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  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Kristopher, #16 again. These quotes were taken from the original AnandTech reviews of nForce2 technology.

    "Remember the 12% boost in bandwidth we saw on the nForce2 by going to DDR400? That 12% increase in bandwidth comes at the cost of a 22% increase in latency! The increase in latency is not only due to the slower memory timings DDR400 modules run at but also because the memory bus is no longer synchronous with the FSB when running in DDR400 mode whereas DDR333 matches up perfectly with the new 333MHz Athlon XP FSB."

    "There's no increase in latency when going from a single channel DDR333 to a dual channel DDR333 setup on the nForce2 platform. There is a slight increase when making the same transition with DDR400 because we had to increase some of the timing delays in order to run two channels of DDR400 with the nForce2 while maintaining stability."

    "As we proved in our original review of the nForce chipset, the bandwidth gained from going to dual channel DDR doesn't help unless you're sharing main memory bandwidth with an integrated GPU. In this case we're not and we'll be focusing on IGP performance in a later article, so we can disregard the two 128-bit nForce2 solutions for the rest of this comparison. We also have a balanced FSB/memory bus setup, meaning we have as much bandwidth going to our CPU as we do to main memory, so increasing memory bandwidth without similarly increasing FSB bandwidth would inherently yield poor returns as we're FSB limited at that point."

    Thus, unless the board is capable of running dual-channel in full synchronous mode at 400MHz+ at tight timings, there does not seem to be any advantage. And then again, how many boards that can do this fall into the "half dozen $80 nForce2 motherboards" category?
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link

    Kristopher, in answer to your question in #12, how about "official" support of 400MHz front side bus.
  • Anonymous User - Sunday, September 21, 2003 - link

    yeah nforce 400 (single chanel) are good performers.
    I also have a soltek sl-nv400-64 and by some benchmarks they performe better than a dual channel bord.
    So please dont advise not to buy them...
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, September 20, 2003 - link

    Where's those 9800np's? Can't find them, can you? (Are you gonna link to Best Buy?)
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, September 20, 2003 - link

    Don't dance around the subject if you yourself want to come out as substantiated.
  • KristopherKubicki - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link

    #10 (and #3): That is a ridiculous and totally unsubstantiated comment. What (in your opinion) does the NV400 bring to the table that the other half dozen $80 nForce2 motherboards dont?

    Kristopher
  • Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link

    Don't buy a single-channel NForce 2 400 board after Anandtech themselves reviewed the Soltek NV-400 as one of the fastest Athlon solutions?!?!
  • Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link

    Perhaps a reason for all this dual-channel advocacy is that quite a few reviewers are actually Intel oriented and fail to see the picture clearly about current AMD system boards.
  • Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link

    #5 I want to know that myself. I'm holding off strickly to buy the 9800XT as soon as it's released, but it's getting tough to hold off. I'm dying for information about this card and scour the net daily now looking for new info.
  • TheSnowman - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    i saw plenty of 9800nps at best buy the other day.
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    You could have gotten the motherboard Evan gave the Editors Choice to for $79, the EPoX 8RDA+

    http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1759&am...

  • DBaron - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    Whats wrong with the Nforce single channel boards? I was all set to buy a Soltek NV400, till I read this article. It seems like a good mobo for the price , and its fairly inexpensive too...76 at new egg. Is there something I am missing?
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    geez can anyone say WHEN the 9800XT NDA will lift or is that NDA too. >:(
  • KristopherKubicki - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    #3: We will add some more 9800 NP cards. They didnt really dissappear, just resellers all decided to reorganize their SKUs are the same time.

    KT600 and nForce2 are priced about the same and perform about the same. Dual Channel memory is the largest difference between the two. If it doesnt cost you anything more, why not?

    Kristopher
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    R9800 (non pro) is becoming widely available and should not be replaced by R9800SE becauase that's a cut down garbage version that should not be allowed to bear the R9800 name...

    A question on the article. Why stress the fact that The KT600 boards are single channel, when dual channel does so very little for SocketA boards in general? When looking at practical performance it basically doe not do much good at all. I'm objecting because so many people looking for motherboards believe the myth that dual channel is an important feature. Don't keep it alive.
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    I thought the 9800np were pretty much OEM cards like for Dell, etc? I didn't think the 9800np was nearly as common as the 9700np, 9500np, etc...

    I imagine the 9800SE will replace the non pro though.
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    No comment about the disappearance of the ATI 9800 non-pro cards?

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