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  • Anonymous User - Saturday, October 25, 2003 - link

    Hello All!!!
    I've been buying components last 6 months one at a time, and the Soltek Nv400L was my last purchace.
    System Specs:
    430 Watt Antec Power Supply
    Athlon XP 2500 cpu
    512 Corsair Xms c2pt memory-single stick
    Ati 9500 pro 128 video card
    Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card
    1 80 gig Western Digital 8meg cache hard drive
    1 80 gig Maxtor 8meg cache hard drive
    Liteon 522446s Cd writer
    Liteon 165h Dvd rom
    Philips Brilliance 107p monitor
    Windows XP professional

    I don' need serial ata, my special editions are plenty fast for the dollars spent, serial needs to mature also. I had a Kt3ultra2, with pc2100 Infineon 512 stick, and a XP2000.
    I was concerned about this upgrade, I don't trust cheap boards. Had real bad time with a ECS pos last year.
    Let me tell you, my system right now, is THE best bang for the buck. I am so impressed. All I needed was the lan, and it too kills my pci network card. This Soltek mobo should not be understated, to say the very, very least. I also like the fact of just having my one stick of corsair, ranther than having 2 dual sticks. If you need all the "features", pass on it. If you want amazing speed, ultra reliability, and great overclocking (Soltek has O/C bios at request, FULL ram tweaking), grab this board.
    I can't believe something this cheap is so damn fast, reliable.............
    Don't be fooled people. Ya, I have no bragging rights, but I have a great little purple mobo on crack, HIGHLY SUGGESTED.
    THIS IS THE MOST UNDERATED MOBO ON THE MARKET RIGHT NOW. ABSOLUTELEY. You don't hear much about it cause Nvidia etc. etc. is not getting rich off it. Its a gem.
  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, August 27, 2003 - link

    Can't see the benchmarks, too. Using Netscape7 on Linux.
  • Anonymous User - Monday, August 25, 2003 - link

    Uhh... Did something happened to the benchmark pics? (They are not showing up) Anyone else experiencing this? or Is my browser acting up?

    Maybe another ongoing article update perhaps?



  • Anonymous User - Wednesday, August 20, 2003 - link

    To the author,

    PCI bus speed runs at a fixed frequency for nForce2. It isn't half of the AGP bus speed. Please use a IOSS RD2 Pro PC Geiger PCI Bus Multifunction Analyzer to verify.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 19, 2003 - link

    Jeff, stop posting, it's already known fact that Gigabyte's nForce2 U400 and other U400 motherboards perform exactly the same as Epox and ASUS's boards. Your argument request is useless, waste's Anandtech's time, and is getting old frankly.
  • Anonymous User - Sunday, August 17, 2003 - link

    I'm really surprised by the figures you guys obtained - I had an ASUS A7N8X-X (non-ultra) and it was crap! I could only get 8,000 in 3Dmark01, upon changing to the ASUS Ultra (deluxe) and keeping everything the same I got 13,500!!!!

    Also, my A7V8X-X was way faster (12,000 3DMark01) - Don't know why, maybe the A7N8X-X was not working correctly(?).
  • Jeff7181 - Sunday, August 17, 2003 - link

    Again I ask... where the hell is the popular boards like the A7N8X Deluxe and 8RDA+?
  • Anonymous User - Sunday, August 17, 2003 - link

    is a7n8x-x anygood?
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, August 16, 2003 - link

    I am awaiting further testing on other nForce2 400/Ultra motherboard, e.g. chaintech 7njl3 or 7njl4 or gigabyte counterparts which are also very competitive in the market.

    wesley, hear my voice?!
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, August 16, 2003 - link

    And one last question - is it not possible that the 'Auto' setting for memory speed actually runs the memory in sync with FSB? I just want to be sure.
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, August 16, 2003 - link

    Wesley -

    I thought the PCI bus runs at a fixed frequency and is independent from the AGP bus. In the review, it was stated that the PCI bus is half of the AGP bus. Is it possible that this could be confirmed with a hardware monitor that is capable of measuring the PCI bus speed? If not, from what source was the PCI bus speed information taken from?

