NVIDIA and some of its partners among mainboard maker had started to sell packages containing a mainboard and a PCI Express graphics card, the company said Tuesday. The move may help NVIDIA to increase its presence in the PCI Express market, where ATI is said to be dominating.

ASUSTeK, AOpen, Gigabyte Technology and MSI now offer special bundles containing a mainboard with PCI Express x16 slot and a graphics card based on an NVIDIA graphics processing unit intended to work with PCI Express bus. The mainboard maker will bundle NVIDIA’s GeForce PCX 5750 or the GeForce PCX 5900 with their platforms powered by Intel’s i915P or i925X chipsets.

“We believe PCI Express bundles are the perfect solution for OEMs and system builders who want to provide their customers with one efficient and complete PCI Express package,” stated Jeff Fisher, executive vice president of worldwide sales at NVIDIA.

NVIDIA’s move follows initiative of Intel Corp. to offer its i915P- and i925X-based mainboards with bundled graphics card produced by ATI Technologies. According to reports, clients of Intel will get $20 - $30 discounts from every bundle compared to the aggregated price of the mainboard and the graphics card separately.

It is necessary to point out that current costs of DDR2 SDRAM memory are likely to erode the $20 - $30 of discount, which is why systems with PCI Express x16 graphics will still be more expensive compared to computers with AGP 8x graphics cards inside.