Six of the Best - nForce2 Roundup @ digit-life.com

The crew at digit-life.com pitch six nForce2 motherboards against an Iwill KK400 (VIA KT400) in their NVIDIA nForce2 Based Mainboards Roundup article. If you’re still not sure which nF2 has what check out the ‘today’s contestants’ table - a brief description of each board’s characteristics.

Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (13×166=2167 MHz), Socket 462(Socket A)

Mainboards on the NVIDIA nForce2:
- ABIT NF7-S (BIOS 10)
- ASUS A7N8X (BIOS 1001C)
- Chaintech 7NJS (BIOS of 01.11.2002)
- EPoX 8RDA+ (BIOS of 28.10.2002)
- Leadtek K7NCR18D-Pro (BIOS of 06.11.2002)
- MSI K7N2 (BIOS 3.0B2)

Mainboard on the VIA KT400:
- Iwill KK400 (BIOS of 15.10.2002)

…Let me remind you what we said about the nForce2 last time “…The NVIDIA nForce2 performed so well that together with its functional characteristics it becomes the most appropriate thing to buy, especially for newly announced and future AMD processors (such a blessed picture can be spoiled only by a too high price)”.

Taking the today’s scores into account I have to add the following: performance of the nForce2 is stably higher compared to the flagship of VIA Technologies, sometimes even by over 10%. Impressive. What about the prices? High performance is not free, and the nForce2 based boards are more expensive than those based on its competitor, and they are pricier by more than 10%; i.e. the price difference is greater than the performance gap. But it was always so! In the upper market sector each added percent in performance costs sometimes dozens of percents of the price increase. That is why, the conclusion is that the nForce2 is a quite attractive solution in terms of functionality, efficiency and price for those who consider the first two parameters much more important than the third one.

[Full article] @ digit-life.com