Nvidia today said that it will offer a specially tailored version of its Nforce 500 chipset for Intel’s upcoming Core 2 Duo processors. While the success of the Nforce 4 on Intel was very limited Nvidia takes another shot at the next generation platform to open up the massive Intel business - which is pretty much owned by Intel itself an ATI today.

The availability of Nforce 500 series media and communications processors will enable SLI configurations to Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme, which seem to be challenging AMD’s Athlon64 processors for the gaming crown.

We expect Nvidia to aim its chipsets at the upper mainstream and high-end of future Intel systems. Nvidia’s clear advantage are features that especially appeal to gamers, such as two dedicated x16 PCI Express slots that are provided by the Nforce 590 MCP today. Intel so far has not announced a chipset that will offer this functionality.

Nvidia said that Nforce 500-based motherboards for Intel Core 2 Duo platforms and Geforce 7950 GX2 (dual-GPU) graphics cards will be available in Dell’s XPS 700 gaming system as well as major system builders such as Asus, BFG, Biostar, DFI, ECS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI and XFX.