Posted on Thursday, October 04 2007 @ 0:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The site nicknames the C72 "Frankenbridge" - partly because some motherboard makers fear this chipset will offer little more than the old nForce 680i chipset.
The 680i features got updated with support for all the latest and greatest from Intel’s own kitchen, with improvements in memory controller and memory pre-fetching area. But the PCIe 2.0 support is rather interesting. Instead of going native, Nvidia is now introducing a third chip as a part of its chipset, the PCIe 1.1-to-2.0 bridge chip for three built-in PEG slots.
One problem of this approach is questionable bandwidth achieved by this bridge, since we all know that two main features that 2.0 brings is ability to churn 150W through the slot (in x16 variant) and increased data rate. Our sources have told us that we can expect PCIe 1.1 style bandwidth, and that new bridge chip only brings more juice to the table.
This is not as bad as it might look, since we are seeing that GPUs aren’t maxing out PCIe 1.1 x16 spec (4GB/s downstream, 4GB/s upstream), but still it will be greeted with a rather chilly looks.
What won’t be chilly is the thermal dissipation. The old 680i was known to overheat by quite a bit, since the cooling system could not dissipate enough heat from the substrate and the actual PCB, resulting in extremely high temperatures on the chip. With two closely packed chips, it was expected that power dissipation (TCP) now rose to incredible 48 Watts, or on the same level as Intel Core 2 Duo E6300.
This is very first time we have a chipset part that heats more than a possible CPU that might end on it.
