Nvidia to launch nForce 500 chipsets this month

Debut coming 23 May, apparently

Nvidia will formally launch its nForce 500 series of chipsets for both Intel and AMD processor on 23 May, online reports citing internal company roadmaps claim. The graphics chip maker revealed the existence of the chipsets back in March.

According to a DailyTech report, Nvidia recently told its partners the nForce 550, 570, 570 SLI and 590 SLI will ship supporting AMD's upcoming Socket AM2 interconnect and, separately, Intel's Core 2 Duo desktop processor line aka 'Conroe'.

The two-chip chipsets will support LinkBoost, a proprietary system to up the bandwidth between the chipset and a connected Nvidia GPU. According to the report, 90nm GeForce chips already have support for the system built in.

The chipsets are also said to support traffic prioritisation, allowing their integrated firewall to give preference to certain types of data, such as streamed video or VoIP connections. Nvidia is believed to be calling the feature FirstPacket.

The two SLI chipsets will both support dual x16 PCI Express graphics card and four-board set-ups. The 500 series will also incorporate support for ten USB 2.0 devices and six 3Gbps Serial ATA drives. The chipsets' MediaShield component has been upgraded to support dual RAID 5, Nvidia has said.

The nForce 500 series uses the MCP55 chip. Nvidia is also preparing the MCP61, a single-chip integrated chipset that's expected to ship in August. ®

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