The updated Serial ATA II controller of the new Nvidia nForce 500 chipset family can also boast some innovations. Now it can support 6 SATA II ports with the bandwidth of 3Gbit/s, NCQ support and plug-n-play function. The number of Parallel ATA channels supported by the chipset remained the same. While a lot of chipset developers give up parallel interfaces, nForce 500 MCP features two PATA channels. Note that Nvidia chipset allows creating RAID arrays 0, 1, 0+1 from Serial ATA as well as Parallel ATA hard disk drives. Note that the RAID functionality of nForce 500 series is united under the MediaShield banner.

Besides the special technologies that serve to enrich the functionality and features of Nvidia nForce 500 controllers and interfaces, there are also a few ?general-purpose?technologies. Here I would first of all like to point out LinkBoost ?the simplest optimized algorithm that allows improving the performance of the graphics subsystem in case there are two graphics cards working in SLI mode. The idea behind this technology is to overclock by 25% the PCI Express x16 ?graphics?busses and that part of the HyperTransport bus that lies between the SPP and MCP chips. This trick allows Nvidia to speed up the data transfer rate between the graphics cards in SLI configurations.

Another technology Nvidia loves talking about in relation to their new chipsets is SLI-Ready Memory . In fact, this feature has nothing to do with chipsets. SLI-Ready Memory technology implies that the mainboard BIOS supports SPD specification extension suggested by Nvidia ?Enhanced Performance Profile (EPP) . It allows to set as default not only the major memory module timings, but also a few more indepth parameters, including the voltage and secondary latency settings.

The full list of features of all four representatives of the new nForce 500 chipset family is given in the following table: