Mike Magee and the rest of the gents from The Inquirer were not the only people to see nVidia's all out attack this week on VIA's new single channel KT600 chipset.

 

Headed "How Via claims the Performance Crown", the five page document seen by the INQUIRER earlier this week, says the Taiwanese firm has "cherry picked" three benchmarks, configurations and resolutions and said its [Via's] figures aren't comparing what it describes as the real world. The real world, says Nzilla, is games.

For a good hour and a half during a conference call this week we heard (what seemed to us) as a worried nVidia compare their nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset to VIA's KT600 in a range of benchmarks as well as bandwidth comparisons which nVidia believe VIA do not provide enough of for today's games and applications. nVidia stated that the "nForce2 is balanced" and the "VIA KT600 can't keep up" - for now we'll just have to take their word on this until we start receiving our first batch of KT600 samples next week but initially it does look as if nVidia feel a little threatened as they saw it necessary to schedule a conference call to reinforce their spot in the market.

 

In the name of freedom of information, here is just one of the benchmark graphs shown to us by nVidia comparing their nForce2 Ultra 400 Gigabyte and ASUS boards compared to a reference KT600 board which probably is nowhere near as tweaked up as the retail nForce2 motherboard:

 

 

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