Introduction

nVidia has been the biggest name in 3D graphics over the last 10 years. With its dominance of 3DFX with the TNT2 series graphics cards, as well as the eventual acquisition of 3DFX over six years ago, nVidia has really started to show what its able to do for the 3D market. While there have been ups and downs (namely the GeForce FX 5xxx series cards as the big downer), today nVidia is the leader in 3D graphics and with what we can see coming in the future, its going to be for some time.

nVidia was the first 3D graphics designer to start producing chipsets for motherboards based on the AMD architecture. Again there were a few ups and downs (the original nForce AMD Athlon XP chipset), nVidia has pulled its R&D team into the 21st century and introduced a series of chipsets that simply were the envy of any chipset manufacturer out there. nVidia has ruled the AMD Athlon market in terms of sales and performance in its nForce 2 and 3 chipsets and has pushed companies like VIA to the backburners as the chipset of choice.

With new agreements with Intel, nVidia has acquired the licence to produce Netburst supporting chipsets, which has now led to the release of the nForce 4 Intel Edition based chipsets. The first chip based for this technology was simply not fully up to specs and plagued with compatibility problems with the Pentium-D and Pentium Extreme Edition CPU's, nVidia has moved to producing a second generation of chipset supporting Dual PCI Express x16 graphics slots.

We have previously looked at the ASUS Pentium 4 offering and today we're looking at Gigabyte's offering.