Considering asus has like one of the slowest KT600 (not to mention their KT333 & KT266A boards also performed towards the lower end of the rest of the competition) mainboards, I'll wait for other manufacturers boards :P. Either way it's all good if thats the performance, I just want something cheap to upgrade to since I think I might stick with AXP platform for rest of this year and nforce2 boards dont seem to be coming down (at least ones with good features :P).

Also, aren't the nforce2 bios' fairly mature? Perhaps more performance lurks in the new KT880 chipset...

ASUS isn't the only one...

http://www.soltek.com.tw/soltek/product/products_all.php?i sbn_st=SL-KT880E-R%2FSL-KT880E-RL

The Soltek one is a bit of a joke for overclockers...

The most important disadvantage isn't performance: it's VIA.

Here is a excelente example as competition is good!!!
Nvidia never have released anything new because no one has surprass them, if there were already something better then nforce2 then we whould see nforce3, i am sure.
This is all to say that we need alot of manufactures/company for graphics cards, processor, chipsets, harddisk, cdrom, etc... or we pay to much.
80$ this is really ridiculous, what do they win manufacturing it....

It would be nice to know if this board has the same conflict between nVida video cards and the 8237 south bridge when SATA hard drives are used. The SATA drives lose their partition information on the primary partition when the system is powered down - unplugged. The systems are fine as long as you don't power them down. Also, they will allow a re-install of the operating system without issue - until you shut them down and pull the power cord - they need to be down for about 30 minutes - we assume that is a temprature issue.

One very important and good feature that was not mentioned is ability to stick 4 RAM modules and it works in dual chanell mode. It is very annoying that nforce have all those nice features but you can only plug in 2 RAM slots to work in dual channell

I agree with noerr on post #7. Failing to mention the fact that the Nforce2 memory subsystem leaves a lot to be desired. I love the fact that the KT880 has the advantage to go up to 4GB RAM VS the 2GB of the Nforce2. Another suprising fact is the VIA KT chipsets CAN handle more hardware and not have compatibility issues such as using non-bus mastering hardware.
Try running the Nforce chipsets with Voodoo 2 in SLI AND simultaneously run a GeForce AGP card too. Good luck!

I have to agree with ohivalsys in post 6; I recently bought a Giga-byte GA-7N400 PRO2 and I have definately regretted buying that damn thing. Nothing but problems, the partition table problem happened to me a couple times, let me tell you it is a bitch to start it up after taking it to a lan party and having alllllll your chit deleted because you didnt wait 30 min for a powerdown.... Very buggy controllers, the agp slot is too deep for my geforce 6800 gt so it keeps giving me damn errors. Not to mention my defective board doesnt run in dual channel mode... In other words, this board isnt looking all that bad right now.

Nforce 2 400 ultra chipsets have excellent performance with athlon xp processors, but mainboards are still expensive compared with VIA kt880 mainboards. I think that the difference of performance between them are little like say the article, and I am sure kt880 has less issues with hardware. I find a a7v880 for 70 bucks while a7n8x deluxe is still over 100 bucks.
Although VIA mainboards have had its own problems in a lot of mainboards, they are more experienced manufacturing chipsets than nvidia, in my personal opinion. So, thumbs up to try the last VIA socket A chipset that will be good too.

ASUS A7V880 gave me the worst head aches since A7V266C. It has some serious problems with Windows XP. I see the blue screen with the memory dumping 3 times a day...

How come ASUS motherboards (A7V600, A7N8X, A7V800) for Athlon XP's never go lower than 1.65v? It makes them impossible to use for anyone interested in XP-M's or silencing. I know ABIT supports lower voltages, and as do most manufacturers I believe.

why is the asus a7v880 motherboard with the s ata raid not powerdown?

why is the asus a7v880 motherboard with the s ata raid not powerdown?
when i shutdown windows xp its stops in the shutdownscreen and the powerled starts to blink.
help me!!!1

I just bought this board and even though it's supposed to support 4gb of ram it doesn't actually work. The response I got from ASUS was a bunch of broken english saying that this motherboard only supports two sticks.

Jep Asus has done it again....make a f*cked-up board that is....this is the newest model with memory problems...the memory won't run @ 400Mhz (sims are ok as tested in other machine w. nforce chipset and have tried a dozen different brands/types)

DON'T BUY THIS BOARD! IN FACT DONT BUY ASUS / VIA COMBO'S AT ALL!!!

Greetingz Blue Rishi

Tried two boards. One is broken, other doesn't support 4GB. Woo hoo! I tried 20GB of RAM from different companies, last two being Kingston and Transcend (Samsung RAM). Still no work.

Raid requires 4 SATA drives - see Via website

The informations about A7V880 are bad. My friend has this mainboard and it doesn't have AC97 soundcard it has another 6chanel soundcard.

is the asus motherboard a7v880 is compadible with a linkysys -G router?

the pc freezes everytime i go on the internet, although going on safe mode, it does not freeze