Nvidia Ready to Launch 600i Series

After several weeks in which details softly emerged into the World Wide Web, Nvidia has finally readied its upcoming 600i line and is ready for the launch.

First let's point out that the 6 series from Nvidia will receive the "i" suffix which will stand for INTEL products. AMD line will have the "a" termination. So it's all about the 600i line now, the near future will also bring us 600a series.

There are mainly 3 types of motherboards available for the home user: 680i SLI, 650 SLI and 650 Ultra. 680i SLI will be the heavyweight champion with unofficial (yet) support for DDR2-1333 speed using Dual Channel technology. As was previously reported, the board will actually have 3 PCI-E x16 slots, 2 of them16x capable for SLI with the 3rd being only 8x capable. The 3rd slot will be used for physical computations making good use of the new physics rendering technology Nvidia has included in G80 GPUs.

Other features of the new series will be LinkBoost, FirstPacket, DualNet, high definition audio and MediaShield, some of them being new; others inherited from the 590 chipset.

As for 650i line, it will be mostly value oriented supporting only DDR2-800 and lacking many of the features to be found in 680i. The SLI version will have 2 PCI-E slots for video card use while the Ultra version will only have one. However, 680i motherboards will only carry 1 PATA port, while 650i will have 2 onboard PATA connectors.

The first manufacturer to release the new line is said to be eVGA. The 680i SLI solution coming from eVGA will cost about $300 while 650i solutions will top at $150.

On several locations, the new motherboard from eVGA has already been tested using Core 2 Duo CPUs and proved to be quite a contender reaching FSB speeds higher than 500MHz. You could say that, with the arrival of C55 northbridge revision found in the new 600i series, Nvidia can actually fight INTEL on its own territory.