nVidia's Booth - PCI Express in Action

Next up we have nVidia's engineering sample machine using Intel's upcoming reference Grantsdale chipset supporting PCI Express 16x graphics and DDR-II. We were not told what socket Pentium 4 processor was in use.

The graphics card in this system is the PCI Express 16x flavor of the codenamed NV30 GeForce FX 5900 GPU. As far as we know, it is purely the NV30 with a PCI Express interface. We were unable to determine if the graphics card had native PCI Express support as we could not see if a bridge chip was present or not.

The system was using Micron DDR-II memory which was labeled as being engineering sample.

Interestingly, the Grantsdale reference motherboard from Intel included a 12v molex connector toward the bottom of the motherboard. We are not sure what the additional power is required for but it might go a long way in explaining the lack of 12v molex connector on the GeForce FX 5900 PCI Express card which was included with the regular AGP 8x NV30 when it was first released.