NVIDIA 2050 MCP:

Next in line is NVIDIA’s midrange or mainstream chipset – the 2050 MCP. While NVIDIA has labeled this as a mainstream solution, it may be a much better choice for companies who are willing to move to the next generation of components. In fact, if you don’t need the backwards compatibility support, you are actually better off with a 2050 solution. The only hindrance is the lack of Opteron support (in numbers), which is an educationally calculated strategy by NVIDIA to encourage sales of their high-end 2200 MCP.

The 2050 MCP, as mentioned earlier, is much similar to its high-end counterpart, so, for the purpose of this article, we will only discuss the differences rather than restating the entire fact sheet.

Unfortunately for those who prefer external connectivity, NVIDIA has completely removed USB 2.0 support. If nothing else, we would’ve at least preferred a reduction in USB ports from 10 to four (or something along those lines), but NVIDIA shocked us by offering 10 ports from one chipset to zero in the other. Instead of ensuring backwards compatibility, NVIDIA also removed support for four PATA drives. Depending on how you perceive it, this may not be such a dreadful decision on NVIDIA’s part. In addition to that, there will be no 32-bit slots on this chipset.

Instead of supporting multiple Opteron microprocessors, NVIDIA has limited the support to only a single Opteron on their mainstream MCP.

Other that what we stated earlier, the 2050 MCP is far too similar to the 2200 MCP.

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