Nvidia nForce 730i Details

Nvidia's highly anticipated integrated graphics platform for the Intel platform; MCP7A will finally arrive on the 23rd of September. The chipset has suffered many delays, slipping from schedule by almost 6 months. However we know that Nvidia will make it up by offering the fastest performing integrated graphics platform.

Integrated graphics has always been a critical part of the market place, so much that Intel dominates the landscape with its integrated graphics offerings and owns more 46% of the market share. Integrated graphics is an alternative to providing minimal level of graphics performance, while keeping the costs and the power consumption down, in some cases it may also help reduce the footprint of the PC. No wonder, these chipsets are very popular with the HTPC (Home Theatre PC) crowd. Integrated graphics is also a major criteria with regards to OEM design wins for the mobile space (laptops), no wonder all the major players dont want to leave this segment anytime soon.

In terms of performance, the MCP7A with 16 Shader processors outruns AMD's 790GX and completely obliterates Intel's G45 in Crysis & Call of Duty 4. It will be a landslide victory for Nvidia because it is competing with only Intel's G45 on the Intel side of things.

MCP7A will take the branding of nForce 730i & will be available in two flavors; Geforce 9300 & 9400. The only differentiator between them being the clockspeeds. nForce 730i will be replacing the long-in-the-tooth nForce 630i. The chipset will include Hybrid SLI support and we would not be surprised to see Nvidia leverage the integrated graphics for tasks like PhysX. The next IGP from Nvidia will be based on the GT200 (budget) series, codenamed iGT209 and is scheduled for Q1 2009.

The delay of this chipset was one of the reasons cited for Nvidia's lowered guidance couple of months back and from the looks of it, this will be a big winner for Nvidia.

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