I am about to buy an nForce 2 mobo and I would like to know peoples experiences with different boards. I am particularly interested in the upper end ones with Firewire and the high end sound decoders. I have seen different manufactureres such as MSI, Leadtech, Abit, Epoc and Chaintech all have nForce 2 boards as well as Asus. It is the lesser known boards I am particularly interested.
Abit NF7-S is a very good nForce2 mobo. It just lack of one onboard LAN and overall $30 cheaper than the best nForce2 A7N8X Deluxe.
EPoX 8RDA+ is the best overclocker and offer a good price also.
Chaintech 7NJS Zenith is the most fully bundled mobo (Optical fibre cable!!! CBox2!!!)but it use C-Media onboard sound instead of SoundStorm.
These are the three mobo I would recommend if you don't want to buy Asus.
P/S: I'm going to get myself a Abit soon, so I may give you a user review soon.
I personally just bought the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe model
and I think it's a great board. It's a little pricey
but honestly I could have done without the deluxe features
which would have saved me some money.
So from my personal experience I would say
go with the Asus a7n8x regular model.
Also make sure it's the nForce2 and not the
VIA. Might be just a personal bias but I
dislike VIA shipsets.
I just put together my system, and I absolutely LOVE the A7N8X!
I needed the features of the Deluxe (Firewire, 2 LAN, onboard sound) but if you don't the base version is VERY competitively priced. However, if you are going to add a sound card, it makes more sense to get the deluxe. You get Dolby 5.1 surround sound with, hard to beat.
Also, using the newest bios from ASUS, the multi's are, for me at least, unlocked. True, the EPOX has shown the best all around OCability but the ASUS is up there too.
My 2 cents
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I put together a system with the Leadtek pro board and had no problems and I think it was great. It has good sound, firewire, and LAN. Just no RAID, SATA, or a second LAN. I was looking at the Abit board, but I dislike having a fan on the northbridge. Plus, the Leadtek board was cheaper.
bought the Epox 8RDA, great mobo with AGP8x plus some very handy hardware monitor programs included. Epox gives you the most options in clock speeds, and its completely jumperless. Hell, you can even overclock the AGP bus on this board. Options galore, and its rock solid stable.
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