nForce or not??

[TheNefariousBC]

I'm going to build a PC in mid to late July and I can't make up my mind on whether or not to settle for the nForce chipset (it's either going to be that or a ViaKT333). I plan on using the new Athlon XP 2200+ thouroughbred, but I can;t make up my mind on the chipset. The nforce doesn't support DDR333 and I don't think it supports Ultra ATA 133 for hard drives either. But does the bandwidth/latency issue for both memory and hard drives in this case really that big of a deal compared to the architectural benefits...not to mention built in audio, LAN, etc. (GOOD audio that is...not some AC97 crap). In other words, is PC2700 DDR that much better than PC2100 DDR and is the Ultra ATA 100 standard really that much slower than Ultra ATA 133? I also wanted to throw this possibility out there: is there ANY chance that the nforce2 chipset might be released by August 2002? Any insight would be greatly appreciated =). Thanx.

 

[mechBgon]

Dismiss ATA133. I don't know of anyone who's reported tangible benefits over ATA100, have you seen any reports to that effect?

nForce doesn't support DDR333, but it does support dual-channel DDR266, provided you pick the two DIMMs you want to live with, so it's not suffering from lack of bandwidth, generally. It's simply not quite as fast in most of the benchmarks that you see reported on hardware sites.

What I always thought it had going for it was the onboard sound. I played a lot of Descent 3 when it came out, and with sound enabled, the system would get bogged down at times, to the point where a 1.4GHz Athlon with a GeForce2 GTS and a SB Live would be dragged down to about 15fps at the lowest points. Disabling the game's sound revealed that it was largely due to the demands of 3D sound, at least in that particular game. If nForce's sound acceleration leaves the CPU more time for other stuff, it could very well erase the performance gap between nForce and KT333. Wish I could afford to experiment with it and find out.

As for PC2700, reviews seem to say that it answers a question that the AthlonXP wasn't asking. It may produce small performance improvements provided you run with low latencies.

 

[Pheran]

Check out the Abit NV7-133R, which has a Highpoint 372 RAID controller which will give you two channels of ATA133 (plus the two ATA100 channels built into the chipset). It's a very inexpensive board with a ton of features (LAN, sound, USB 2.0, RAID). To answer your other question, PC2700 is not that much better than PC2100, especially if your bus is clocked at the normal 133 MHz DDR.