Oh... did you forget that Nvidia made AMD motherboards with some nice features for a while?
I used an nForce 2 for my Athlon XP "Barton" 3200+, and an nForce 4 something-or-other (I think "Ultra" is the word I am looking for) for my Opteron 165 (which was my first dual-core CPU and my first 64-bit CPU, and I overclocked the f*ck outta that thing with the insaaaaaane
stock cooler). That was my first PCI-Express system if I recall correctly. I loved the ActiveArmor hardware firewall on that nForce 4. I think I built that in 2006. In 2003 or 2004 one of my friends paid waaaaaay too much money for an Alienware system. nForce 3 with AMD's first-gen 64-bit processors which introduced x86-64/AMD64. I think he had an Athlon FX-51. SATA-1 HDDs in RAID 0. I can
not for the life of me recall the graphics card. But I experienced a lot of games for the first time on that machine, like Doom 3, HL2, F.E.A.R., and a few others. I recall nForce 3 not being the best, but otherwise AMD+nForce used to be such an awesome team. Too bad Intel + nForce wasn't really anything special. I did build an nForce 6 system using an Intel CPU (maybe an E6750?) for a friend's dad, and maybe one or two others for other friends. I remember something about Intel and nVidia having fights back then too. Don't recall the details. As the decades pile on, details on computer industry cat fights start to get real murky.
Honestly I think the first real disruption to the sound card industry was what Nvidia showed you could do a good sound solution on a motherboard.
I think you are referring to nVidia SoundStorm? I never knew much about it, but was always curious. Wasn't that only for nForce 1?
I was a big fan of the Aureal Vortex 2 sound card, and that was the only card to get me away from Creative Labs for a while. I used the Vortex 2 in my P3 500MHz machine and my Athlon Tbird machine.
I'm learning some interesting things about their historical catalog on their wikipedia page.
en.wikipedia.org
Apparently at one point they sold a product called the Turtle Beach Rio, which was a daughter board, designed for the Sound Blaster daughter board connector, which added wavetable midi synthesis to regular sound blaster cards. It even had a ram slot for expanding sample size.
Man, if I had known about this back in the day before my AWE32, I would probably have jumped on it.
One of these days I'm gonna go back through Turtle Beach's history, as you have done now. I remember my dad had a few of their cards, but which ones and why not even he can recall. Not even sure if we still have any 'em buried away somewhere. That was so long ago...
It was based on a VIA KT266A.
Ah yes, my brother, my father and I used quite a few generations of VIA chipsets. Certainly during my Athlon Tbird and Athlon XP days, probably well before. Don't remember the chipset in my P3 system or my dad's P3 system. My vague memory recalls SiS stuff thrown in the mix.
An enthusiast motherboard witjh an MSRP of $139 that actually sold below MSRP in retail... Different times.
You don't know how badly I miss when $140 was still the general price point of high-end motherboards.
