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.

nForce 550

The NVIDIA nForce 550 is the entry level offering of the new series. It comes with quite a few features, but is meant for price-conscious consumers who want to get support for the newest plattform. This chipset is specifically meant for AMD Sempron CPUs, Athlon 64 and X2 processors.


This single chip solution and will have one PCIe x16 slot for the use with a graphic card. There will be four PCIe x1 lanes which does not mean that you will see all of these in form of a slot on the board, making for a total of 20 available PCIe lanes. Even though this core-logic is meant for the budget market, it comes with Azalia HD Audio, 4x SATA II 3Gb/s with RAID support and 10 USB ports. NVIDIA's new boards will only have one IDE connector, slowly letting go of the aging technology. There is only one native Gigabit Ethernet connection available but we may see boards which include a second one with an external chip using one of the available PCIe x1 lanes. The nForce 550 will lack DualNet Technology as there is only that one Gigabit Ethernet connection available, which does not support TCP/IP Acceleration either. Other drawbacks are the lack of any Linkboost or FirstPacket Technology.

nForce 570 Ultra

The NVIDIA nForce 570 Ultra is designed for casual gamers and performance users. There are a few subtle features added, which are absent from the entry level nForce 550 core-logic.



While this chip may look just like an nForce 550, as it comes with 20 PCIe lanes using the same 5 links in a x16 and four x1 configuration, a closer look reveals two native Gigabit Ethernet interfaces which in turn can be used for NVIDIA's DualNet Technology. The nForce 570 Ultra has a total of 6 SATA II 3Gb/s connections available. This chip supports the Linkboost and FirstPacket Technology as well as TCP/IP Acceleration. But more on those later.