Modern Chipset Identification Guide

[kureshii]

I'm sure any geek who is just a little more familiar with hardware gets bombarded with questions about processors and motherboards all the time. It just occurred to me that when you try to explain all this to a hardware newbie, it can get a little overwhelming. What's the difference between 780a and 780i? What about 790GX and 790FX? Or P45 and P55?

To make things a bit simpler for all who fight the good fight against ignorance, I've tried to make some chipset identification diagrams [huge PNG warning!]. Right now they're somewhat sparse and also quite incomplete (especially for AMD/Nvidia chipsets). If you have suggestions for info to add in, or corrections to make, please reply in this thread.

A few things to note:

• I left out other chipset manufacturers (VIA), as well as some chipsets (Intel Atom, Nvidia ION) for brevity and to avoid confusing readers (i.e. hardware newbies). Server and laptop/mobile chipsets are also not included. For now, this identification guide will only cover desktop chipsets.
• As the guide name says, this is for modern chipsets. So I'm leaving out chipsets from earlier than Intel 965 era, early AMD 7-series chipsets, as well as the older Nvidia chipsets. Basically, this guide only covers chipsets from the last 2-3 years.
• I have not included any information about the chipsets (save for socket info on Intel chipsets), if you feel there's good information to be included (for the sake of the target audience, remember), do let me know and furnish said info if you can (I'm no hardware guru). I'm trying to strike a balance between including useful information, and preventing information overload.
• Some of the chipsets are missing chipset block diagrams, if you happen to have/find any diagrams of those chipsets, please let me know. * kureshii curses AMD and Nvidia for being too lazy to include useful block diagrams
• Sorry about the image format, I'll optimise it for the web once it's nearer final form.

Intel Modern Chipset Guide (#edit: P33 in the diagram should be P31, my bad)
AMD Modern Chipset Guide
Nvidia Modern Chipset Guide

[Arveene]

Very nice! I'm quite sure I'll find this handy in the future.

Question: Any chipsets you're having trouble finding diagrams for?

[rl9009]

Great start.

Just to comment on Intel's segment, Intel's look a little complex than AMD's. AMD only has 3, Intel has lots to choose from...

[kureshii]

Arveene: Any chipset that's there without a chipset diagram needs one (although I believe some of the chipset diagrams can be shared by 2 or more models, I just don't know which)

rl9009: I should add that AMD's lineup in the image is far from complete, I only included those 3 because they confuse me the least. I'm still trying to figure out where to slot the other remaining obscure chipsets into the picture... they also haven't released any new chipsets in a long time.

IMO, Intel's segment is actually simpler than Nvidia's or AMD's. You can ignore the Q-models because hardly anyone buys those (maybe I'll do that in a future revision), and once you do that you'll see that there really only are 3 main product lines easily sorted by generation. If you want to stay "modern", you can pretty much just get the latest generation and ignore the rest.

Nvidia has 3 product lines, 2 nForce ones and the GeForce line. They are delineated for AMD or Intel systems by an -i or -a suffix. Simple enough. Until you realise that certain product numbers available for AMD systems are not available for Intel systems, and vice-versa. And this suffix scheme does not carry over to the GeForce line, which are also exclusive only to either system brand.

As for AMD, I'm still figuring out where to slot the 770, 790X and 800-series.

AMD's chipset and Nvidia's chipset nomenclature had me reading and re-reading. Intel's chipset lineup looks much simpler (after the 965/975 lines), but that might have something to do with me being more familiar with Intel's chipsets than either AMD's or Nvidia's.