Review: NVIDIA nForce2

Before you scream that I haven't looked at performance I'll say two things. It's fast. You'll see that in the XP2700+ review. Rather than hit you with two sets of nForce2 based results in a day, I decided that a close look at the chipset here and some performance analysis with one of the chips it was engineered for in the XP2700+ review would be a decent compromise and would cut down on your info intake that will no doubt include other reviews around the web.

Hopefully this look at the chipset is enough and the evolution from nForce to nForce2 is clear.

If you don't want to look at the performance numbers in the other article, I'll venture out on a limb and without directly comparing it to another Socket A chipset I'll say nForce2 is the fastest Socket A chipset you can get (although not by huge amounts). It's just a matter of getting boards on shelfs and retail warehouses so you can get your hands on them too.

On a nicely setup board with all the voltage trimmings, tweakers will be happy, nForce2 overclocks properly now and has some crazy memory options to get the most out of things.

Overall, it's a technological tour de force supporting all the latest peripheral technologies, it's fast and it supports 333MHz CPU's and DDR333/DDR400 memory. The audio is outstanding and it overclocks.

All we need is solid boards, the chipset base is there.

Big thumbs up to NVIDIA for this chipset, I'd be happy to have a fast XP and nForce2 grace my personal system, something I can't say about a similar system running a VIA or SiS chipset.

So we now present NVIDIA with the Editors choice for socket A Chipset, this chipset coupled with 'Manic' peformance is a sure fire winner for all socket A users.