More bad news for Nvidia - PCI prefetch issues

[WalkinTarget]

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?op...10222&Itemid=1

Not that the PCI bus is the preferred method of moving data on your rig, but why Nvidia didn't pony up the money to accomplish this is beyond me.

Quick take on the situation:
Nvidia has infringed a patent regarding to PCI prefetch that OPTi holds and although OPTi no longer makes PC chips, they now license intellectual property. The problem in this case is that Nvidia didn't come out on agreeable terms with OPTi and has to remove the PCI prefetch feature from its chipsets.

[Apache Warrior]

Boy am I glad my new motherboard has an Intel Chipset.
Apache

[WalkinTarget]

Honestly, this only affects users that need to update their BIOS for any issues, or someone using PCI devices.

I fear that my time buying eVGA mainboards has reached an end, as they are known for needing BIOS updates to fix some bugs here and there. Then again, I'm not sure if it only affects multiple PCI devices, or whether it could impact only a single PCI device on a board.

Time will tell what happens in the end, but I'm glad I have a stable BIOS (from eVGA - only took them a few months too !!) on this 750i board.

All the bad press is surely hurting them more than we can imagine. Would it be possible to see Nvidia merge with a big name such as AMD did with ATI ?

[Duke{CLR}]

Regardless what happens EVGA would still support it the best they could.

[Apache Warrior]

Maybe Intel should merge with Nvidia.
Apache

[AmazingRedd]

wow, i might be affected by this now that i'm planning to upgrade my cpu.

[Donziboy2]

Well erm read the bottum of the post.... They updated it lol...

Update: Nvidia got back to us with a following comment. " This is old news from Jan 2007. NVIDIA implemented and distributed an SBIOS fix to disable the feature starting in Jan 2007, and disabled it in future hardware products that were introduced after this date. AMD is currently being sued by Opti on the exact same issue." but we still think that there is more to it.

[WalkinTarget]

LoL .. typical Fud stuff, but I posted it nonetheless. I hate linking their articles, but some end up ringing true at some point.

[mapes]

I'm kinda curious how this works. I haven't looked at PCI specs deeply before but, honestly this is not part of the spec?