
• NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP for hard-core, do it yourselfer (DIY) enthusiasts

These four versions come at different price points. The high-end nForce 590 SLI will start at $150 but many manufacturers will sell boards closer to $200 dollars. The nForce 570 SLI is actually much cheaper with boards from MSI starting at around $140. The nForce 570 Ultra boards go for $100 while the nForce 550 will sell for around $70 Dollars. There will be different manufacturers in every segment, with BioStar and Jetway at the low-end. The high-end will include all the usual suspects like MSI, ASUS, ABIT, Gigabyte, DFI and EPoX. It's interesting to see that companies like ECS and Foxconn are really trying to break into the market with high performance boards right from the start.