The Chipset

The main chipsets for motherboards come in all shapes and sizes.  The chip shown in the photo here is an Nvidia nForce 3.  Several companies produce chipsets for performance desktop PCs, including Intel, SiS, ATi (AMD) and Via.  Current chipsets are often just a single chip, older chipsets follow the northbridge/southbridge design which is two chips.

If you look for the chipset on a motherboard, you may find that it is concealed underneath a heatsink for cooling purposes. 

An nForce 3 MCP

The chipset plays host to the main higher level features of a motherboard, including the CPU, system bus, SATA, system memory and USB.  The exact features will vary according to design and the chipset used.

The nForce 3 is a known as an MCP, short for media and communications processor.  This is single chip architecture, so it is not quite right to describe it as a chipset.  There is no memory controller on the AMD nForce 3, because it is present on the main CPU.  The nForce 3 MCP controls the AGP 8x bus, PCI and RAID storage.

Useful external links

www.nvidia.com

ati.amd.com

www.via.com.tw

www.intel.com

www.sis.com