my point was simply that when reviewers got ahold of ATI's "Bullhead" reference board, ATI made it very apparent that they had worked "really" hard on it, and that it should be up to quality of a retail board, which is probably true, considering the overclocking results and such. nvidia's reference board was much more rugged, and definitely not up to snuff for retail. I just don't see the kind of improvement seen from nvidia's retail boards coming from ATI. I could be wrong, but even if I am, ATI's boards will still only be as fast as nforce4, not faster. Equal performance, coupled with a practically non-existent feature set, is a recipe for the bargain basement if I've ever seen one.
Does anyone else feel like all the review websites are kinda coddling the new ATI chipset? I mean, sure, it's not bad like the last few, but still, there is really nothing other than integrated graphics that makes it stand out in any way. Average performance, terrible features, and yet every website seems to just rave and rave about it. It almost seems like they feel sorry for ATI in the chipset market, and don't want to hurt its feelings or something. I mean, even VIA's new low-end K8T890 has better features than this chipset, and no one is raving about that chipset, other than to say it was the first chipset (before it got delayed 2 months) with PCIe.