Chipset: nForce2 400GB Review :: Conclusion

With the nForce 2 Ultra 400 Gb, NVIDIA has taken its best selling chipset and improved upon it. With the myriad of additional features offered by the nForce2 Ultra 400 Gb, NVIDIA has made a worthy addition to their chipset arsenal, fully equaling and bettering the competition in the form of performance, integrated features and drivers.

While some may question the need for another Athlon XP platform, I am not one of them. There are still plenty of mid-range PCs that don't need all of the power of the high-end PC. With integrated Firewall and RAID, the nForce2 Ultra 400 Gb is perfectly suited for the business that doesn't need or want the high performance provided by the Athlon 64 platform.

Truth be told, most end-users don't need a Socket 939 Athlon 64 CPU. Many people use their computers mainly to surf the Net, write emails, use Word and play a few games. For these users, an Athlon XP is still a viable computing platform. The other day I was at a local Circuit City shopping for memory. The salesperson was trying to convince a 60-year old man to buy a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 computer. While I'm sure he would be happy with the computer that the salesperson was selling, a computer based on a Athlon XP would do him just as well.

The bottom line is this. If you're looking for a Athlon XP chipset, you really can't go wrong with the nForce2 Ultra 400 Gb. This chipset provides all of the performance, and features that you would want in this platform. The key additions make this an easy choice for myself if I was looking for a Athlon XP motherboard. Shortly, NVIDIA will announce another nForce3 chipset. This will likely be a Socket 939 based nForce3. This will complete NVIDIA's lineup of AMD chipsets from top to bottom. It's going to be an interesting rest of the year in computers.

There are some noticeable items missing from NVIDIA's nForce2 Ultra 400 Gb. They are PCI-Express (which isn't released yet but will be important from here on out), Sound Storm (which MAY make an appearance in a future chipset or may even make it to a discrete solution but many people miss from NVIDIA chipsets), and Dual Ethernet (which is potentially significant). However, the onboard sound, AGP 8x and Gigabit LAN are worthy items for the intended market.