Conclusion

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The benchmarks show that the nForce2 motherboard has the power to come out on top of the chipset war between NVIDIA and VIA. While we have not yet posted any information on KT400 motherboards here on Amdmb.com, from the three that I have tested, the performance is actually less than the best KT333 motherboard available – and at best they are on par with their older siblings. That doesn’t give VIA much to look forward to in the motherboard market until they can get another, more competitive product out.

However, we have all seen this pattern before. When the first nForce chipset was released and we saw benchmark numbers from that, we were impressed and most editors were sure that NVIDIA would find a foothold in the AMD market with their motherboards. That didn’t happen. VIA maintained their market share and only lost a small portion of the low-end market to NVIDIA. NVIDIA’s answer for that problem with this release is to try and sway the notion that nForce2 = integrated. They are pushing for this distinction by having different categories of motherboards called “graphics motherboards” and “performance motherboards”. While I doubt that something like this will really catch on in the DIY market, it may be helpful for the newer and less experienced builders and also for retail outlets.

If NVIDIA wants to succeed now, all they have to do is get the product out. The delays have been piling up already, as it was July when the product was first launched, and we still don’t have any retail products available – even this Asus board is labeled as a pre-production sample with a similar bios and drivers. Hopefully NVIDIA knows that waiting will only lead to a larger loss of chance for increased market share. The fact that we are using a Radeon 9700 Pro video card in this review should also dictate that.

Once the product is available though, having an nForce2 solution with a 333 MHz FSB Athlon XP processor looks to be about the best combination available for any computer you could need. The list of features on the Asus motherboard meets or beats anything we have seen on the KT333 or KT400 motherboards. If we can get IDE RAID on a board or two with the nForce2, we’ll be in even better shape.

At this time, I’m not going to give the Asus A7N8X motherboard a rating or award for anything simply because we don’t have final silicon here or final bios or drivers. That just wouldn’t be fair to other products on the market or on the test bench. When Asus or NVIDIA has a better solution out we’ll definitely take a longer look at it and hopefully have more KT333 and KT400 solutions to test against it for a better comparison. All that remains is for us to wait.

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