Taking their sweet time with lower-priced models

Apr 3, 2007 07:40 GMT  ·  By

Since the ?break up? between NVIDIA and AMD, part of which was motivated by the acquisition of ATI by AMD last year, NVIDIA had more liberty in pursuing revenues from wherever it wanted, and the ?next best thing? happened to be right up their alley, in the form of a very familiar face called Intel. That allegiance NVIDIA once had for AMD products has been left aside, and they started producing chipsets for Intel processors. This is how the nForce 680i SLI series appeared, and was followed soon after by the nForce 650i SLI and then by the nForce 680i SLI LT.

But nowhere in this lineup did the NVIDIA nForce 650i Ultra model show its face, even though it was originally announced as being a part of the chipset offer NVIDIA was preparing for Intel processors, and of course, the nForce 650i Ultra is cheaper than the other offerings from the fabless giant. Now it appears that the motherboard has been spotted by the guys over at Chilehardware.com much sooner than NVIDIA has planned on releasing it.

The model has the same CPU support as the rest of the nForce 6xx series, with a ?limitation? on supporting a FSB of 1066/800 MHz. Unlike the ?big sisters? in the family, this model features one PCI Express x16 connector, not allowing for video cards to run in SLI mode, and 2 PCI Express x1 extensions slots. It also has only one Gigabit Ethernet Connection, High Definition Audio, four Serial ATA 3Gbps ports with RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 capabilities. Besides that, it has four DDR2-800 memory DIMMs, but not the NVIDIA SLI-Ready memory with EPP, although they could have done that, they chose to leave it for the high priced nForce 680i SLI series. The retail price for this model upon launch is expected to be below the $100 mark.