The connection with the chipset South Bridge is implemented via HyperTransport bus featuring 800MB/s bandwidth. There are two types of South Bridges: MCP and MCP-T, which is more functional due to the second Ethernet controller, FireWire support and NVIDIA SoundStorm technology that includes hardware decoding of the Dolby Digital data stream. The nForce2 also supports StreamThru Technology similar to the Intel CSA (read more about it here), i.e. it’s developed to boost the network performance by assigning a separate connection of the guaranteed throughput. I should say that NVIDIA’s solution looks better than Intel’s one because it needs no support from the board maker, i.e. no additional components should be laid out on the PCB, while the Intel CSA needs a network controller to be mounted on a separate channel with all the resulting consequences.

The graphics core in the nForce2 IGP is none other but GeForce4 MX adapted for integration into the chipset North Bridge, and all capabilities of the graphics core remain untouched. If you remember, GeForce4 MX has two rendering pipelines with two texturing units in each, Accuview AA technology, 2x anisotropic filtering, memory optimization technologies in 3D modes, vertex shaders unit/T&L, two integrated 350MHz RAMDACs up to 2048x1532x32, an integrated TV-out controller up to 1024x768, and a special hardware unit controlling certain DVD and HDTV decoding stages.

To integrate it into the North Bridge the engineers probably redesigned the memory controller and brought down the core clock to 200MHz. The latter measure was a forced step because the electromagnetic interference from the high-frequency core could affect operation of other North Bridge components and hamper cooling. Moreover, NVIDIA hardly wants the integrated chipset be as efficient as add-on graphics solutions because it can negatively tell on sales of external graphics cards, which NVIDIA and its partners would hardly wish to happen. So, the core clock is 200MHz, 50MHz lower than that of the slowest model of the GeForce4 MX family - GeForce4 MX420. The situation with the memory bandwidth available for the integrated graphics core looks as follows. The chipset can allocate 2.2GB/s for the integrated GPU at worst (if the processor uses 400MHz bus). But it’s not a typical situation because processors with the 400MHz bus belong to the high-end market and their owners would hardly use integrated video. Moreover, NVIDIA didn’t announce the official support of the 400MHz bus for the nForce2 IGP. It also concerns processors with the 333MHz bus, even the slowest Athlon XP 2600+ is not a budget product.

So, we can consider only the processors with the 266MHz bus. In this case the memory bandwidth offered for the GPU is 3.3GB/s for PC2700 and 2.1GB/s for PC2100. While the first figure is good enough (it’s still much higher than what GeForce4 MX420 offers even on external cards), the second one is not that impressive. Anyway, this is much better than other integrated cores based on SMA idea use. The influence of the speed and timings of the system memory on the graphics core performance will be discussed later, and now, please, take a look at the board which we are going to test today.