NVIDIA's nForce 420/220: It's finally here

Final Words

If there was one phrase that would best summarize NVIDIA's nForce it would be "raising the bar," since that's exactly what it does.  The introduction of the nForce and the subsequent assimilation into the market raises the bar in many areas; audio, video and integrated chipsets in general.  Having something as powerful as the NVIDIA APU on every motherboard will quickly sour your taste on conventional AC'97 on-board audio not to mention what the next-generation nForce with an even more powerful integrated video core will do to the expectations for on-board video performance.

There are a couple of conclusions that can be made from this article.  For starters, the performance of the nForce with an external AGP card is approximately on-par with that of the KT266A.  While the KT266A does come out ahead in the majority of benchmarks, its lead is usually limited to 3% or less which is honestly indiscernible to even the most highly trained eyes.  For the ultimate Athlon platform in terms of performance, the decision really comes down to the KT266A or the nForce.  Assuming you're captivated by the features of the nForce, let's have a look at what your options are:

If you're not going to use the integrated video, the most sensible nForce solution to pursue is indeed the nForce 220-D.  The reason motherboard manufacturers would want to push this solution is because the chipset is cheaper and physically laying out the board is not as difficult with only a single 64-bit memory bus to trace out on the PCB.  At Computex we didn't see much emphasis placed on the nForce 220-D but we're hoping that the cost savings will be significant enough to see some support from motherboard manufacturers.

As ironic as it may be, the more expensive nForce 420-D is definitely more desirable if you want to go down the "cost effective" route and make use of the integrated video.  Trying to play any of today's 3D games on a memory bandwidth limited nForce 220-D platform will not do the GPU or yourself any justice. 

The nForce is a good platform for a user that's building a system from scratch since you do end up getting a very powerful sound processor and Ethernet controller in one package.  For the user just casually upgrading their motherboard that already has money invested in a good sound card/Ethernet controller then there's not as much reason to move to nForce.

For an OEM looking for a highly integrated platform with all of the bells and whistles, the nForce fits the bill perfectly.  It is all too often that we are forced to sacrifice quality or features when going with a highly integrated platform but the nForce changes all of that.  Raising the bar is indeed what it does in this sense.

There's also the issue of price; NVIDIA was claiming that boards would retail in the $120 - $150 range and if we end up seeing a $120 nForce 220-D motherboard then we'd be quite pleased but we'll reserve judgment on that until we actually see boards available.  Speaking of which, motherboards are going into mass production in October and you should see them shortly thereafter.  As far as we know, MSI is currently closest to shipping boards out of all of the manufacturers.

So there you have it; the somewhat over hyped, somewhat misunderstood nForce.  The product itself is very well designed, but we think NVIDIA will find it a little more difficult to dominate in the chipset market as well as they have in the video realm.