Hybrid NVIDIA Chipset Motherboards Launched

MojoKid writes "Filling the price gap between the high-end nForce 680i SLI and more affordable 650i SLI chipsets, without sacrificing any advanced features, motherboard manufacturer Asus has created a hybrid motherboard chipset in cooperation with NVIDIA, dubbed the "Dual X16 SLI". Designed for the Intel platform, the chipset combination employed on the P5N32-E SLI Plus motherboard offers true, dual PCI Express x16 electrical connections for graphics, dual Gig-E LAN support and a slew of other features found on high-end 680i boards. HotHardware pits the P5N32-E SLI Plus against an nForce 680i SLI to see if Asus' hybrid chipset approach truly offers all of the performance of the more expensive 680i SLI for a fraction of the cost."

Comments

Re:Slow news day

[julesh]

Manufacturer announces slightly different model of thing at lower price. How did this get in? Slow news day?

To be fair, this is a rather unexpected announcement. Usually new motherboards only come up when the chipset manufacturers release new chips. What Asus have done here is to use the existing chips in a way that they weren't originally designed for. And they've come up with a stunning offer: they're beating the price of the next cheapest motherboard on the market with the same feature set by nearly 50%. These things are available now for about £90+VAT; their closest competitor is £140+VAT. For a geek news site, I'd say that's a pretty important story.

Re:What is 'hybrid' about this?

[julesh]

It's hybrid because it uses the northbridge from one chipset and the southbridge from another. Sounds like a reasonable use of the word to me.

Re:What they mean is

[mattmacf]

Close, but not quite. I think you have your definitions backwards. Replace "electrical" with "physical" and "lanes of signaling" with "electrical lanes" and you've got it. The Wikipedia article explains it better that I would be able to.

A connection between any two PCIe devices is known as a "link", and is built up from a collection of 1 or more lanes. All devices must minimally support single-lane (x1) link. Devices may optionally support wider links composed of 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, or 32 lanes. This allows for very good compatibility in two ways: A PCIe card will physically fit (and work correctly) in any slot that is at least as large as it is (e.g. an x1 sized card will work in any sized slot), and a slot of a large physical size (e.g. x16) can be wired electrically with fewer lanes (e.g. x1 or x8) as long as it provides the power and ground connections required by the larger physical slot size. In both cases, PCIe will negotiate the highest mutually supported number of lanes. It is not possible to place a physically larger PCIe card (e.g. a 16x sized card) into a smaller slot, even though the two would be signal-compatible if it were possible.