EPOX 8RDA3i, User Manual

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Introduction
Page 1-3
Chipset Overview
This board is designed with nVidia chipset, nForce2 TM Ultra 400 (also known as
nForce2 TM SPP) as North Bridge and nForce2 TM MCP as South Bridge. NVIDIA ®
has developed the next generation System Platform Processor (SPP) nForce™ 2, to
provide the highest-performance, fullest-featured system architecture for the AMD
Athlon XP Processor™. The second generation System Platform Processor works
together with the second generation of the NVIDIA Media Communication
Processor, the MCP.
The nForce2 was architected specifically for the AMD AthlonXP Processor.
NVIDIA’s patent-pending DASP (Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Pre-Processor)
technology intelligently predicts and prefetches requests from the AMD Athlon XP
Processor to boost system performance beyond its nominal speed grade.
The nForce2 Ultra 400 delivers twice the bandwidth by implementing the new
NVIDIA DualDDR™ Memory Architecture speed to DDR 400 memories. This
generation System Platform Processor also implements the AGP 8× interface,
HyperTransport Link, and is fully compliant with industry standard power manage-
ment specifications such as ACPI 2.0 and PCI Power Management Interface (PMI)
Spec 1.1.
The NVIDIA
®
nForce™ MCP Media and Communications Processor (MCP)
provides a highly integrated, high-performance, low-cost PC2001-compliant
peripheral controller that supports NVIDIA processor bridge functionality for
next-generation PCs. No other single-device controller provides all the functionality
of NVIDIA’s MCP.