Nvidia guns for integrated GPUs with $50 GeForce 7 board

Nvidia has rolled out its latest entry-level graphics chip, a GeForce 7 series product it hopes will win business back PC vendors choosing to stick with GPUs integrated into chipsets, and to persuade punters with low-cost PCs to do the same.

The GeForce 7200 GS is only a DirectX 9-class GPU, but it's Windows Vista Premium friendly. It doesn't support Nvidia's SLI multi-card technology, and it's only capable of connecting to DDR 2 video memory across a single-channel, 64-bit bus. It can also borrow system memory from the host PC, thanks to Nvidia's TurboCache technology.

Nothing special spec-wise, but enough to deliver twice the performance that the "latest" integrated graphics cores do, Nvidia claimed. And all for around $50 (£25/€37), at added. The chip's available from today in boards from a wide array of add-in card makers.