It’s been a long time, but it’s finally here. NVIDIA has lastly integrated its motherboards with a graphics card, which NVIDIA claims to be leaps and bounds ahead of its competition.

There are a few combinations between the north and south bridges, which will hybridize to give you various motherboard options. There are, as of now, two north bridges (the graphics processing engines – 6100 and 6150) and two south bridges (410 and 430). By integrating the aforementioned combinations, NVIDIA plans to deliver the following solutions: 6150/430, 6100/430 and 6100/400. The 6100/400 is the entry-level arrangement with limited features and additional lack of PureVideo, Gigabit Ethernet, and two PATA connections as opposed to four for the other two. NVIDIA has, however, added HD Azalia Audio support.

Here’s a comparison between the various combinations of the north and south bridges and the functions they support.

Credit: CoolTechZone.com

The interesting thing to note here is the difference between the graphics chips. The dissimilarity at this moment is related to the clock speeds with a 50MHz difference between the high-end and low-end components.

Another thing to point out is that the clock speed is higher on the integrated GPUs than the 6800GT, which is clocked at 400MHz. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the integrated graphics solution will perform better than its standalone predecessor, but it’s something to point out.

The balancing factor in terms of graphics is that the graphics chip will only have two pipelines instead of the previously expected four. This could mean that the performance will be closer to ATI’s Xpress 200 solution. Micro ATX versions of this board could conceivably change the way we look at digital entertainment boxes, since there is enough onboard power to do everything but gaming.

Furthermore, the chipset does not automatically disable video, so if you put in a standalone card, you can use the onboard video in conjunction and have three monitors working simultaneously, similar to the way it’s done with the Xpress 200.

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