14 DAY TRIAL // Even if most news items about NVIDIA place the green company in not too bright a light, we must not doubt that it will continue to release new products. And that's besides the highly anticipated 55nm GeForce cards, which should virtually put the Santa-Clara based chip manufacturer in the leading position in the competition for the highest-performance graphics card. Word in the industry has it that the company is about to introduce its customers to another motherboard design.
This is believed to arrive on the market sometime in August, according to the inside sources cited by Digitimes. The new motherboard chipset is also going to bring support for Intel's processors. Even more, as rumors have it, it looks like NVIDIA plans to have the boards go into mass-production in mid-August.
The new boards are going to be based on the GeForce 9-series mGPU, the nForce 730i MCP (MCP7A) and, per the already-mentioned sources, they will come in two versions. The MCP7A-U will come equipped with a GeForce 9400 graphics core, while the MCP7A-S will most likely be built with the GeForce 9300 graphics. The two versions are pretty much the same, the only difference between them being that the GeForce 9400 is faster.
Speaking of which, let's see what technical specifications the two boards have - as few known as they are at the moment. From what the cited sources indicate, the GeForce 9400 core features a frequency of 580MH and a Shader clock of 1500MHz, while the GeForce 9300 will be clocked at 450MHz, and 1200MHz for the Shaders.
The MCP7A will support an FSB of up to 1333MHz and dual-channel DDR2 or DDR3 memory. Both boards will also have PCI Express 2.0 and, because they are built on NVIDIA's G96 graphics core, will bring DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0. The MCP7A will also support Hybrid SLI, PureVideo and Cuda technologies.
No details about how much the new boards will cost are currently available.