Price Guides April 2005: Motherboards

Athlon 64 PCIe

nForce4 has really taken off over the last two months and since our last guide, we have seen another 10 motherboards added into the RTPE. While it's great to see nForce4 show more maturity, the real news over the last few weeks (to us) has been the introduction of Socket 754 PCIe motherboards. The nForce4 "4X" chipset provides enough of the rudimentary PCIe support so that low end Athlon 64 and Sempron systems are not much more affordable. For those who follow our video card guides, you may recall the relatively high price of AGP low end video cards. With ATI's HyperMemory and NVIDIA's TurboCache cards, low end GPUs are now much more affordable, as long as you have PCIe. Socket 754 Semprons combined with TurboCache/HyperMemory video cards on sub $80 motherboards seem like an awesome leap forward to us - but then again, any reason to bury AGP always seems to get us excited. Below, you can see the new Socket 754 nForce4 motherboards in our system.


That isn't to say that NVIDIA is the only player in the Socket 754 PCIe game. VIA has a few 754 boards based on the K8T890, but the only retail board available right now seems to be the Soltek SL-K890-754G [RTPE: SL-K890-754G]. Hopefully by the time our next guide rolls around, there will be even more options on the 754 platform.

Of course, the stars of the PCIe world are still those nForce4 Socket 939 motherboards. There are still a few late comers to the party, but all of the Tier 1 and most of the Tier 2 guys have pretty solid offerings at this point. Since our mini roundup a month ago, board prices have dropped dramatically, putting the MSI nForce4 Neo4 Platinum SLI [RTPE: K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI] a little bit cheaper than the DFI nForce4 SLI-DR [RTPE: LanParty SLI-DR] board that also won the gold award.

However, nForce4 doesn't come exclusively in the SLI variety; and there are certainly a few nForce4 Ultra boards that we find very attractive. The ASUS A8N-E [RTPE: ASUS nForce4 Ultra (939) A8N-E] comes with one of the better feature sets available and also throws in some very good overclocking features for modest overclockers. However, going on price alone, the four-month-old Chaintech VNF4 Ultra [RTPE: Chaintech nForce4 Ultra (939) VNF4 Ultra VE] set the bar for any other nForce4 board to follow. The Chaintech board won't set any speed records and leaves a little bit to the imagination as far as features, but if you just need a rock solid Socket 939 board, this is the one to have.


Although we really expected K8T890 motherboards to flood the market since February, it looks like only a few motherboard manufacturers were anxious enough to adopt VIA's solution. We feel that the NVIDIA based boards are a little more stable and readily available at this point, but ASUS and Abit both have comparable boards.


Finally, don't neglect the newcomer to the AMD world, ATI. The Xpress 200 chipset didn't seem to grab a lot of manufacturer support, but MSI's RS480M2-IL [RTPE: RS480M2-IL] really is a nice board for the price, particularly for an HTPC setup. For under $100, MSI and ATI have one of the best solutions for Socket 939, particularly considering the integrated Radeon X300 video. Unfortunately, the board lacks Gigabit Ethernet and comes in a MicroATX form factor.