Ordinarily, motherboard reviews are rather consistent.  Take six boards, swap out a few features, tweak prices a little bit, swing performance a few percent from a medium in either direction, and that’s your average round-up.  Its one reason we instituted a different rating system, so as to give readers a better feel for the differences between each motherboard.  This time out we’ve got six boards based on NVIDIA’s nForce2 chipset to look at and some real differences to discuss, both in terms of feature sets and overall board quality / performance.  Before reviewing the specific boards, however, a general overview of the NF2 chipset is in order:

The nForce2 Chipset: 

The nForce2 chipset is NVIDIA’s second foray into the world of Socket A technology and an update to the original nForce design.  The nForce2 has seen wider adoption overall than its predecessor; though boards based on VIA designs still dominate the marketplace, NVIDIA is gaining ground. 

Features of the nForce2 chipset include:

• Dual Channel DDR Technology (Twinbank)


• Support for DDR400


• 2nd-Generation DASP (Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Pre-Processor)


• Support for NVIDIA’s SoundStorm Audio


• Dual NIC Capability


• Onboard IEEE 1394 (FireWire) Support

 In addition, the nForce2 driver package contains a new set of IDE drivers that boost performance significantly.  Although NVIDIA does caution that these use of these drivers may produce system instability we never observed any problems whatsoever from the driver sets.

 A Word About RealTek:

 All of the boards we’ve reviewed here (with the exception of Chaintech) use the Realtek ALC650 Codec for sound output.  While the NVIDIA APU is still being used (and the Dolby encoding option is still available, when noted) the final output is handled by the ALC650 DAC. 

 Similarly, all of these boards use a RealTek connector to provide a physical plug for the NIC itself.  The actual NIC support is integrated into the NVIDIA southbridge.

 The nForce2 and High FSB’s:

 In order to test the nForce2 boards here at high FSB’s we’ve had to mod our test CPU.  As we’ve discussed in detail before, the nForce2 chipset does not run stable at high overclocked FSB’s with a processor set for a 333 MHz FSB.  The only solution to the problem at this time is to cut one of the L12 bridges on the CPU, disabling its native 333 MHz FSB, and returning it to a 266 MHz bus.  We performed the modification for two reasons:  First, we wanted to be able to run the boards at the highest FSB possible in order to gather information on just how high they could run, and second, to eliminate this rather odd instability as a potential cause of system crashes.

 Whether or not its worth modding your CPU for higher bus speeds is a question you should consider before blithely slicing away.  Generally the improvement gain from the modification is 10-15 MHz, though in one case we saw a boost as high as 25.  We’ve also heard rumors, however, that the modification doesn’t always work (though not observed such directly).  As always, if you choose to mod your CPU, you do so at your own risk.   

 The Boards:

 We’ve reviewed the following boards for our round-up today:

 ABIT NF7-S
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
Biostar M7NCG
Chaintech 7NJS (Zenith Package)
Epox 8RDA+
MSI K7N2G

We’ll be taking things in alphabetical order this time around, so without further ado?.

next > next > next > next > next > next > next > next >

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• ABIT NF7-S (0 of 8)
• ASUS A7N8X Deluxe: (0 of 8)
• Biostar M7NCG (0 of 8)
• Chaintech 7NJS (0 of 8)
• The Epox 8RDA+: (0 of 8)
• MSI K7N2G-ILSR (0 of 8)
• Performance (0 of 8)
• Conclusion, Rankings (0 of 8)