    Thanx for review! :D
  • Anonymous User - Friday, August 15, 2003 - link

    #23, you're clueless. AnandTech still has the best motherboard, CPU and now memory reviews on the net. HardOCP does some of the best video card reviews on the net, a bit better than AnandTech, but that's mostly because Anandtech doesn't release any individual video card reviews. If they did, Anandtech would dominate CPU, motherboard, video AND memory reviews.

    Read other web sites before you belittle Anandtech for quality reviews.

    LMAO at #24. Though your point could have been made better without the swearing. :)
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, August 14, 2003 - link

    Yeah Well ,This review is slightly amusing &
    Mildly Boring..

    For all you new guys at AnandTech,
    This place does not feel like "Home" anymore..

    Oh yes ,its still my homepage ,after so many years.

    The Place Might be Anand's - But it aint Anandtech no more...

    THe reviews are lacking & incomplete - with too much cutting & pasting done all the time.

    Many issues are just ignored ,
    & it all feels so shallow.......

    You Should Go Read "Old" Coppermine Area AnandTech Archives & get a grip on what this place used to be...

    Please hear My (our?!) cry ..
  • Locutus4657 - Thursday, August 14, 2003 - link

    #5:

    What the heck are you talking about? Via? Better Stability?? You've obviously never looked into their white papers before.... More than 200 pages for the KT133 errata section alone. I'm sorry, It's worth getting fewer features for an nForce board. At least it will work.
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, August 14, 2003 - link

    Why is it that drivers get so little attention, but small differences in performance are blown up well beyond reasonable proportions? I'm talking about reviews all over the net now and not just Anandtech. It's just that the nForce drivers continuing mess doesn't get even a tenth of the attention that benchmarks in stupid programs like SiSoft Sandra get. (?!?)

    Wich bothers the users most, a few percentages here and there that doesn't show in practical use or driver issues that makes the regular user call his or her "techy" friend to come solve the issues.
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, August 14, 2003 - link

    Actually, we are only on a limitted relationship with Crucial, Corsair, Kingston and Mushkin. They all send us lots of products, but its fairly easy to do considering how much (or how little) a stick of DDR costs.

  • Evan Lieb - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    In case anyone is wondering, all nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboards from Epox, ASUS, ABIT, etc. vary on an average of 0-1.5% (max). In fact, Gigabyte's nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboard (7NNXP) was ever so slightly faster than ASUS's A7N8X Deluxe rev. 2.0

    In other words, it serves no purpose to run benchmarks on 10 different nForce2 Ulra 400 motherboards if they all perform the same (unless it's a roundup of course).
  • Wesley Fink - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    All our benchmarks are run at 1024x768 and at 32bit color if possible. We run the GunMetal 2 bench at default settings - which is audio enabled and 2X Anisotropic filtering. It has been common practice NOT to run Quake3 and other game benches with sound enabled due to the variation in scores caused by different sound chips. However with this new DX9 bench, we decided to run at default.

    Unfortunately, GunMetal 2 seems VERY video-card bound, and may not be a very useful benchmark for motherboard testing. It would appear a great choice, though, for testing video cards.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    Wesley could you please state what settings the gunmetal benchs were run including the resolution, graphical settings ect.. I would like to compare my setup to your results. This info would be benificial if it was stated in the result graphic in the article. Thanks.
  • Wesley Fink - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    #14 - As we stated in #10 and #12, we recently completed retesting ALL recent reviews with our new ATI 9800 PRO video standard. When that was done, benchmarks for this review were updated and sent to our editor who does web-posting.

    Unfortunately, our web-editor posted the earlier tests. These have NOW been corrected and all reported benchmarks are with the 9800 PRO.

