In a press release yesterday, nVidia announced that their partners will be marketing PCi Express motherboards with grahpics solutions in a combo to further the advances in cinematic-quality multimedia experiences. They are marketing their GPUs with partners AOpen Inc., ASUSTeK, Gigabyte Technology, and MSI.

“Gamers and enthusiasts will find this unique opportunity too good to
pass up,” said Jeremy Liaw, Senior Manager, Multimedia Department at
MSI.




“Our new MSI PCX5750-TD128 graphics cards combined with our new line of
MSI 915 Neo 2 Platinum Edition motherboards will ignite the cinematic
computing revolution, and help gamers gear up and play hard with this
new technology.”

NVIDIA has been a key contributor to the joint definition, development,
and deployment of PCI Express solutions. NVIDIA also serves as a member
of PCI-SIG, the industry organization that owns the PCI Express
specification.

“All of our graphics products are designed to meet our customer’s
demands for features, performance, and visual realism, and by bundling
them with our P5GD1 motherboards, we are providing end users with an
easy migration path to PCI Express,” said Kent Chien, Senior Director,
Multimedia Business Unit, Sales and Marketing Division at ASUSTeK.
“This is certainly an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast!”

For more information about NVIDIA’s PCI Express efforts, please visit www.nvidia.com/object/pci_express.html. For additional information on the Intel Developer Network for PCI Express, please visit http://developer.intel.com/.

This is a good showing that nVidia is not going to stay idle and allow ATi to capture the PCi Express market. The competition is good for the industry and better for the consumers. The longer this kind of competition keeps up, if it eventually picks up and proves its worth, the lower the prices will be for such options in the future.

As it stands, there are several obstacles and one of which may be viewed as the accusations between ASUStek and Gigabyte. Gigabyte has recently accused ASUS of 'cheating' with their motherboard(s). They say there is a feature, undisclosed, that overclocks the board for higher test scoring.

Actual testing on their board proves that the board itself is not really overclocked. In all actuality, it is the graphics card which is overclocked and leads to gains in some 3D environments. These boards, the P5AD2 Premium (i925X), coupled with ATi PCi Express cards unleash an option in the BIOS called PEG Link mode. This mode is a surreptitious enhancement to the graphics card's core engine frequency and memory was not disclosed at first to the public.

Some are saying this is a misleading of the truth to the public, however in my opinion it should have been told -- but now that it is out, there is no harm in allowing the technology the credit it deserves. I think they will learn their lesson for sure after this blows over. Regardless, this board may yet prove to be very effective at doing it's job and that won't change much in the way of product sales. At least, I would buy it if it got the job done whether it was improperly advertised or not. That's their perogative, mine is to get a quality piece of hardware.
¬

RedTiger writes...

Quote:

I would buy it if it got the job done whether it was improperly advertised or not. That's their perogative, mine is to get a quality piece of hardware. ¬

AGREE