nVIDIA nForece2, again

[Jin Guojun [NCS]]

It is a vague problem on term of best performance -- what.
NVidia has better memory bandwidth in AMD motherboards.

However, if SATA is involved, some motherboard either
lowed the memory bandwidth, or had other I/O issues.

In terms of IDE performance, the AMD 760MP has
the best performance in all chipsets in the world. 760 gives true
200 MB/s I/O IDE throughput, where most other chipsets only gives
100/133 MB/s on both IDE buses with 4 drives.

As to onboard NIC, I do not see any performance problem on 100 Mb/s NIC.
Maybe some NICs are not supported.
The performance problem is on 1Gb/s NIC, especially Intel onboard NIC
which chews 100% high-end CPUs.

I have not had MSI K7N2 board yet. ASUS A7N8X is the similar one which
works very good in most areas. I have not tested its IDE controller yet.

VIA VT400 and VT600 are not very good on I/O performance.

    -Jin

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> My main machine has just fried a southbridge, and I'm looking for a
> replacement.  From what I can see, in the AMD range, the current best
> performer is the nVIDIA nForece2.  I've read Bill Paul's description
> of the problems with the onboard NIC, and if I buy one of these
> boards, I'll certainly swell his mailbox of disgruntled nVIDIA
> customers.  But at a more pragmatic level, a 100 Mb/s NIC costs
> nothing, and I have a few spares floating around, so it's not that big
> a deal.
>
> Looking at what our local suppliers have to offer, the MSI K7N2 Delta
> boards
> (http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UID=436)
> look reasonable, both in terms of performance and price.  Does anybody
> have any experience with them?  Are there any other problems with the
> chip set?  I've heard that it has an IOAPIC on it, even for single
> processors.  Is this an issue?  Any other comments?  Based on what
> I've read, I'd probably be putting a Barton 2600XP+ and 0.5 to 1 GB of
> DDR memory into it.
>
> Greg
> --