Nforce 5 up and runningIn various labs and fabsBy Fuad Abazovic: Thursday 13 January 2005, 13:39NVIDIA WAS HAPPY to confirm that Nforce 5 or Nforce for Intel platforms as the firm calls it, is taped out and up and running. It's already a real thing.We asked around and learned that there are indeed some Nforce 5 reference platforms that have been sent to various addresses for evaluations and valuations. Motherboard manufacturers are trying to make boards from Nvidia reference design while memory vendors have to test the memory and see how it runs.There is a substantially big interest for Nforce 5 especially as it will accommodate Nvidia SLI dual graphic port marchitecture. There will be at least two variations of Nforce 5 chipset - one with SLI and one without, while we heavily suspect that there will be one more low cost Nforce 5 chipset. Call it an educated guess.Someone even suggested that Nvidia might not use Nforce 5 in a naming convention but I find that very unlikely. At least we can be sure it will be called Nforce. It's still scheduled for Q1 2005.