Is this the chipset that nvidia is supposed to have worked with Via on to ensure Nano support?

A HP mininote v2 using Nano and this mGPU would be an awesome product that would take a dump on every other netbook from a great height!

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This chipset in ULV form is the one being used in the new MacbookAir, so there is no reason why it couldn't be used in netbooks like the HP Mininote, as adequately demonstrated in the power consumption page of this preview.

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Do you have any thoughts or speculations you would like to share on whether this is the fabled Via Nano integrated chipset?

It would be big news for those of us awaiting a powerful HP mininote v2..........

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A lot of netbook newsites are reporting drastic price cuts in the mininote 2133, which is fueling speculation that a v2 may be due out soon.

As it happens; there is already a petition requesting HP use the Nano + MCP79 combo in a future v2 mininote:

http://www.petitiononline.com/mininote/petition.html

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That's my understanding, too. I was wondering what the delay was caused by, now my guess is that Apple wanted the exclusive for launch. Let's hope some new mini-ITX 2.0 Nano boards with this chipset will appear soon.

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We will be updating the article shortly. It has been an all night meeting marathon with the motherboard suppliers and NVIDIA trying to get answers on the AHCI problems, memory performance, and other minor items we discovered. ASUS sent us a new BIOS that we will test in a couple of hours, the AHCI problems have diminished greatly after yet another clean install of Vista SP1 (still have some minor pauses during heavy drive load), and we feel safe enough in taking a detailed look at the motherboards in a couple of days.

That said, NVIDIA surprised us with this chipset, probably the best one (all around) on the market for HTPC setups and casual gaming performance now. That is not to take anything away from the AMD platforms, personally I am running a 8750 and GF8200 hooked up to a new 52" LCD, if the price was right, the 9350e is a really sweet processor that will greatly lower power requirements on the AMD side, as we will see next week. Hopefully, AMD will respond with multi-channel LPCM output in their IG chipset. If that is not important, the 780g/790GX is great. ;)

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30% cpu utilization for a HTPC is good? Umm, I guess I come from a different perspective then.

Quite a few HTPC's are for streaming, so with this chipset it is almost impossible to stream data while watching what you are streaming.

Did I misunderstand something here or what?

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Why would it be impossible to stream media? Most media streams are only a fraction of 100Mbit ethernet, even a full Blu-ray disc rarely hits 20+Mbit. The CPU usage charts for network traffic in this review are for full thoroughput tests, the NIC will never come close to pushing that much traffic when streaming media.

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I stream 300mbs/sec all the time on my HTPC with my gig Intel nic. I guess you never streamed across multiple devices. It is called VOD, if you do not believe me look at the newest tivo.

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Does nVidia intend to have this GPU on an AMD chipset at all, or have they given up competing there?

Can we expect this chipset to be used in Intel laptops (other than Apple), and will they still get the Centrino brand? If Intel insists on requiring their own chipsets for that brand, I'm afraid laptop manufacturers will not use it despite its obvious advantages.

Does something like hybrid-SLI work on this chipset, to get better performance from a 9400/9500/9600GT card?

From the Apple adverts it seems dynamic switching between the IGP and stand-alone GPU will be a reality in its laptops... is that the case also with the desktop version that you test today? I guess you'd have mentioned it if it were... Is it at least planned with future drivers or something?

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