ABIT Puts NVIDIA’s Vanta Chip on Its New ZX-21 Motherboard

ABIT and NVIDIA announced the ZX-21 today, a motherboard with NVIDIA’s Vanta graphics processor built right onto the board. It is the next generation of ABIT’s well-known BX and ZX boards, this time skipping the graphics card slot entirely for buyers on a budget.

The Vanta itself is the newest chip in NVIDIA’s stable: a low-cost 128-bit TwiN Texel part that borrows the RIVA TNT2’s core architecture, trimmed down for value desktops. It handles software and hardware DVD playback, supports AGP 4X and flat panel displays, and its drivers stay compatible with the Detonator family in both directions, so updates should not be a headache. NVIDIA is aiming it at small business machines and corporate desktops with heavy visualization needs.

Integrated graphics is usually a phrase that makes gamers wince, but a TNT2-derived core is a far better floor than most of what ships soldered into budget PCs. Whether serious players ever touch a ZX-21 is another question; for the office box that occasionally moonlights after hours, it could be a sleeper.