Motherboards and Buses - Upgrading and Repairing PCs - page 253

VIA Chipsets
Until recently,VIA Technologies, Inc., was the largest chipset and processor supplier out-
side of Intel and AMD. Originally founded in 1987, VIA is based in Taipei, Taiwan, and
is the largest integrated circuit design firm onthe island. VIAis afabless company,which
means it farms out the manufacturing to other companies with chip foundry capability.
To learn more about VIA's chipsets for AMD processors, see “VIA Chipsets for AMD”
and“VIAChipsetsforAthlon64”in Chapter4 , “ MotherboardsandBuses , ”of Upgrading
and Repairing PCs, 19 th edition, included in its entirety on the DVD packaged with this
book.
SiS Chipsets
SiS has produced a variety of chipsets for the Athlon, Duron, Athlon XP and Athlon 64
processors, some of which use a single-chip design and others of which use a high-speed
two-chip design similar to other vendors' chipsets.
For more information, see “SiS Chipsets for AMD” and “SiS Chipsets for Athlon 64” in
Chapter 4 , “ Motherboards and Buses , ” of Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 19 th edition, in-
cluded in its entirety on the DVD packaged with this topic.
NVIDIA Chipsets
NVIDIA, although best known for its popular GeForce line of graphics chipsets, also be-
came a popular vendor of chipsets for the AMD Athlon/Duron/Athlon XP processor fam-
ily thanks to its nForce product families. The original nForce was a descendant of the
custom chipset NVIDIA created for the Microsoft Xbox console game system. For more
information about nForce and nForce 2, see “NVIDIA nForce Chipsets for AMD.” For
more information about nForce 3 and nForce 4 chipsets, see “NVIDIA Chipsets for Ath-
lon 64.” Both are found in Chapter 4 , “ Motherboards and Buses ,” of Upgrading and Re-
pairing PCs, 19 th edition, included in its entirety on the DVD packaged with this topic.
Currently, nVIDIA offers nForce chipsets for AMD 64-bit processors in the following
families: nForce500,nForce600,nForce700,andnForce900;theGeForce chipsets with
integrated graphics for AMD 64-bit processors are in the GeForce 6 series, GeForce 7
series, and GeForce 8 series.
ThenForce500seriessupportsAMDprocessorsusingtheAM2socketsuchastheAthlon
64 X2, Athlon 64, and Sempron models based on the Athlon 64. Models labeled SLI sup-
port two-way or three-way SLI, and all models include support for PATA and SATA hard
disks (most support 3Gbps), RAID, and integrated audio (AC97 or HD audio, depending
upon the individual model). Fast or Gigabit Ethernet support varies with chipset model.
For details, see http://www.nvidia.com/page/nforce5_amd.html .