INTEL

[Skuzzy]

I have looked at the briefs they have on the WEB site for the NForce, but have not gotten any firm docs on the chipset yet.

I am really curious if they have a compatible mode to run in or if they went with a new interface design and require special drivers.

I have nore read any recent news about it, so my questions actually may already be answered.

[bloom25]

The nForce does have a couple performance boosting features in it that are pretty exciting.  First is the Dual Channel DDR ram setup (it does not require pairs or same size ram chips like the early pentiums).  The second is a prefetch ability of the chipset northbridge.  (Almost like a L3 cache.)

As for drivers, one of the features Nvidia is touting is a "unified driver", i.e. only 1 driver for everything.  (This is better than via's 4.)

[bloom25]

Oh Skuzzy, as for the AGP 4x thing.  That was a problem with the AMD 750 and Via kt133 chipsets.  (With some tweaking it can be made to work reliably on the via kt133 and kt133a.)

On the newer DDR ram chipsets there are no issues with AGP 4x anymore that I've heard of. (The AMD 760 chipset is incredibly stable.)