X-bit labs

Contemporary Socket A Chipsets: NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400, NVIDIA nForce2 400, SiS748 and VIA KT600 (page 6)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Contemporary Socket A Chipsets Specifications

Summing up everything we have just said about the today’s Socket A chipsets supporting 400MHz bus, we would like to offer you a table. Keeping in mind that each chipset can be used with various South Bridge versions, we split the table into two parts: one for North Bridge specs, and the other for South Bridge specs.

We will begin with the North Bridges:

As you can see, all chipset specs look very similar, except the only chipset with a dual-channel memory controller – NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400. We discovered much more “paper” differences between the South Bridges, which can go with the above described North ones. Have a look:

The situation with the South Bridges is somewhat more interesting. The most advanced versions of NVIDIA South Bridges can boast very rich networking and sound capabilities, but do not support SerialATA, not to mention RAID. VIA, on the contrary, supports SerialATA and RAID, but has nothing similar to NVIDIA’s APU. Although VIA claims that Vinyl Six-TRAC Audio implemented in the VT8237 South Bridge provides no worse sound quality than NVIDIA’s solution if you use it with VT1616 codec. Also VIA’s South Bridges do not support IEEE1394, which is supported not only by NVIDIA’s chips but also by the South Bridge from SiS. As a result, we have to admit that there is no ideal South Bridge today. Each manufacturer’s solution has its bottlenecks, which will be eliminated by the mainboard makers: they will have to add extra onboard controller chips.