(Review) - NVIDIA’s nForce series of chipsets have been a runaway success. Quite frankly, if top performance is what you are looking for, there is no substitute for an nForce 4 SLI board. The chipset has given us many legends including DFI’s NF4 Ultra and more recently, the maddeningly remarkable ASUS A8N32-SLI.

For everyday consumers though, these boards are way too advanced and by extension, expensive. The average Joe out there doesn’t care much for SLI and for sure would rather have an onboard video with an option for a better card later on.

Herein lied the challenge for NVIDIA. They were losing out on price conscious buyers who were opting for third party chipset based boards. For consumers, they were missing out on some of the best boards around just because it didn’t have onboard video.

To plug this hole in NVIDIA’s AMD lineup came the C51 chipset. The interesting thing about this chipset is that apart from integrating a fairly robust (by onboard standards) GPU, NVIDIA also provided two southbridge options, thereby allowing the manufacturers to mix-and-match their solutions. This allowed them to offer a wide range of products, each being directed at a more specific audience.

With that said, let’s see what Gigabyte has cooked up with its C51 offering…

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