With the introduction of NVIDIA’s new chipset, the C51, NVIDIA has righted a long-standing anomaly.

I’ve analyzed quite a few board reviews lately, and NF4 chipsets have reigned supreme without exception to Intel, and particularly AMD.

The market and economics say that you need to sell more boards in order to be profitable, and since the mainstream audience (non-gamers/designers) requires a board that is durable, performs well and is economical, NVIDIA may have its work cut out? If you were to buy a NF4 board, irrespective of the board’s cost, you will need to buy and put in a graphics card, as it doesn’t come with video output. This translates into added cost for the end user for a feature, or the amount of power, he doesn’t really need, so instead of purchasing a NVIDIA chipset, buyers were opting for ATI core logics if they needed a reasonable card onboard, or SiS and VIA for the absolute budget conscious buyers.

Realizing they were missing out on a significant amount of customers, NVIDIA took the challenge of integrating a graphics card on the motherboard. After a lot of speculation and rumors, NVIDIA has finally decided to launch it with the new 6100 range of graphics integrated with the C51 chipset. Apart from the graphics, the chip also has support for HD audio with the Azalia chip, something that has been carried on from NF4 as well as HDTV output in the 1080p (Progressive) modes.

It has been quite sometime since we’ve heard about the integrated chipset, but it’s finally here. What’s missing, however, is the extreme performance we had been expecting from it. It has definitely beaten most of ATI’s offerings, but the expectation that NVIDIA would bundle in a 6800 Ultra has been firmly put to rest.

The strange thing is that NVIDIA has offered this solution only in the AMD segment. Intel, a sector it has entered recently, still has the mainstream NF4 without the onboard video. This difference gives mixed signals about the audience NVIDIA is targeting.

In the AMD segment, every chipset but NF4 have onboard video, so NVIDIA is out of sync with the mainstream and slightly graphics conscious buyers. In the Intel fragment, however, the NF4 is no competition to the 915 chipset which does indeed have onboard video whereas the 925 lacks it and is hence similar to the NF4 chipset. We would expect NVIDIA to go after the mainstream 915 markets, but the reason NVIDIA hasn’t done that is because, as of today, NVIDIA is competing with Intel in the high-end segment (925, 955…) where the chipsets don’t have onboard video support. In fact, the 915Gx is the only budget oriented chipset that supports onboard video.

The strategy is quite interesting actually, but things would’ve been a lot more interesting if NVIDIA had positioned its 6100 enabled chipsets against the 915Gx chipsets. Intel would’ve had to really run for cover, as our tests have shown that NF4 based boards are far superior to others in their class (ASUS A8N-SLI, for instance), but for now, mainstream AMD users can rejoice and guys at Intel can breathe easy.