Nforce board reviewed at Anandtech – 4253 days old

[Alakazam]

Anand posted the first (to my knowledge) independent nForce review. The nForce appears to be an excellent all-around chipset, matching the VIA KT266A in all around performance when equipped with the Thunderbird (the KT266A, likely due to the lack of a chipset prefetch capability, appears to gain more performance from the jump to Palomino). Overall, this is a smashingly good job for a first try in the chipset market for nVidia, though the hype being generated far outpaced what we've seen here. Still, we can't ignore the possibility of nVidia making improvements to nForce performance, at the least with BIOS and driver updates.

Additionally, it should be noted that the nForce has several features, like prefetching and that dual channel memory subsystem, which are not found on the similarly performing KT266A. This evidences that VIA has room to grow its performance by adding features of that nature to their Socket A chipset lines.

It makes for a very good read, the article is 17 pages long so be prepared for a lengthy stay. Check it out here

[AmStoned]

The VIA KT266A isn't too bad either. It even out matches the nForce chip on numberous video tests, not to mention boosting more performance gain while utilizing a AMD MP. But like the Rep said, nForce's the new kid on the block, and they are steam rolling bugs left and right all month long.

[Alakazam]

It's interesting to note that the Nforce boards won't be out until December, that's a lot of time for tweaking drivers and bios. We'll just have to wait and see what transpires with that chipset. Look at via, almost monthly a new 4-1 set comes out, a little competition should be excellent, each chipset trying to outdo the other. From what I read, the SIS chip isn't too bad either, I'm sure each set will have their quirks but it can only be good for us in the longrun.

[ImaginAsian]

I hope all this competition between the Via KT266A and the nForce keeps the mobo prices down. I had high hopes for the nForce and it is a bit sad to see it only on par with the Via...but like you said, maybe some driver tweaking will get nVidia going again...they are a company that doesn't like to lose ...that's for sure.

I will have to say their Audio Chipset eats the SB Live performancewise though!

[Darksword]

The low cpu utilization with the onboard sound looked very promising, but like the review said...the nForce may not be a very good deal for people like us who already have high-end video cards and sound cards. The onboard video is pretty much useless for us since it only performs like a GeForce2MX 200.

I guess it's just a good option for someone building a budget box from scratch who doesn't want to deal with a lot of different drivers and such.

For my needs, I'll probably still go with the KT266A until nVidia fine-tweaks their drivers for a noticeable (like 10% or more) performance increase over the KT266A.

[Alakazam]

In case some of you were wondering about nForce stability, comments from Anand on that (as he did not mention about it in his article) can be found here

[muckshifter]

For an OEM looking for a highly integrated platform with all of the bells and whistles, the nForce fits the bill perfectly. It is all too often that we are forced to sacrifice quality or features when going with a highly integrated platform but the nForce changes all of that. Raising the bar is indeed what it does in this sense.

Says it all really.

One consolation of this type of board is that, it will suite 98% of my "customers" down to the ground.