14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA has remained the only independent GPU provider in the world after it nearly became a part of AMD, but seeing as how things didn't work out between these companies, AMD got "stuck" with ATI. This little detail didn't stop NVIDIA from producing chipsets for AMD products, and this was immediately seen through the nForce 680a SLI chipset they built in order to support the QuadFX initiative submitted by AMD.
It's the same with the integrated graphics market, AMD has put out a challenge with their 690G chipset, and now, we see NVIDIA's comeback with the MCP68, the marriage between an NVIDIA 7 series derivate IGP and the nForce 630a. Demos of motherboards built with this chipset are being demonstrated at CeBIT, with an expected market availability due next month.
The mGPU is a new class of Motherboard GPUs as they were defined by NVIDIA, and the GeForce 7050-630a is one of the company's initiatives. It features the 7050 IGP, on-board HDMI interface, the NVIDIA PureVideo engine with HD H.264 video processing and the NVIDIA nForce 630a core logic.
The IGP uses DirectX 9.0C with Shader Model 3.0 and supports a maximum resolution of 1920x1440@75Hz. The chipset supports AMD AM2 processors, with four 240-pin 1.8V DDR2-533/667/800 dual channel architecture and a maximum of 16GB of memory can be installed.
But NVIDIA is cashing in from both sides by having an mGPU platform for Intel processors, the GeForce 7050/nForce 630i. This has the same main benefits as the AMD version, with, of course, support for the Intel Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad processors.