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Chipset Duel - VIA vs. Nvidia nForce

Posted by michael on from the dueling-banjos dept.

msolnik writes: "Tom's Hardware has put 13 motherboards to the ultimate test in their lab. The outcome? By and large, the VIA KT266A chipset knocks the stuffing out of the Nvidia nForce 420D. True bright spots were the candidates sent in by Soltek and Soyo."

6 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Don't forget... by SaDan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The nForce is nVidia's first attempt at a chipset for AMD systems. How long has VIA been making chipsets?

    I think this is a really good showing for nForce.

    I also think that Tom is starting to lose focus when it comes to what people really want. With processors as cheap as they are, there's not much point to overclocking anymore. If a board doesn't make it easy to nuke your processor, that shouldn't be held against the manufacturer. Stability should be the priority, not how fast you can run the board out of spec.

    1. Re:Don't forget... by Pfhor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Also, if you look at the actual numbers, the difference in the boards statistics was around .2 or so, from fastest to slowest. All of the boards are performing obscenely fast, yet tom doesn't seem to pay attention to his own graphs or statistics.

      http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/01112 6/ kt266a_nforce-18.html

      the 5 fastest boards for Lame MP3 encoding all have times of 178 secs. No decimal points included. "The nforce boards come out on top" yeah they really are when the slowest KT266A board has a time of 179 seconds.

      Or for another fun bunch of numbers, look at the flask mpeg encoding. The "fastest" fps is 21.51 (nForce board) and then there are 6 boards following it, all at 21.25 FPS. According to Tom the nForce boards "Pummeled" the competition.

      Just some funny statistics stuff i noticed. Of course, Tom isn't lying per say, but it would be more impressive if he did an analysis based on cost etc. Like best board for a $600 system, $900 system, $1300 system.

  2. Tom needs to take a chill pill by Rogerborg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Phew, another article that focusses on overclocking potential and absolute performance. All well and good, but I'd like to see Tom's doing more comparisons on total component price and bang per buck and not try and match specifications without regard to the retail price. When I upgrade, I pick a budget first, then go shopping to see what I can get for that money. The price difference between a fully integrated nForce and a bare VIA + NIC + GeForce2 + sound means I can afford to put a significantly faster processor and a shedload more RAM in the nForce. There's a tradeoff in that it's harder to upgrade piecemeal, but I choose not to do that anyway as I find that it's cheaper and more rewarding to make infrequent larger upgrades, and easier to find a deserving home for the old hardware if it can form the substantial core of a box.

    Informative article, but it's once again aimed at the geek who simply has to have the rootinist, tootinist fastest system west of the Pecos, with cost not an issue. Note to Tom's; for those of us who don't get free hardware, cost is always an issue. ;-)

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  3. Re:nForce vs KT266A performance by Rogerborg · · Score: 3, Insightful
    • The nForce [...] has not just graphics, but sound integrated onto the motherboard, at a significant cost saving compared to buying them seperately.

    And a NIC. I go for integrated boards (at least sound + NIC) simply because it allows me to buy a faster processor and more RAM, which pretty much negates the advantage of the bare bones performance board. Before the nForce, I wouldn't have gone down the integrated gfx route, but really, a GeForce2MX paired with an Athlon 1800+ is a pretty good solution right now. Off the top of my head, I work the KT266A + GeForce3 solution as about $300 more than the equivelant nForce before adding processor and RAM, and that's a pretty big differential.

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  4. Re:GeForce 2 MX??????? by softsign · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The nForce chipset has a Geforce2 integrated into the northbridge... it's not exactly the type of thing you just leave off a board. Not only that, but since it's in the northbridge, the interface is equivalent to AGP 6x. I really question why they didn't test or show results for the nForce boards sans Geforce3.

    Furthermore, can somebody explain to me why they used a memory configuration of 1x256, 2x128? Doesn't this switch off the nForce dual-channel configuration by using three dimms?

    I really have issues with their methodology and conclusions here... "Trounces"? The best KT266A mobo does marginally better on Q3A and office benchmarks and gets beaten on bandwidth intensive apps. I don't know about Germany, but where I come from, that's not a trouncing by any means.

  5. Re:GeForce 2 MX??????? by softsign · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Maybe I should have phrased that differently. On the other hand, maybe I should have checked my source before posting:
    With its second generation transform and lighting capabilities, per-pixel shading operations, a fill rate of up to 350M pixels per second and an internal 8X AGP interface, the integrated GeForce2...

    I didn't mean to imply that the only reason the integrated GeForce2 is 8x (I said 6x, my bad) is because it's in the IGP - merely that it is equivalent to 8x AGP, as a consequence of its location and nVidia's nice work.

    You have no idea how hard I found it to respond to your comment in a civil manner. Next time, you try the whole "civility" thing.