Thinking of getting a Nvidia Nforce chipset

Hello all,
I'm thinking of buying a Nforce based board, are any of these boards on the market yet? and also who would be a better manufacture to go with? Asus, MSI, Gigabyte? any thoughts on Soyo Dragon boards? also should i get DDR or SDRAM? thank for your help

Thanks Madpriest, Looking at using a athlon 1700 or faster and thanks for the tip on the ram.

I cousin also have an Asus A7N266-C. He liked it a lot.

I would suggest getting the A7V333. This board is made by Asus and has the COP feature on it so you wont have to worry about frying your chip if you overheat your computer. Also you can add somne Resisters to overclock the FSB. Asus is so far the best board that i and my friends have used. No problems. You sho8uld also get the PC2700 DDR RAM. Try to avoid Third-party RAM becuase they tend to mess up your computer. Either get the 256MB DRR RAM or 512MB DDR Etc. 1Gb RAM is expensive but worth it i think. Thats my suggesttion.

Asus will be surpreme!

Just for the record, the 415 boards are identical with the 420 boards but without integrated video. Stability is very good and the memory bandwith doubles with 2 bar of 2100 DDR memory installed. I recommend the ASUS A7N266C but there are other boards as good out there. I also got it for the thermal protection for the CPU. I would have probably got a KT266A board but the thermal protection wasn't there. They are still new to chipsets but I don't feel that I am missing anything.

en Xristos

AMEN

For the record, I am told that the nforce will support double sided Dimms in the first two slots and only a single sided dim in the third. It is when using a double sided dimm in the third that you get the performance hit. can anyone verify this?

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!

for the record.... the nforce 420 and 415 are identical, except for the intregated video on the 420. contrary to what some have said, and many subcribe to, the onboard sound, video, and optional lan are all quality solutions. in the past i couldnt be paid to use onboard anything, but that has changed. the video is not the equal of the latest agp cards, nor was it ever intended to be. it is the best intregated video on the market, and those who want this will be satisfied. similarly, the onboard sound is more than adequate... i have simply never heard a better sound solution, including my own SB Live Platinum.
as for the 415 board w/o video onboard... the only comparisons i have seen (for shame, Tom.... where is your comparison? = ) showed the 415 to be equal to or in some cases significantly superior to the via 266a chipset. in fact, the 415 held its own for the most part against even the 333 revision.
as for the ram, you need identical dimms in slots one and three, leaving slot 2 unpopulated, for best results. this board supports 1.5 gb of ram, but speed is achieved with only slots 1 and 3, so max ram would be 1gb.
finally, via has made tremendous strides lately... but as some of us know to our sorrow... it can be a nightmare to get certain things configured, particularly the nvidia agp gforce cards. need i point out that as the nforce and gforce have the same company in common, this is not a problem with the 415d.
last, the asus a7v266e is available with Asus C.O.P.... (cpu overheat protection) but this is not a reason to buy the via... the nforce 415 has it as well... = )

whew, im done

tannji

Actually, I've read there is a difference between the 420D and the 415, other than the onboard video. I understand that with the 420D, even with the twin banks active, you still only get a bandwith of 2.1 GB/sec. However, with the 415D, you get 4.2 GB/sec with twin bank. I am not sure, but I believe it has something to do with the onboard video being a bottleneck.

There is a <A HREF="http://www.virescentnetworks.com/news/dc04112002.htm" target="_new">good article on Twin Bank </A> that explains it better.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=87962" target="_new">My Rigs </A>