Nvidia will ship nForce this month, allowing mobo makers to ship boards based on the Athlon chipset by "the end of September", according to a company spokesman.

Abit, Asustek, Gigabyte and MSI will all be producing nForce-based boards, the spokesman (cited by ExtremeTech) added.

All of which ties in nicely with the recent suggestions of a September ship-date for the Abit, Asustek, Gigabyte boards published over at Tom's Hardware. There's still no official word on the presence of Dell among that story's list of nForce-supporting PC vendors, but we hear that the company is indeed working on an nForce-based box - but one based on the Pentium III, not the Athlon.

nForce is derived from the chipset Nvidia designed for Microsoft's Xbox console, which is powered by a PIII. That makes a PIII-based nForce a possibility, but it's certainly not a part the Nvidia itself has ever mentioned. Other suggestions, that Nvidia is a lot closer to licensing the Pentium 4 bus, muddy the waters further. Surely, Dell would prefer to use a P4 in its desktops, rather than a PIII?

Meanwhile, we still can't help feeling the arrival of nForce and AMD's next generation of desktop Athlon CPUs, based on the Palomino core, can't be a coincidence. ®