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Contemporary Socket A Chipsets: NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400, NVIDIA nForce2 400, SiS748 and VIA KT600 (page 17)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 07/08/2003 | 01:26 PM ]

Conclusion

Well, let’s sum everything up. First, I would like to point out that we are very unlikely to witness any changes in the Socket A chipset market in the near future. NVIDIA managed not only to stabilize its positions in this segment during the past year, but also became the leader here. As we see, the competitors cannot do anything about it. nForce2 chipsets remain indisputable performance leaders.

Of course, nForce2 does have certain drawbacks, such as the lack of SerialATA protocol support. However, this fact is very unlikely to distract the users’ attention from this chipset family, especially since it is sometimes 10% faster than the competitors. DASP appeared an extremely smart chipset unit, and none of NVIDIA’s competitors managed to offer a worthy alternative to it.

The launch of a single-channel nForce2 400 chipset is a pretty logical move of NVIDIA’s. As we found out, the newcomer is not too much slower than its dual-channel fellow: the performance difference is not more than 2-3%. This is more than enough to make nForce2 400 the fastest single-channel Socket A chipset. So, nForce2 400 has every chance to win a stable leading position in the today’s market, since the competitors are still unable to offer a solution fast enough to defeat the new leader.

Despite aggressive marketing, VIA didn’t succeed with its Socket A solution. After the launch of KT333, the company rolled downhill little by little. KT400A was far from success, and the today’s KT600 seems very unlikely to help VIA regain its leadership in the Socket A chipset market. In reality VIA KT600 appeared considerably slower than NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 and NVIDIA nForce2 400. That is why almost the major advantage of VIA KT600 is an attractive features list including SerialATA HDDs and RAID arrays support.

According to our tests, SiS748 is running almost neck and neck with VIA KT600. That is why this solution has very good chances to win the low-cost platforms market, as SiS is traditionally known for its low prices.

As a result, we would like to recommend all gamers and advanced users who are willing to squeeze the maximum out of their systems to pay special attention to dual-channel NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400. If you are not so dedicated and can stand a small performance drop, the single-channel NVIDIA nForce2 400 will be a good choice to think of. The new solutions from VIA and SiS will definitely find their way into low-cost systems. However, you shouldn’t forget that they are considerably slower than NVIDIA’s chipsets. Anyway, a lot will surely depend on the final cost of SiS748, VIA KT600 and NVIDIA nForce2 400.