X-bit labs

Second Generation of Integrated Graphics from NVIDIA: GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 (page 4)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 10/27/2005 | 01:41 PM ]

nForce 430 and nForce 410 MCPs

Although NVIDIA is already using separate and quite advanced South Bridges in its nForce 4 SLI (Intel Edition) and nForce4 SLI x16 chipsets, the company developed other MCPs for the integrated chipset. Why? Because NVIDIA’s older MCPs do not have all the features necessary for “digital home” computers. Particularly, the nForce 430 and nForce 410 South Bridges are the first NVIDIA MCPs to support the High-Definition Audio standard (Azalia).

Otherwise, the characteristics of the nForce 430 and nForce 410 are typical enough, resembling those of the nForce4 Ultra, for example. To be specific, the new South Bridges include a Serial ATA controller that supports the SATA II standard (300Mbps bandwidth) and Native Command Queuing (NCQ). The nForce 430 MCP supports four Serial ATA ports and RAID arrays of level 0, 1, 0+1 and 5, while the nForce 410 provides only two such ports and RAID array levels of 0 and 1. Besides Serial ATA, both South Bridges support two Parallel ATA ports.

The nForce 430 also has a built-in Gigabit Ethernet controller which features the hardware secure networking engine aka ActiveArmor (you can use NVIDIA’s exclusive firewall with this MCP). The junior model, nForce 410, is only equipped with a basic, 100Mbps network controller.

The nForce 430 and nForce 410 each provides eight USB 2.0 ports which should be enough for a multimedia PC. And finally, the PCI bus is supported by both these MCPs, too.