When nVidia announced its first 500 series chipset for the Intel platform, the market was looking forward to a chipset that could perform, after seeing how well the AMD variants worked. We were all expecting to get our Core 2’s blazing on the 500 series for Intel; unfortunately, nVidia dropped the ball here. While a new MCP was introduced, the Northbridge or SPP as its known from nVidia was the same C19 chip that was used on the nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition, the same woeful memory controller and overclocks followed yet still remained fairly popular due to SLI support.

Learning from this mistake, nVidia took its 500 series for Intel and threw them down the toilet and started to work on the 600 series, which would be the first new chipset for Intel platforms using completely new and improved silicon.