Author Topic: nForce chipset - do you trust it? (Read 494 times)

beet1e · « **on:** May 14, 2002, 03:04:54 AM »

I am thinking of buying a K7N420 Pro motherboard, which has the nForce chipset. My question is, do you think this chipset is stable? Various people have found that some operating systems don't run on it very well. Some people even think it's too new, and needs a bit of history behind it before it can be trusted.

There seems to be two chipsets for that board - IGP and MCP.

Lephturn · « **Reply #1 on:** May 14, 2002, 08:48:31 AM »

Do I trust it nForce? No, not yet. However, I don't have great confidence in VIA either. Yep, nForce drivers are built for XP/2k first, and I've also heard they don't like 98/ME. That's cool with me, I won't be running those old craptastic OS's on any new machine that's for certain.

I'm just now starting to order parts for a new machine. It will be based on the nForce chipset, the one with no integrated video. The onboard sound is good quality, and has the lowest CPU utilization of any sound card/chip I've researched... slightly lower even than the Audigy. It has onboard LAN which I want, and it has no extra crap that I don't want, like RAID controllers or Firewire that add expense and suck up IRQ's but are otherwise useless to me.

nForce is not quite as fast as the new VIA 333 boards, and it's not as friendly for overclocking. However, it seems to fit my needs rather well, and it's what I'm planning on building on this summer. It also seems that it will be likely that nVidia graphics cards and drivers would be designed to work well with their chipset, and I'm hoping will be less likely to encounter compatibility problems.

Lephturn · « **Reply #2 on:** May 14, 2002, 09:45:18 AM »

This is the one I'm thinking of going with:

http://www.msicomputer.com/product/detail_spec/k7n415pro.htm

bloom25 · « **Reply #3 on:** May 14, 2002, 04:37:24 PM »

I've found stability to be better than some of the VIA chipsets I've used. You do want to use Windows 2000 or XP on it though. Remember, this is the chipset used in the Xbox with some modifications. (GF 2 MX versus GF 3 integrated video, and the EV6 bus for Athlons vs the P3's bus.) It is certainly going to be stable. (The Xbox uses Windows 2000, which explains the drivers as well.)

As for MCP and IGP, those are just nVidia's marketing names for the traditional northbridge and southbridge. It's not two separate chipsets. (MCP -> Southbridge, IGP -> Northbridge.)

The 415D chipset is the same as the 420D chipset, but lacks the onboard video. In your case, the onboard video is a plus.

Turbot · « **Reply #4 on:** May 16, 2002, 01:42:37 PM »

Under The Hood:
140 Chipsets Compared

http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/02q2/020422/chipset-02.html

funkedup · « **Reply #5 on:** May 16, 2002, 03:40:51 PM »

Anybody know if nVidia plans on releasing a 333 MHz FSB version of this chipset? I'm kind of torn between nForce and the Gigabit KT333 board right now.

Lephturn · « **Reply #6 on:** May 17, 2002, 08:16:04 AM »

You couldn't pay me to take a Gigabyte board. Too many bad experiences with those guys.

Also... with current Athlons the 333 chipsets really don't make a bit of difference. The front side bus speed for the CPU is more of a bottleneck than the faster ram is from what I've seen. The KT333 chipset boards are such a tiny ammount faster than the 266 boards that it's not an issue to me.

bloom25 · « **Reply #7 on:** May 17, 2002, 04:18:41 PM »

The only thing Lephturn is that AMD is planning on going to a 166 MHz DDR bus within the year. (333 Mhz equiv.) It's hard to say whether or not KT333 will actually support that though, but it's worth considering.

The upcoming Thouroughbred core Athlon XPs are just a die shrink, which will allow lower temps and higher clockspeeds. There are no significant changes to the CPU design itself. These CPUs are supposed to be available for desktops, starting with an XP 2200+, soon.

The next core is code named Barton, and is supposed to include a L2 cache increase to 512kB and a FSB increase to 166 Mhz DDR. It's hard to say whether or not these would be supported by KT333 boards. I'd expect to see this core right when the Hammer based CPUs are released. They will be AMDs "budget" line (probably still called Athlon XP), and the Hammer (Sledgehammer and Clawhammer) will be called Athlon XP-64 and AMD Opteron respectively. The launch date on these was recently announced to be in late October, but IMO it will probably be mid-November before you see them readily available. The Hammers most certainly will not fit into a Socket A board purchased now, but the Barton Athlon XPs may...

Karnak · « **Reply #8 on:** May 18, 2002, 01:50:11 AM »

I'd go with an MSI board myself.

I was just looking at their nForce board and their SiS 745 board today. I'm fed up with Via.

I ordered the SiS 745 board as a friend has had good luck with it. None of my friends have tried an nForce board.

The nForce board from MSI was $100.00, the SiS 745 I ordered was $65.00.

CavemanJ · « **Reply #9 on:** May 18, 2002, 06:37:35 PM »

My current box is built on the MSI K7N 420 pro board.

There's really only 1 qualm I have with this board:

The rear channel sound doesn't work with analog speakers. Digital speakers and you're golden.
If yer using analog speakers ya either have to slap in a sound card and disable the onboard sound or go get a set of digital speakers.

The twinbank memory archetecture is nice. Just remember bios versions 2.0 and 2.1 you have to put the DIMMs in slots 1 and 3, 2.2 - 2.4 1, 2. And don't forget it has problems with double sided DIMMs if all 3 slots are populated (don't know if that's fixed in bios 2.4 or the 415boards)

funkedup · « **Reply #10 on:** May 19, 2002, 11:39:06 PM »

Cave do you mean that there is no way to connect analog rear speakers or do you mean that it doesn't send a signal to them? I saw some pics of the MSI and ASUS nForce boards and it looked like they had a daughtercard with analog outputs for 5.1.

CavemanJ · « **Reply #11 on:** May 20, 2002, 03:04:16 PM »

Funk my board came with a CNR audio card, which has the spdif and rear analog plugs. It doesn't send a signal to the rear speakers for analog. From what I understand reading the MSI forums for this board it's a problem they've never fixed.

Also, no matter how I set up my sound options, I've not been able to get any sound to come out of the rear channel period. Which is a real pain cause I like to plug my headphones into the rear channel when I'm flyin AH =)

http://cweb.msi.com.tw/eforum/?target=topic&fid=9

All kinds of interesting stuff in there about the MSI K7N 420 Pro board.