Price Guides September 2003 IDF Edition: CPU, Motherboards and Video Cards
by Anand Shimpi & Laura Johnston on September 18, 2003 2:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
AMD motherboards are where all the new things are happening. Athlon 64 doesn’t go on sale until September 23, but that hasn’t stopped any resellers from putting the motherboards on their shelves. At time of publishing, NVIDIA had 3 nForce3 motherboards available, the ASUS SK8N, the Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP and the Gigabyte GA0K8N Pro. MSI, Abit, Albatron and several other manufacturers have nForce3 solutions available, but resellers have been a little more careful about not putting those motherboards on sale.
Certainly, nForce3 is not a cheap debut chipset. Even though we saw samples of nForce3 back in late April, the GA-K8NNXP and the SK8N both retail over $200. Jumping on the Athlon 64 train right now does not make sense, at least from an NVIDIA point of view. Waiting at least a few weeks is the best course of action.
In other news, NVIDIA motherboards for the XP chipset plummeted like a rock last week. The motherboard market has less price protection and more volatility than the CPU sector, so a new chipset expectation creates havoc on the whole marketplace. Remember when 865PE replaced 845PE?
There are a plethora of good deals available in the nForce2 arena. One of our personal favorites, the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe is still priced a little high, but other notables such as the EPoX 8RDA+ and the Albatron KM18G Pro 2.0 both produce excellent performance at excellent prices. Other interesting buys include the dual channel MSI K7N2 Delta-L which is priced LESS than the ASUS A7N8X-X single channel board. Don’t buy a single channel nForce2 400 board. Trust us.
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Kristopher, #16 again. These quotes were taken from the original AnandTech reviews of nForce2 technology."Remember the 12% boost in bandwidth we saw on the nForce2 by going to DDR400? That 12% increase in bandwidth comes at the cost of a 22% increase in latency! The increase in latency is not only due to the slower memory timings DDR400 modules run at but also because the memory bus is no longer synchronous with the FSB when running in DDR400 mode whereas DDR333 matches up perfectly with the new 333MHz Athlon XP FSB."
"There's no increase in latency when going from a single channel DDR333 to a dual channel DDR333 setup on the nForce2 platform. There is a slight increase when making the same transition with DDR400 because we had to increase some of the timing delays in order to run two channels of DDR400 with the nForce2 while maintaining stability."
"As we proved in our original review of the nForce chipset, the bandwidth gained from going to dual channel DDR doesn't help unless you're sharing main memory bandwidth with an integrated GPU. In this case we're not and we'll be focusing on IGP performance in a later article, so we can disregard the two 128-bit nForce2 solutions for the rest of this comparison. We also have a balanced FSB/memory bus setup, meaning we have as much bandwidth going to our CPU as we do to main memory, so increasing memory bandwidth without similarly increasing FSB bandwidth would inherently yield poor returns as we're FSB limited at that point."
Thus, unless the board is capable of running dual-channel in full synchronous mode at 400MHz+ at tight timings, there does not seem to be any advantage. And then again, how many boards that can do this fall into the "half dozen $80 nForce2 motherboards" category?
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Kristopher, in answer to your question in #12, how about "official" support of 400MHz front side bus.Anonymous User - Sunday, September 21, 2003 - link
yeah nforce 400 (single chanel) are good performers.I also have a soltek sl-nv400-64 and by some benchmarks they performe better than a dual channel bord.
So please dont advise not to buy them...
Anonymous User - Saturday, September 20, 2003 - link
Where's those 9800np's? Can't find them, can you? (Are you gonna link to Best Buy?)Anonymous User - Saturday, September 20, 2003 - link
Don't dance around the subject if you yourself want to come out as substantiated.KristopherKubicki - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
#10 (and #3): That is a ridiculous and totally unsubstantiated comment. What (in your opinion) does the NV400 bring to the table that the other half dozen $80 nForce2 motherboards dont?Kristopher
Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
Don't buy a single-channel NForce 2 400 board after Anandtech themselves reviewed the Soltek NV-400 as one of the fastest Athlon solutions?!?!Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
Perhaps a reason for all this dual-channel advocacy is that quite a few reviewers are actually Intel oriented and fail to see the picture clearly about current AMD system boards.Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
#5 I want to know that myself. I'm holding off strickly to buy the 9800XT as soon as it's released, but it's getting tough to hold off. I'm dying for information about this card and scour the net daily now looking for new info.TheSnowman - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
i saw plenty of 9800nps at best buy the other day.