NVIDIA MCP73 Preview
Bluetooth 18 Aug 2007

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Introduction

From what know, NVIDIA is slated to do a hard launch of the MCP73 chipset that is, you can purchase boards as early as 25 September 2007. A paper launch is expected on the 2nd week of September.

NVIDIA intend to promote the MCP73 as an alternative to the Intel G33/G965 chipset with a more powerful Purevideo embedded integrated graphics.

Similar to the 7050/630A series, this new chipset enables the integrated board to be used as the base for a HTPC as it supports H.264/VC-1 decoding. It is still a DX9.

We understand that there will be 3 variants of the chipset, they are :

GeForce 7050-630i, GeForce 7025-630i and 7025-610i. All the 3 has a DX9.0c, SM3 compliant graphics core running 300MHz RAMDAC. NView is supported. Purevideo HD is supposed to be available only on the 7050-630i or MCP73PV.

The MCP73PV (7050-630i) will support up to single channel DDR2-800 while the other 2 supports up to single channel DDR2-667.

The chipset will support one IDE interface, 10 USB ports, 4 SATA II RAID ports. Mediashield RAID 0,1,5 is supported on the higher end chipset. Boards can support DVI, HDMI, D-SUB output. That depends on manufacturers on how they wish to layout their product.

Most of the boards will come with a single GbE and HDA using various codecs.

As final drivers are not ready, we show you some preliminary results using an external graphics card :

As we can see, the MCP73 is single channel DDR2-800 and it can perform quite well against the G965. No doubt the memory performance is poorer, the rest of the results arent' very far off from the G965 chipset.

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