ATI's CrossFire coming on September 26, NVIDIA Tforce (C51) on September 27

The Inquirer gives us a small update. Earlier they reported ATI would launch its CrossFire on the 24th but that was a typo. They now clarify the release will happen on Monday 26th and one day later on September 27th we can expect the launch of NVIDIA's C51.

The C51 is NVIDIA's first chipset with integrated graphics sincs the popular nForce 2. The chipset will be called Tforce and there will be some variations like one called Tforce 6150 supporting NVIDIA's Pure Video and with an additional 1x PCI Expresss slot.

This chip is actually north bridge as Nvidia could not put a north bridge and a south bridge on one chip this time. The other north bridge will be known as 6100 and this baby will have same NV44 derived core integration but won't support an additional 1x PCIe slot or Pure Video.

Both north bridges will feature cut down versions of the Geforce 6200 TC core but we are informed that you can expect just two pipelines from this part. We reported before that it's expected that Tforce 6150 and 6100 graphic should be a little bit faster than ATI Radeon Xpress 200.

When it comes to the south bridge Nvidia will offer two SKUs. The first one will be called Nforce 420 and will support four S-ATA ports, Gigabit Ethernet and Raid 5. The second one will be known as Nforce 410 and will include two S-ATA ports, Raid IO and 10/100 Mbit LAN.