NF3 or K8T800

[VIAN]

What do you think, which one is more appealing to you and do you think classic northbridge/southbridge or nvidia's single chip solution.

 

[NicColt]

In all honesty the jury is still out, to be fair it's very close but 'some' numbers show that the K8T800 is performing **well** in comparison to the NF3-150.

The following was a Hard comment, in it's entirety.

K8T800 Vs. nForce3 150

Above we saw the nForce3 150 board from Shuttle easily outstrip the VIA K8T800 board from MSI in every single benchmark. At first we were a bit unsure, but the picture becomes quite clear once you see the full data sets from the entire review and have had some time to spend with all of the hardware. It's our opinion that we are seeing the score differences because of the superior IDE implementation by NVIDIA. NVIDIA has had issues with their IDE drivers for well over a year now with their nForce2 line, and some of those problems have followed over to the nForce3. With that said, NVIDIA has devoted huge resources to fixing these issues and we think that the IDE driver of NVIDIA has simply been tweaked to perform much better than the VIA IDE implementation.

There is always another side of the story though. Currently we can crash every nForce3 board we have possession of, both retail and engineering samples, when running extreme IDE traffic. We are also hearing that this is why some Taiwanese board companies are going with the VIA solution instead of the NVIDIA nForce3. We've received new drivers here recently, but we haven't had time to test them out to see if the stability has gotten any better. We will surely be looking at this soon, as we are testing retail nForce3 150 and Pro boards.

We could not get the nForce3 board to complete even one successful benchmark run of 3DMark2001. Manipulating drivers and DX9 versions did little to help and this issue has not yet been resolved.

In my opinion nvidia is 'optomizing' or as they put it tweaking and pushing their IDE drivers over the limit causing some problems in order to keep up with Via. Overall I think via will win this one. I'd rather give up a couple frames and have a ah... honest board, but of course it's just my opinion and opinions DO vary. Flame on : )

 

[VIAN]

me too, im giong via, nvidia is just a company not to be trusted

 

[Vette73]

Yea Nivida is having some problems with their chip. VIA seems to be the way to go NOW, but once Nivida gets on the ball they will probable pull ahead. Kinda like teh Socket A days. Via ruled at first, then Nivida came along and worked their bugs out to be #1.

So for Now VIA 1, Nivida 2