Conclusion

The return of NVIDIA to the market of integrated chipsets seems to be as successful as the company’s first steps in that field. NVIDIA’s new GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 chipsets have a good chance to win the market, but in a slightly different manner than before.

If you thought that NVIDIA would offer a fast but inexpensive solution for economical gamers, you may feel truly disappointed. The graphics core of NVIDIA’s new chipsets, although supports DirectX 9 and Shader Model 3.0, falls far from the performance of even the cheapest standalone graphics cards of today. In fact, only previous-generation games run at an acceptable speed on the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100. But well, the chipset developer didn’t even try to meet the needs of gamers. The positioning of the new products is completely different. NVIDIA’s new integrated chipsets are intended for home multimedia PCs built according to the digital home concept. Viewed from this perspective, the GeForce 6150 and the GeForce 6100 seem much more appealing. Compatible with the upcoming operating systems and feature-rich, NVIDIA’s chipsets will permit to build inexpensive, small and functional computers. They provide all modern interfaces, have a high-performance network controller with a hardware firewall, reproduce HD content and support High Definition Audio. What else could you wish to have in a multimedia PC? And the price of a typical MicroATX mainboard based on a GeForce 6150 or GeForce 6100 will be as low as $80.

It should be noted that NVIDIA’s new integrated chipsets are undoubtedly preferable to ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200 not only because the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 are slightly faster in a majority of applications, but also because they offer a much wider functionality. Functionality is a strong argument in the eyes of PC integrators. So, we only have to wait for stable and reliable mainboards to appear and it may take some time if some technical problems persist.