NVIDIA announced the nForce2 chipsets back in July, promising that the actual mainboards based on the core-logic will be available in late August or early September. Unfortunately, the nForce2 is going to be postponed for a number of weeks because several mainboard developers currently have some problems with their nForce2 powered products. The issues mainly concern stability and are going to be resolved soon. As our sources at NVIDIA assured us, the mainboards will be available by the time Athlon XP processors with 333MHz system bus are on the market, as a result, we are not going to see nForce2 based devices in big quantities until October.

Since nForce2 is the most feature-rich Socket A chipset, it is pretty natural that mainboard makers have some problems with their designs. As we know, the nForce2 is a unique core-logic that supports AMD Athlon XP processors with 333MHz system bus, 2-channel PC2100/PC2700 and DDR400 DDR SDRAM memory, AGP 8x, ATA133, 6 USB 2.0 ports, Dual 10/100 Ethernet controllers, 3 IEEE1394 ports, DolbyDigital decoding and ACR cards. NVIDIA offers two versions of nForce2: discrete nForce2-ST and nForce2-GT with integrated GeForce4 MX graphics core.

Meanwhile, some mainboard manufacturers reveal the specifications of their future nForce2 powered products. This week EPoX has unveiled the specs of their EP-8RGA+ that utilises the latest chipset from NVIDIA:

• Supports all Socket A Athlon XP/Athlon/Duron with 200, 266, 333MHz FSB;
• NVIDIA nForce2 IGP North-Bridge and MCP-T I/O Controller;
• 3 DIMM slots for up to 3GB of PC2100 (DDR266), PC2700 (DDR333) and DDR400 DDR SDRAM (2-channels of DDR SDRAM require only two slots to be utilised);
• Integrated GeForce4 MX graphics core;
• 6 PCI, and 1 AGP 8x slot;
• 2-channel integrated ATA/133 controller;
• Dual 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet Adapter;
• 6 USB 2.0 ports;
• Optional IEEE1394 ports;
• P80P onboard post controller;
• Integrated 6-channel audio solution with DolbyDigital support;
• Overclocking functions, including, Vcore, Vmem and Vagp adjustments.

EPoX will also roll out its EP-8RDA+ mainboard based on nForce2-ST core-logic. To my great sadness, there are no word about the timeframe these devices will be available.