14 DAY TRIAL // A few more details on Nvidia's MCP7A chipsets have been revealed, along with some core speeds for the GeForce 9300 and GeForce 9400 boards. The IGP motherboards are expected to come during Q3, as previously announced this year, and they are said to be fully packed and competitive.
The two motherboards are also known by the code names of MCP7A-S (the GeForce 9300) and MCP7A-U (GeForce 9400), and they seem to feature similar standards. The front side bus speed is set at 1,333MHz for both models, and they also come with DDR2-800 or DDR3-1,333 memory. There is no specific information on whether we'll be provided with combo boards based on either chipsets or if there is one x16 PCIe slot, up to four x1 PCIe slots/devices and up to six PCI slots.
A sure thing, though, is that they will feature support for up to six SATA ports with RAID 0,1, 0+1 and 5, as well as Gigabit Ethernet and up to 12 USB 2.0 ports. As for display connectivity, the entire standard interface is supported, including D-sub, DVI, HDMI or DisplayPort.
The core processor of GeForce 9300 will feature a 450MHz speed, and will also have the shaders set at 1.2GHz, while GeForce 9400 will come with the clock set at 580MHz and with 1.5GHz shaders. The difference between them is only speed binning, presuming that the Geforce 9400 will feature a bigger cooler or even some sort of active cooling, but that remains to be seen.
Hybrid SLI, PureVideo HD and CUDA are technologies supported both by GeForce 9300 and GeForce 9400. Although these boards may prove to finally be competitive Intel chipsets developed by Nvidia, they seem to come a little too late on display, but are expected to leave Intel's G45 chipset behind in 3D benchmarks.