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Nvidia nForce3 Ultra Motherboard Roundup
[Abstract]
IntroductionFollowing our Socket 939 roundup of VIA K8T800 Pro motherboards, we take a look now at NVIDIA's camp, more specifically the nForce3 Ultra chipset. The nForce 3 chipset as we now kno...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Motherboard Summary
As we come to the conclusion of our roundup, let us summarize what we've seen so far. To start off, if performance is the most important criteria for you, the Gigabyte GA-K8NS-939 should provide it in abundance. The board was the most consistent performer and recorded the best scores in most of the benchmarks. MSI's K8N Neo2 Platinum was also a robust performer and the board managed to stay on par with the Gigabyte most of the time though it came in a close second when looking at overall results. Both of these boards also proved to have excellent overclocking headroom, achieving the same top FSB of 275MHz in our overclocking tests.
We would like to give the EPoX Ep-9NDA3J a special mention though. The board was found to be extremely temperamental with its settings, resulting in system instability. It was also dogged with a localized PCI slot issue that revolved around network card and memory configurations causing the board to even fail booting up. Due to these, we had to run the board using relaxed memory timings, which dragged down much of its scores during benchmarking. However, once we got it up and running, it did so flawlessly and even achieved a very commendable overclocking result of 270MHz FSB, only 5MHz less than the Gigabyte GA-K8NS-939. Suffice to say that you won't feel the pinch in general usage such as web surfing or typing out documents.
Users should note that all three boards using the same chipset would not differ too much from each other in terms of noticeable real world performance. Though if you crave every additional second saved or every extra frame rendered, the choice here is obvious. Users may even want to cross compare performance with our recent VIA K8T800 Pro roundup, found here.
In the audio department, all three boards could be seen to offer the same CODEC. On paper, they should all have similar options and capabilities though this wasn't really true on board. Of the three boards, only the EPoX EP-9NDA3J and MSI's K8N Neo2 Platinum provided both analog and digital output options taking full advantage of the 8-channel audio capabilities. That being said, if you happen to use a discreet sound card, you won't really be affected either way.
User's looking for a stable and fully featured board should check out the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum. It makes full use of the nForce3 Ultra chipset plus offering extra storage options, dual Gigabit LAN and IEEE 1394a support. Although our roundup looks at the most common boards from budget to premium, users should take note that both EPoX and Gigabyte do offer high end versions of their nForce3 Ultra board that come with additional features comparable to the K8N Neo2 Platinum.
An emerging focus for all motherboard manufacturers these days seem to be user diagnostic functions. Information that helps users in overclocking, tweaking, troubleshooting and recovery become a crucial factor for most enthusiasts. All three boards were loaded with their distinct diagnostics and reporting functions to aid users in overclocking or identifying errors. Users can also find different variants of Gigabyte's GA-K8 series that feature two BIOS chips to prevent BIOS failure and corruption.
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