The nForce Professional 2200 MCP chip communicates directly with the Opteron via the HyperTransport link which currently operates at 800MHz. There is flexible PCI-Express which has 4 controllers and 40 lanes. This chipset has integrated gigabit Ethernet, 4 SATA 3Gb/s, 4 ATA-133, NVIDIA RAID, and Native Command-Queuing. There are also 10 USB ports available and PCI 2.3 if the motherboard manufacturer wants to include it. The nForce Professional 2050 is a I/O companion chip for the nForce Processional 2200 MCP. This chip is sort of like a traditional southbridge would by handling I/O functions. Each 2050 chip provides additional I/O capability by adding 4 controllers and 20 lanes to the PCI-Express bus. It also adds another gigabit Ethernet port, and 4 more SATA 3Gb/s.