NForce5 Boards Begin To Emerge

KingFish (KingFish) Graphics Geeks have been anticipating the release of nVidia's famed NForce5 chipset, powered by its SLI dual PCI-Express graphics capabilities. The Inquirer has managed to get a snapshot of an NForce5 board.

January 11, 2005 11:49 PM ET in News,

Graphics Geeks have been anticipating the release of nVidia’s famed NForce5 chipset, powered by its SLI dual PCI-Express graphics capabilities. The Inquirer has managed to get a snapshot of an NForce5 board.

Nvidia said that we will see such boards sometimes later this quarter as it’s too early to show them. However we managed to take a picture of the board when we least expected it.
It is still a prototype board but it was extremely interesting to so two PCIe graphic port together with socket 775.

We cannot tell you much about this motherboard apart that it should come sometime in Q1 but I could easily guess that we are talking about real availability in Q2 2005. It has two graphic PCIe ports, four PCI slots, Northbridge and Southbridge, four memory slots four S=ATA ports, LAN and all the other stuff you might need.

Source: The Inquirer

11 Comments:

  1. Omatic810
    12 Jan '05, 5:13 am

    Jeez, I'm still stuck with NForce 2...
    And to think just a year ago I thought I had the "new hottness".

  2. 1030mhz
    12 Jan '05, 6:31 am

    hmmm cool...*looks harder at the pic*...doesnt look SLI to me, but im sure they will have that option when it comes out

  3. Geeky1
    12 Jan '05, 6:36 am

    it has 2 16x PCI-E slots...

  4. 1030mhz
    12 Jan '05, 7:00 am

    Ya I know, but on the SLI boards I've seen online they have a onboard thing between the two slots, where you have select if your running one card or two, the Asus one does for sure the Gigabyte card looks to have the same type of thing
    http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/...i/giga-sli.jpg pretty much looks like a jumper to me.

    http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/...LI/slicard.jpg this is the asus one and this is the whole thing http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2284&p=1

    maybe it does it on the card itself with out the need of the extra thing with Intell stuff, dont know guess we shall see soon enough.

  5. mmonnin
    12 Jan '05, 7:23 am

    Yes all motherboards so far will need a connector of sorts between the 2 video cards.

  6. Gobbles
    12 Jan '05, 11:02 am

    They may have incorporated the sli dual cards technology into the board and made it either and jumperable or bios settable item.

  7. Tethax
    12 Jan '05, 5:57 pm

    Gobbles is correct. in fact, gigabit made a single card, with two gf6600gt chips on it, and made it sli. each chip has it's own 128mb of memory (total of 256 - but used like two sets of 128).

    so yes, the nf5 boards will likely have the jumper setting in the bios.

    /imagines dual processing, 512mb vid cards, in sli. *drool/

  8. Sputnik
    13 Jan '05, 2:02 am

    can't have dual sli cards that already are in SLI mode. SLI is a point to point connection between 2 chips, each chip only has one of these 'points' to connect to: it's not a bus.

  9. mmonnin
    13 Jan '05, 5:52 am

    Gigabyte made the whole SLI package on one PCB. Instead of having another piece of hardware connecting 2 different video cards, its on the same PCB. Check out Anandtech, they have anice review of it.

    No need to get it. The 6800 ultra still wins, 2 6600 cards are almost just as fast (Gigabyte OCs their cards a bit), and you lose the option of having 2 DVI ouputs if you ever need it since its all on one card. It has 128mb of RAM for each GPU, not shared and the 256bit is also shared so its only 128 bit each. They causes some problems with AA/AF since they are so memory intensive. Thats where 2 real 6600 cards win.

  10. a2jfreak
    13 Jan '05, 4:38 pm

    6600, 6800 Ultra, whatever. My hunka-junk Radeon 7200 (SDR-RAM thankyouverymuch, you can stop your applause.) is still kicking . . . albeit underclocked because the card displays artifacts at stock speeds.

    Ahh, the power of defective obsolescence: RADEON 7200!

  11. 1030mhz
    13 Jan '05, 10:42 pm

    *bows to the Awesomeness of the 7200*

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