NVIDIA Corp., a leading graphics company, said this week Intel Corp., the world’s largest maker of semiconductors and a large supplier of mainboards, will bundle NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 GT graphics cards with Intel’s mainboards featuring PCI Express x16 slot for graphics.

The Santa Clara, California-based graphics company said the bundles would be available to Intel’s worldwide channel of 100 000 system builders through Intel Authorized Distributors. The promotion runs through December 31, 2004, and includes bundles that contain a GeForce 6600 GT graphics card along with Intel Desktop Board D925XCV/BC, D925XECV2/BV2 or D915PBL/CY/CM families of platforms.

The move may bolster NVIDIA’s market share in the market of PCI Express x16 graphics cards among system builders. The approximate percentage of the market the company may gain and estimated number of graphics cards NVIDIA may sell bundled with Intel’s mainboards are unclear, though.

Earlier this year Intel bundled ATI’s “own-brand” RADEON X600-series graphics cards for PCI Express x16 interface with its mainboards based on i925X and i915P chipsets. Clients of Intel reportedly got $20 - $30 discounts from every bundle compared to the aggregated price of the mainboard and the graphics card separately.

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 or PEG x16 graphics cards and DDR SDRAM inside.

So far the highest share in the PCI Express market has belonged to ATI Technologies, who supplies around 100% of OEMs with its graphics cards.