Chipset Duel - VIA vs. Nvidia nForce

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."

Comments

Don't forget...

[SaDan]

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.

Re:Don't forget...

[Pfhor]

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.

Tom needs to take a chill pill

[Rogerborg]

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. ;-)