nVidia nForce motherboard advice needed

[philzee]

I was looking at the nVidia website and came accross the nForce chipset,
Does anyone have one of these Mobo's?
are they any good?
which one is better the AMD or Pentium4?
do they manage to play games such as return to castle wolfenstein without glitching?
which manufacturer of these boards is more stable, in fact...which company actually produces them, Abit, Asus etc?
any info on this chipset would be appreciated http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

[kfh]

Hi philzee,
There's a couple reviews Here (http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/Motherboards/nforce_reference(2).shtml). and Here (http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=1535&p=3).
kfh.


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Sequitur Patrem Non Passibus Aequis

[This message has been edited by kfh (edited 03-20-2002).]

[philzee]

Originally posted by kfh:
Hi philzee,
There's a couple reviews Here (http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/Motherboards/nforce_reference(2).shtml). and Here (http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=1535&p=3).
kfh.




thanks kfh, but thats not quite what I was looking for...all the reviews I've seen tend to be more technical than anything else, what I was really after was a reply from someone who HAS one of these boards and that could tell me his/her experience of it, whether they thought it any good or if they thought it was gimmicky?

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ERROR: Windows has been running for 5 hours without a break and has decided to call it a day, Press any key to re-start Windows without saving any data.

[saphalline]

Originally posted by philzee:
which one is better the AMD or Pentium4?
do they manage to play games such as return to castle wolfenstein without glitching?
which manufacturer of these boards is more stable, in fact...which company actually produces them, Abit, Asus etc?
any info on this chipset would be appreciated http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

As far as what I've seen, the nForce chipset for AMD processors is one of the best you can get. Now I don't have one of these mobo's, but not very many people do so if you wait around for some hands-on advice, well... you could be waiting awhile.

The only real gimmick with the nForce chipset has been the GeForce2 MX core based onboard video. If you check nVidia's website, however, you should see that they're re-releasing the chipset without onboard video for cheaper (so that you can add your own AGP video card). The real kicker surprise with the nForce chipset is that it requires dual-DDR DIMMs, kind of like the P4 requires dual-RDRAM modules. So you need to get 2 modules of the same size (and preferable the same type and manufacturer) in order for your RAM to work. So if you get two 256MB DDR modules, you'll have 512MB of RAM total.

Yes, Asus and Abit both make nForce-based motherboards, and if you want the best you shouldn't have to look any further than those two http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif.

Moving on to the processor question, the AMD AthlonXP and Intel Pentium4 Northwood are fairly even in terms of performance. The P4 Northwood usually comes out on top, both in performance and more so in price, not to mention the RDRAM you'll need to take advantage of P4's over 2GHz. Either of them, tho, paired with a good graphics card (ie Radeon 7500 or GeForce2 Ti or higher) would run RTCW without a hitch at full graphics settings, up to 1024 x 768 and higher. Today's games don't even stress a GeForce3 Ti 200, much less a Radeon 8500 or GeForce4 Ti, so you won't have any speed issues for quite some time.