GeForce 6100 and nForce 400 preview

Today nVIDIA is throwing its hat back into the integrated video market again. Last time they where in it was with the nForce 2 product line. nForce2 was aimed at the enthusiast market for the most part, this time they are aiming for corporate desktop, media center machine and what I call the inexpensive mom and pop machine.

INTRODUCTION

Today nVIDIA is throwing its hat back into the integrated video market again. Last time they where in it was with the nForce 2 product line. nForce2 was aimed at the enthusiast market for the most part, this time they are aiming for corporate desktop, media center machine and what I call the inexpensive mom and pop machine.

What we are going to show you today is the specifications of the different parts that are being introduced. You will not find these parts for sale at e-tail since they are designed for white box builders and OEMs. But within the coming months your very next office machine may be built around them and we wanted you to know what they are and can do.

The GeForce 6100/6150

The GeForce 6100 and the Geforce 6150 is as the name implies based on the GeForce 6 series of GPU’s. It allows the motherboards to feature both Dx9 and Shader Model 3.0 support as well as support for HD-video. The GeForce 6100 is the low-end solution while the GeForce 6150 the high-end solution. 

It is pretty obvious that motherboards using this GPU will be an obvious choice for Media pc-builders. Finally we have a integrated solution that supports HD-video.

 
The dongle allows you to output HD-video

The nForce 410/430

A motherboard GPU needs a motherboard to live on and NVIDIA of course provides us with that to. Today NVIDIA are presenting the new nForce 410/430 chipsets, which of course are based on their successful nForce4 chipset. Motherboards using this chipset will all be micro-ATX formfactor making them idea for the various OEM-builders.

The nForce 400 series feature many of the things we’ve come to like from the nForce 4:

· NVIDIA ActiveArmor™
NVIDIA ActiveArmor Firewall includes secure networking features integrated into NVIDIA nForce 430 MCPs that protect your PC from sophisticated spyware and hacker intrusions. ActiveArmor Firewall secure networking is activated the moment you turn on your PC, inspecting at the deepest levels the data packets that flow in and out of your network connection.

· NVIDIA MediaShield™ – Confidently Store Your Digital Assets
Through a simple user interface, NVIDIA MediaShield storage allows you to easily manage multiple hard disk drives so you can safely store your digital assets. With support for a variety of hard disk drive configurations including the latest SATA 3Gb/s hard drives, MediaShield offers one of the most advanced storage solutions available for desktop PCs. MediaShield’s unique interface allows you to easily configure or modify your multidisk arrays.

Do you want your data fully protected? Just set up one disk as a mirrored copy of the first. Plus, provide further protection by assigning dedicated spare disks that are ready to be automatically used as backups if one of the mirrored disks with your digital assets fails. Another MediaShield storage innovation alerts you when a disk fails, and shows you which one to replace.
Do you want faster access to your stored assets? Set up two disks to operate in parallel (known as striping), by clicking a button on the storage management user interface. For the more technical user, MediaShield incorporates a choice of RAID configurations including RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 3 and 5.

· Native Gigabit Ethernet

· Support for SATA 3 Gb/s support

One motherboard to rule them all

One cool feature is the fact that NVIDIA has one single motherboard design and that the systembuilders and motherboard OEM’s can pretty easily change the GPU for instance if they want to upgrade it to a different variant. This makes it possible for the to offer almost any combination of GeForce 6100/6150 and nForce 410/430. Right now it looks like we will see the following combinations:

Motherboards should be available some time by the end of September and full systems from leading system builders and global OEM’s should be available later this autumn.