Tag: nForce

The nForce is a motherboard chipset created by Nvidia for AMD Athlon and Duron microprocessors. The chipset shipped in 3 varieties; 220, 415, and 420. 220 and 420 are very similar with each having the integrated GPU, but the 220 only has a single channel of memory available whereas 420 has the 128-bit TwinBank design. The 415 variant again has the dual-channel memory interface, but has no integrated graphics.
The nForce chipset introduced a dual-channel memory controller to the mainstream motherboard market, doubling theoretical throughput, and offering very competitive performance most especially in workstation class benchmarks. This dual-channel design was deemed necessary largely because of the added integrated GeForce 2 MX class video hardware. For the relatively fast integrated graphics processor (IGP) to have adequate memory bandwidth it needed more than to simply share a single memory channel with the Athlon XP CPU. In fact, the K7’s EV6 CPU bus was unable to take advantage of…