The nVidia GeForce 6100 and 6150-series chipsets give AMD users something they have very badly needed, a low cost fully integrated solution. The GeForce 6100-series 'C51' GPUs are built on TSMC's 90 nanometer manufacturing process, and are intended to support current Socket 939 AMD Athlon64 processors.

Memory support is actually up to the memory controller built into the Athlon64 processor, but from what we have seen so far most GeForce 6150-series motherboards will have four DDR DIMM slots, which means up to 4GB of PC3200 DDR RAM can be used. The GeForce 6150-series chipset is connected to the Athlon64 processor via a 1 GHz 16/16 p/Down Hypertransport connection (which is adjustable in the BIOS).

The GeForce 6150 supports a TV encoder, TMDS/DVI support, a slightly higher graphics core speed (475 MHz as opposed to 425 MHz for the 6100), 18 total PCI Express lanes (16 for the videocard, two for misc devices), 1080p/1080i HD playback and higher video scaling.

The GeForce 6100 on the other hand does not support TV encoding or TMDS/DVI output, and only sports standard definition (4:3) video playback.

	NVIDIA GeForce 6150 and NVIDIA nForce 430	NVIDIA GeForce 6100 and NVIDIA nForce 430	NVIDIA GeForce 6100 and NVIDIA nForce 410
TV Encoder	Yes	No	No
TMDS/DVI	Yes	No	No
Graphics Clock	475 MHz	425 MHz	425 MHz
PCI-Express	1x16 2x1	1x16 1x1	1x16 1x1
MPEG-2/WMV9 Playback	high-definition (1080p/1080i)	standard definition	standard definition
Audio	HDA (Azalia)/AC97	HDA (Azalia)/AC97	HDA (Azalia)/AC97
SATA/PATA drives	4/4	4/4	2/4
RAID	0,1,0+1,5	0,1,0+1,5	0,1
Ethernet	10/100/1000	10/100/1000	10/100

The nVidia GeForce 6150 series is not a single chipset solution, and so it is combined with the nforce 430 or 410 Southbridge. Both Southbridge chipsets are Serial ATA II compatible, however the nForce 430 supports RAID modes 0, 1, 0+1 and 5. The nForce 430 series chipsets are also compatible with Intel's new Azalia 7.1 channel high definition audio codec.

Connecting the motherboard chipsets is another HyperTransport connection; this however only runs at 800 MHz with an 8 bit wide Up/Down data bus.

Component output (Y, Pb, Pr) support is vendor specific, some manufacturers like Asus are leaving component output for header brackets, others like Gigabyte and its GA-K8N51PVMT-9 sport Component output natively on the rear I/O.

The GeForce 6150 series graphics cards has two pixel rendering pipelines so that right away should tell users the onboard graphics card is best only for casual gaming. It does however support the DirectX 9.0C standard as well as support for Shader Model 3.0, so the onboard videocard will work just fine with Microsoft's Vista upcoming 3D desktop.

	experts tip: driver versions
	finding the latest chipset drivers for the geforce 6100 series motherboard is not an easy task. one of nvidia's proudest achievements was the unified driver, but when it comes to motherboard chipsets it has broken down into multiple variants. There are no less than seven motherboard chipset drivers to choose from when surfing nvidia's website. Traditionally manufacturers have identified chipsets by the Northbridge. In this instance, nVIDIA lists the nForce4 430/410 Southbridge chipset.
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Both DVI-D and analog monitors are supported on this particular motherboard. Another nice feature is that the onboard graphics card is not automatically disabled when using a PCI Express x16 graphics card. Users who need a lot of desktop screen real estate will certainly appreciate that feature.