GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 IGPs

The GeForce 6150 and 6100 chips include a graphics core, a HyperTransport bus controller to communicate with the central processor and a PCI Express bus controller.

As for CPUs supported, the GeForce 6150 and 6100 support HyperTransport frequencies up to 1GHz. It means that either of these chipsets can become a foundation for both Socket 939 and Socket 754 systems and work with any processor from AMD’s Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 and Sempron series.

The GeForce 6150 and 6100 are both equipped with a PCI Express x16 bus which can be used to connect an external graphics card to be used instead of the integrated graphics or as an additional graphics accelerator, working together with the integrated one. By default, these chipsets do not disable the integrated graphics core when an external graphics card is installed and thus can support four-monitor configurations. By the way, ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200, another popular integrated chipset for the Athlon 64 platform, only allows the integrated core and the external graphics card to work simultaneously if the graphics card’s GPUs belongs to the Radeon series. The GeForce 6100 series chipsets are free from such a limitation and support any graphics card.

Besides PCI Express x16, the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 have PCI Express x1 lanes for connecting external devices: the GeForce 6150 has two PCI Express x1 lanes and the simpler GeForce 6100 has one such lane.

The integrated graphics core of these chipsets supports Unified Memory Architecture. In other words, dedicated graphics memory is not installed on mainboards based on these IGPs ?instead, the graphics core will use some of the system memory for its needs. The portion of system memory allocated to the graphics core may vary depending on the running application ?NVIDIA uses this technique in its cheap graphics cards with the TurboCache technology.

Although the integrated graphics cores from NVIDIA have numeric markings close to 6200, their performance is far inferior to that of the GeForce 6200. This comes just from the architectural features of the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 ?although compatible with DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3.0, these cores have only 2 pixel pipelines and 1 vertex shader. So, the GeForce 6150 and 6100 do not try to compete even with low-end GeForce 6 series cards in terms of performance. By the way, the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 architecture is very different: this graphics core has 4 pixel pipelines and processes vertices on the central processor.

The GeForce 6150 and 6100 modifications differ mainly in the frequency of the graphics core: 475MHz and 425MHz, respectively. This is 43% and 28% higher than the operational frequency of the graphics core in the ATI Radeon Xpress 200.

Frequency is not the only point of difference between the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100, though. The former and more advanced IGP supports TMDS/DVI interface and dual-monitor configurations ?the GeForce 6100 doesn’t have that. Besides that, the GeForce 6150 features a hardware TV encoder which allows mainboards on this chipset to have an analog video-Out.

Another exclusive feature of the GeForce 6150 and 6100 is their support of NVIDIA’s PureVideo, a hardware video decoding and post-processing technology. Unlike the GeForce 6100, the GeForce 6150 supports HD video standards and high-quality scaling. It is also expected to support the H.264 format after an upcoming driver update.

To everything sum up and to compare the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 with the ATI Radeon Xpress 200, we built the following table: