nForce 2 Previews

http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.html?i=16829&t=pn

nForce2 powered tiny little Shuttle boxes, could be interesting for those wanting to build small home entertainment units.

What happened to mobos without a bunch of shit onboard? I HAVE MY OWN SOUNDCARD/NIC/VID CARD, DAMNIT.

Great, even more bandwidth the AMD cpu's won't use, that's fantastic.

Where oh where is the intel version of this chipset (stupid licensing costs)

I have the highest respect for [H]ardOCP, but I thought that their preview of the nForce2 was rather *fluff* (not what I'm used to seeing from [H]). I'd like to bitch and moan about 2 things that bother me with the nForce2.

1) Paying for a second integrated lan card. (From 3com, of all companies... I'd much rather use one of the high quality leadtek or NetGear cards *I ALREADY OWN*. Seems like a feature that only 2% of the market will need and or use. Stupid that we all have to pay for it.)

2) Leadtek... omg... why not just make the onboard video out availible on the reference design? Now to get outward video signal, I'll have to get a Leadtek? Joy... I've had a leadtek card in the past... MISTAKE! I send that puppy straight back and picked up an MSI for $10 less which scored me 12 more FPS!

Anyway, just my $0.02. Thanks.

I have an Asus nForce board in my box right now...

No problems with it whatsoever. Very, very fast load times on levels with only a 7200rpm ATA100 HD and the ethernet, video, sound have all been rock solid. I added a GF2 Pro to it and now it has a GF4 ti4200.

The onboard video was more than adequate for casual gamers I think and was handy when my old Voodoo3 died in an old box, letting me move the GF2 to it and use the onboard till the GF4 arrived.

Dunno what people have against it, probably the best motherboard I've ever owned as far as utility and stability. I was considering getting another without video for the older box with a cheaper Duron for like $120 total, now I may just wait till the nForce 2. -

my € 0,02 (haha overruled!):

if this thing gets cheaper i ll buy one and use it as a linux based mulimedia and router box. dvd/mp3/divx player with proxy and samba fileserver and stuff... all onboard. /me likes that. i hope everything works with linux...

The benchmarks from the nforce1 weren't that great either remember, and it turned out to be better than via simply because of stablity. Nvidia knows that they can't get away with just stablity now and are trying to put as much into making the board go faster. I think it looks promising, but we will see.

I wish all the 'I hate my NIC/cooler' stuff was marked offtopic*.

*hint hint

This looks very intersting to me, I really want that Dolby Digital encoder for Doom 3 since my Audigy can't encode.

with the TV tuner one of these would be great for a home entertainment PC.

And the actual nForce2 homepage:
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=nforce2

Looks like Nvidia are taking a page from the Apple book and streaming the 'launch event':
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=nforce2_launch_replay
(all one hour or so of it, I don't think even I can take that much Nvidia)

I think the basic gist of these previews and the aim of the nForce2 is that you won't pay for what you don't want anymore. Nvidia made the mistake with the nForce of loading it with features, then being surprised when it seemed people did not want to pay more despite the board had decent onboard video, because they had fast video cards already. This caused myself and others to wait for the nForce415 boards which lacked the onboard video.

Now they seem to be preparing to offer a range of solutions based on combinations of g2mx level video, gf4mx, no video, 5.1/6.1 sound or 2 channel sound, Firewire and USB-2 ports, and up to two onboard ethernet ports. So you may see manufacturers with three or four boards ranging from onboard gf2mx, 2 channel sound and not much else, for cheap systems, up to no onboard video, 6.1 sound, and all the other goodies for power users with a fast video card all ready to plug in.

Im more excited about the n force 2 then I was about nforce 1.
So far so good.