* ITC judge had found three Rambus patents were violated

* Nvidia Corp, Hewlett-Packard among respondents (Adds comment from Nvidia, detail)

WASHINGTON, March 25 (Reuters) - The International Trade Commission (ITC) said on Thursday it would review a decision by one of its judges who said that three Rambus RMBS.O chip patents had been violated.

The battle is a key one for graphics chip maker Nvidia NVDA.O, whose core business relies upon the sale of specialized graphics cards.

Rambus, which filed the lawsuit in 2008, also named as respondents Hewlett-Packard Co HPQ.N, ASUSTek Computer, Micro-star International 2377.TW and Pine Technology Holdings 8013.HK.

Other companies named in that lawsuit were MSI Computer Corp, BFG Technologies, Biostar Microtech Corp, Diablotek Inc, EVGA Corp, G.B.T Inc, Giga-byte Technology Co, Palit Multimedia Inc, Palit Microsystem and Sparkle Computer Corp.

Rambus has filed a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco charging that Nvidia infringed 17 patents.

The ITC said in a statement on Thursday that the full commission would review the decision, announced in January, of one of its judges. That judge had found that three Rambus patents were infringed, paving the way for infringing chips to be banned from importation into the United States.

Rambus, based in Los Altos, California, said it would continue the patent fight. “We look forward to supplementing our arguments regarding the issues the commission has decided to review,” Rambus spokeswoman Linda Ashmore said in a statement.

Nvidia said that it had expected the review.

“The ITC’s action to review the initial determination was fully anticipated, given the significant patent issues that were raised by Nvidia,” the company said in a statement “We are very pleased the primary focus of the review is on the Barth patents, which were previously found to be valid and infringed.”

The three Barth patents -- the nickname given the three remaining patents in the ITC case -- were issued to Rambus engineer Richard Barth for technology that controls and manages the flow of computer data to and from a chip’s memory.

Two of these three patents have been affirmed as valid by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.[ID:nN04192068]

Rambus has filed lawsuits against a long list of technology companies in the past decade, saying they infringed patents held by the memory chip designer.

The commission is a popular venue for patent litigation because it can bar the imports of products made with infringing technology into the United States.

The case stands before the International Trade Commission. The case number is 337-661. (Reporting by Diane Bartz and Ian Sherr; Editing by Gary Hill)