Although the corporate market was conquered, integrated video solutions didn’t become common in home PCs. Since most home users play games, such boards were simply a bottleneck. The performance of boards based on Shared Memory Architecture (i.e. when the frame buffer uses a part of the system memory, like in Intel’s solutions, for instance) was low partially because of the low memory bandwidth available for the core. The matter is that until recently the systems supported mostly SDRAM and then single-channel DDR memory, while external graphics cards got the fast DDR memory of a much higher bandwidth. Nonetheless, external frame buffers weren’t of much help for integrated solutions because the cores were very plain and slow.

NVIDIA was the one to promise us a revolution in the use of integrated graphics for home needs. The company introduced the nForce chipset that had dual-channel DDR memory support and sported good bandwidth for an onboard core. The core was actually an altered GeForce2 MX processor, and it wasn’t very efficient but was fast enough for games to be played with acceptable image quality. But the nForce failed. NVIDIA overpriced the integrated chipset (over US$90); besides, this company didn’t have the reputation of a reliable chipsets manufacturer, and finally, the users didn’t trust the integrated solutions that much. The nForce version without the integrated graphics core was launched a bit later and even won some users’ hearts. But it failed to become popular despite its outstandingly high performance and immensely advanced integrated sound solution aka APU (Audio Processor Unit).

But NVIDIA didn’t give up. The company took its mistakes into account and developed the nForce2, which was positioned as the fastest solution for AMD processors. By the way, NVIDIA has no plans to release a chipset for Intel platform, as they consider the license fees to be too high. The company used another approach with the nForce2. First they launched a version without the integrated graphics core (which has been replaced with GeForce4 MX) named nForce2 SPP, and only after that they started supplying the nForce2 IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor). The high integration of the nForce2 made it possible to create micro-ATX mainboards with pretty rich features. One of these boards, Albatron KM18G Pro, as well as the nForce2 IGP in general, will be the topic of our today’s review.

Closer Look: NVIDIA nForce2 IGP

So, NVIDIA nForce2. We will not dwell on the discrete version of this chipset, as it has already been discussed in a huge number of various articles, reviews and news stories. Let me just briefly remind you of its features: it uses a dual-channel memory controller supporting up to PC3200 (the nForce2 IGP supports up to PC2700 to reduce the EMI from the memory controller onto the graphics core). In this case the CPU uses the available memory bandwidth most efficiently when the FSB and memory clock rates coincide. The excessive memory bandwidth compared to the FSB is used for the DASP algorithm (Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Pre-processor) for data pre-fetch or for the integrated graphics core.