    It helps to read all the comments before posting here. Your question or comment may already have been addressed.
  • Wesley Fink - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    #13 - The VIA KT600 board tests were earlier tests already completed by Evan Lieb with the 4.47 VIA Hyperion drivers . We reported what was used in those tests. The Hyperion drivers do not have any relevance to THIS review of the nForce 400.
  • Turnip - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    This is the least fair benchmark I ever remember having seen on AnandTech!

    To quote the last paragraph of the review, "It's hard not to get excited about a board that sells for about $70 and outperforms the majority of Athlon boards in gaming."

    You're comparing 3D-based benchmarks using different graphics cards! Of course the benchmarks using the brand new whizzy cards are faster than the older benchmarks with old cards!

    Regardless of whether you're updating this article with the new results now or not, this article should never have appeared in a publication of AnandTech's standing in this appalling condition in the first place!

    - A long-time reader of AnandTech, who has never before seen such an unfair review.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    Wesley-

    Just a little curious why you used all the updated drivers available except the Via Hyperion 4.48 drivers?
  • Wesley Fink - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    Jeff7181 -
    In our tests at AnandTech, the performance of the nForce2 and nForce2 Ultra 400 is virtually the same at the same settings. The difference is that the Ultra 400 officially supports the 200FSB AMD processors, and they generally overclock better as a result.

    As stated in #10 above, we have completed a retest of recent reviews with our new ATI 9800 PRO video card standard, and those will be posted in this review later today. Since the difference in nForce2 and nForce2 Ultra 400 is 200 CPU/bus support and overclocking, we did not retest the older nForce2 chipset boards.

  • Jeff7181 - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    This review is lacking... where's the benchmarks for the popular motherboards like the A7N8X Deluxe, NF7-S, and 8RDA+ ?!?!? I don't care if a new nForce2 400 Ultra whatever the hell they call it now is faster than a KT600 chipset... I want to know if it's faster than the previous generation of nForce2 motherboards. Quit slackin off Anand.
  • Wesley Fink - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    All of our benchmarks have been updated using the ATI 9800 as the reference video card, and you will see updates in this article very shortly. The text changes will go up first, so bear with us until all the updates are up.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    Stability? Sound? Are you joking?

    You can also get an Epox 8RDA+ with those same features for $15 more and it'll come with Serial ATA, nForce sound (much better than any VIA sound), better overclocking potential, and most likely better drivers. Push comes to shove, who would any sane person choose, VIA or NVIDIA? LOL, as if I should have to answer that.

    Face it, KT600 motherboards are worthless unless you're a VIA whore.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    I have an Asus A7N8X-X, and this mobo has a nForce2 400 chipset, with single chanel memory. Processor, XP2600(fsb333) and 1GB DDR333. If it is faster than nForce2 ultra 400 (dual chanel), or not... that I don't know. But I was surprised with the speed of my system.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    Lets See what issues this chipset brings,
    For 15$ more KT600 With integrated SATA &
    better sound (& probably stability) is a better
    choice without a doubt.

    Btw..What is it with you guys & Corsair...Looks
    Like you have a "Nice" setup with them huh ..
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    #2 what are you talking about? Why would anyone choose a KT600 motherboard that is slower and overclocks poorly for more money just because you can get onboard SATA that does absolutely nothing for performance? Puhlease.
  • epicstruggle - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    is it just me or did the article replace ' with ’.

    later,
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    Good point for soltek board is they always unlock your high order XP cpus ;)
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    I think the ASUS A7N8X-X also uses Single-Channel memory.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    What are you talking about, for $15 more than this board costs I can get a KT600 board that's equal or greater in performance with SATA (+RAID), Firewire, 8 USB 2.0 ports, and better onboard audio. Certainly wouldn't want people looking at that!
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link

    Great bang for the buck! It should keep a lot of people from looking VIA's way.

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