Nvidia got in touch with us with regards to the story we wrote on Friday about the PCI prefetch issue and they're claiming it's old news. We're curious as to why then the company sent out the email we took part of to its partners in Taiwan as recent as last week.

The email we got reads "This is old news from Jan 2007. NVIDIA implemented and distributed an SBIOS fix to disable the feature starting in Jan 2007, and disabled it in future hardware products that were introduced after this date. AMD is currently being sued by Opti on the exact same issue."

Although this might be an old issue, there are still partners out there that haven't updated their BIOSes and this is as far as we understand why Nvidia's motherboard division has issued yet another request to its partners to make sure it has been done. There's also meant to be motherboards in the channel in the US which hasn't had their BIOSes updated and this was part of the issues mentioned in the email. To our knowledge, no motherboard manufacturer recalls products in the channel for a BIOS upgrade unless there's a severe issue, so this might not be as easy to fix as Nvidia is hoping.

And if this is an issue, why would new chipset models such as the 680i and 780i be listed in the email that was sent out as of last week? There's something going on here and Nvidia doesn't seem to be very forward with the details. And just because a BIOS fix is released, it doesn't mean that everyone will implement it straight away, and why would a motherboard manufacturer want to reduce the performance of their products willingly?

With regards to AMD being sued for the same issue, well, we'll have to wait for an official reply from AMD with regards to it, but then again, AMD and OPTi might come to a better solution for AMD's customers than Nvidia and OPTi did on behalf of Nvidia's customers.

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Nvidia forced to disable chipset PCI prefetch