nVidia was rarely competing on their merits in the chipset space. They were popular on AMD because the other options were spotty at best. I loved my SiS 735 a

nVidia was rarely competing on their merits in the chipset space. They were popular on AMD because the other options were spotty at best. I loved my SiS 735 and ULI M1695 boards, but virtually nobody touched the chipsets-- almost exclusively second tier manufacturers. VIA was the leader before nVidia hit, but they had a long string of half-baked launches... you had to assume that you'd wait for the second-revision chipset. On the Intel side, the only place they competed was in a specific enthusiast gamer segment. The nForce 780i chipset was hot running and unpopular, but people bought it because they wanted to run SLI. I srtill have one sitting around, from a "gaming PC" I fished out of a dustbin The heatsink on the chipset is comically large and cries out for a fan.