The nVIDIA GeForce 7050PV/nForce 630a chipset has integrated HDCP. HDCP ensures Blu-Ray and HD-DVD plays at its full resolution.

The GeForce 7050PV offers video output options on par with AMD's impressive 690G chipset, and realistically either option is a good choice. Built on TSMC's 80 nm manufacturing process, nVIDIA was able to integrate the GeForce 7050PV Northbridge and nForce 630a Southbridge into a single tiny slab of silicon. In practical terms this means compact motherboards based on this chipset should run pretty cheap because there is only one core logic.

Looking at the chipset on the ASRock Alive-NF7G-HDready motherboard we can see "NF-7050-630A-A2" marked onto the silicon. This indicates that the A2 stepping is for the retail market.

The GeForce 7050PV-nForce 630A support nVIDIA's PureVideo and the onboard GeForce 7 series videocard is DirectX 9.0C and ShaderModel 3.0 compatible (Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Ready). The GeForce 7050 onboard graphics does not have its own memory and will grab a bit of system memory for its own use, up to 256MB.

The GeForce 7050 supports HDMI although it's up to the manufacturer to implement it on the motherboard (in this case the jack is not included). HDCP is now supported by default, that means you get to watch high definition content at maximum settings whether you're viewing it on your computer monitor or television. Of course if you want to watch standard definition video, the GeForce 7050 can handle that too but it depends on the motherboard manufacturer to offer standard definition output.

There really aren't any significant differences between the GeForce 7050PV and the GeForce 6150 other than the two items that we mentioned up above. This is a really smart move by nVIDIA because the GeForce 6150 chipset is one of the most popular chipsets that PCSTATS has ever tested.