Do you still remember that together with nForce 420/D chipsets NVIDIA announced their younger brothers aka nForce 220/D, which didn’t have the second memory controller? Good if you do, because it was not that hard to forget about them, really: there haven’t yet appeared a single mainboard in the mass market based on IGP64 (this is the North Bridge of nForce 220).

The true reasons of this sad story are still unknown, though we can try and guess them easily. There is actually only one really mattering reason: high cost. At first NVIDIA wanted to sell its chipset at such a high price that the mainboard makers felt at a loss and could only wait patiently for the prices to get down to reasonable level. The prices dropped, however, down to the level that only the use of nForce 420-D made some actual sense. Then appeared cheaper discrete solutions aka 415/D and the manufacturers were happy to use them in their products. nForce 220 seemed to have sunk into complete oblivion then.

Only now NVIDIA realized that they would earn much more if they started selling low-cost discrete solutions (415, 615) and low-cost integrated solutions (220), rather than expensive and very expensive integrated ones :) nForce 220/D price was reduced so that the mainboard makers could start paying some attention to them finally (in this case they should sell at $20-$25). According to this story, two members of the "Big Four" will start shipping the mainboards built on them next month already. These are ASUS and MSI. Later on, more Taiwanese makers will join them.

As for the performance of nForce 220, please see our NVIDIA nForce Chipset Review. Part I and Part II.