NVIDIA has really made a huge name for itself over the past decade; not only do they have world class GPUs for desktop and notebook solutions, but they were also bold enough to push into the platform chipset market. This is something that no GPU maker had really made a go of before, though it hasn’t been a smooth ride for them. Compared to Intel, the NVIDIA range of chipsets are much smaller. Intel has at any one time five to six different chipsets, where NVIDIA is lucky to have two. However, today it isn’t so as they have further expanded to really take advantage of the growing market share.
Being a graphics card maker, there is one area that NVIDIA has a leg up, that being the IGP market. For the basic home PC and office workstation, IGP based boards really do have a home. Even for a Digital Home PC that does nothing but play movies and record TV programs, integrated graphics is perfect as there is no need to add in extra expansive hardware.
Till now, NVIDIA hasn’t had an IGP based solution for the Intel market; it has been supplying ones solely for the AMD sector. Core 2 and Pentium Dual Core CPUs are perfect CPUs for an IGP board. The only problem is that Intel G31 / G33 boards don’t have much power when it comes to running any graphics programs. Now the field gets a new player, introducing the new kid on the block, NVIDIA’s GeForce 7150 chipset paired with the 630i southbridge. How does it fair? Let’s find out.
