UPDATED: Foxconn drops nForce 790i

Posted at: 3:37pm 1st August 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Nvidia denies that its quitting the chipset business, as Foxconn drops its nForce 790i-based Dreadnought board

Foxconn has halted development of its nForce 790i-based Quantum Force Dreadnought board, amid reports that the chipset is unreliable. This morning, The Inquirer claimed that Foxconn was one of three motherboard manufacturers, along with Gigabyte and DFI, who had dropped their 790i boards, implying that the problem was related to the weak packaging and thermal management issues of some mobile GPUs that Nvidia admitted to this month.

While Nvidia acknowledges that Foxconn has ceased development of the Dreadnought board, the company’s PR manager for the UK and Northern Europe, Ben Berraondo, told Custom PC that Gigabyte’s 790i board is ‘still on their roadmap, and they’re still coming out with it.’ Berraondo also said that he ‘didn’t even know DFI were meant to be making a 790i board,’ so the board may not have even been in development in the first place.

While Foxconn claims that it’s had problems with the chipset, every other motherboard manufacturer that we’ve spoken to says they haven’t had any problems with it. MSI’s Richard Stewart told Custom PC that ‘from MSI’s side, we haven’t seen any major problems with our P7N2 Diamond, which is based on nForce 790i, so we don’t currently have any plans to drop the chipset from our lineup.’ Meanwhile, Asus’ Iain Bristow said that ‘Asus are still selling and producing the Striker 2 Extreme and Striker 2 NSE range of motherboards, which utilise the 790i Ultra and 790i Nvidia chipsets respectively. There are currently no plans to change this.’

The bad press surrounding nForce 790i has prompted speculation that Nvidia may be exiting the chipset business. Today, DigiTimes reported that Nvidia decided to quit making chipsets after a meeting this week apparently showed that motherboard manufacturers weren’t interested in new Nvidia chipsets. The site says that ‘Nvidia will transfer the chipset team to working on GPU projects.’

However, Berraondo from Nvidia described the story as ‘complete fabrication,’ adding that ‘Nvidia is still very much in the chipset business and has no plans to exit, as several exciting new products on the horizon will show.’