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Nvidia to Buy ULI Electronics
Steve from Hexus writes "In a move that has taken the technology market by surprise, graphics card and chipset manufacturer Nvidia has announced its intention to buy ULI Electronics, Taiwanese chipset designer and maker: 'NVIDIA openly recognizes that a large proportion of chipset innovation happens in the Far East where ULi is based and that is one of the things that makes ULi an attractive proposition. The move is seen by many as good sense on NVIDIA's part as its own in-house chipset makers are based solely in the USA. ULi, in contrast, has relationships with chipset makers in Taiwan and China, as well as in San Jose.'"
I recently purchased a Asrock 939DualSataII with a ULI chipset. This board came with AGP and PCI Express graphics slots, another slot for a future M2 upgrade board, no whiny fans on the northbridge and is very stable. I am not a overclocker but people were having great luck OC'ing this board. Although most board companies were using the ULI chipsets in their budget boards, this was starting to change. The current ULI chipset competed very well with the Nvidia chipset, in some cases its actually faster and I think if ULI was a seperate company it would be giving Nvidia some great competition in a few years. If you don't want Nvidia what else is there? Via chipsets are not what they used to be and the ATI southbridge has horrible USB 2.0 performance - this is supposed to be fixed in the next southbridge they release. I bought a NF4 based motherboard and had alot of problems with it. I found out through forums that the IDE drivers are buggy so I didnt install them, the 'activearmor' is buggy so I didnt install that and active armor was one of the selling points for me when I bought the motherboard. I never did get all of my driver problems worked out. I hate to say this but my next computer will probably be Intel motherboard with a Intel chipset. I havent used a Intel processor since 1998 but unless ATI or Via releases a much better chipset I don't see myself as having any choice. Nvidia makes great graphics cards so don't take this as a anti-Nvidia comment, I just don't like their chipsets. I suppose its easier for a company like Nvidia to buy ULI than it is to fix their own product, something we have all seen over and over again.
How long before governments look to stop nVidia from buying out the entire chipset market? They're starting to verge on monopoly here. Just when another chipset maker starts to get established, they buy them up.