NVIDIA to Prepare a MCP7A-GL Motherboard

The latest news on NVIDIA points towards the fact that the green Santa Clara company is working on a new motherboard dubbed MCP7A-GL. It is said to launch the chipset under the official name of Quadro FX470, and it wouldn't be the first time when we see a Quadro-branded IGP chipset from NVIDIA.

As some pictures of the motherboard show, the MCP7A-GL is somehow different from the MCP7A-S and MCP7A-U boards (the GeForce 9300 and 9400, respectively). This new product comes with x16, x4 and x1 PCIe slots, one each, and also features a PCI slot due to the mATX form factor. Even so, the chipset is able to offer support for a pair of PCIe x8 slots, which means that it can support SLI setups. The board in the pictures seems to be made by ASUS.

The board comes with other advantages as well, one of them being the support for two displays at once, which are enabled by the two DVI ports the MCP7A-GL features. The output graphics performance of the IGP is not known at the moment, but rumors say that the board may be limited to single link DVI, which means that users will not be able to get super high resolutions.

The ASUS board is said to come to the market under the name of P5N-VM WS. It will include support for all Core 2 based processors with 1,333MHz bus and below. The motherboard maker offers some extra-performance solutions as well, including two different SAS cards to fit into the x4 PCIe slot on the board. The pictures of the board are available here.

The rumors say that NVIDIA is planning a few MCP8A chipset series boards for the next year. The performance of the series is supposed to be leveraged through the introduction of the Quadro graphics solution the same way the MCP7A-GL will offer more performance for the MCP7A series. And, who knows, we may also see an ATI FirePro integrated chipset on the loose in the near future.