VIA vs. nForce2

Introduction

When last we left our stalwart hero, he was engaged in an entertaining dance few mortals do, namely, the motherboard hokey pokey. Ok, fine, so I'm no hero. You've got me there. But guess what? The dance wasn't much fun either. I'm just glad it's over. It was a long, arduous couple of days trying to figure out why a motherboard that worked just fine in the store wouldn't work at home. The problem was due, ultimately, to one lousy millimeter. Seriously. Read the article if you don't believe me.

Despite how little fun the whole thing was, however, there has been a definite up-side to the whole mess. I've long suspected that at least some of the problems I've had with previous motherboards—more about that in a moment—have been due to their VIA chipsets. But I've never had a chance to experiment with any other Athlon chipset until Fry's Electronics made it possible. I've had some very pleasant surprises over the last few weeks, and I encourage you to read onward for the details.

Compatibility and Stability

Perhaps the biggest problem I've had in the past is simple compatibility. My first motherboard with a VIA chipset, an ABit KT7A-RAID, gave me nothing but grief in this department. I had to go to ridiculous lengths to keep my Soundblaster Live X-Gamer sound card from conflicting with the VIA chipset. Whenever I plugged my Epson Photo PC 3000Z digital camera into one of the system's USB ports, the entire machine would instantly lock hard. I couldn't use DMA access with my DVD drive. These were but a few of the problems I saw with that motherboard. I had never seen such issues before with a Pentium-based system.

Switching to an ASUS A7V133 motherboard cured those ills, but it wasn't a panacea. With that board, I had several stability problems, I couldn't run my CAS2 memory at CAS2, I could never get a couple of games to run, and I had all manner of nasty "stuttering" problems. Toward the end of my use of that board, I was also disappointed to discover that an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card wasn't compatible with it at all. I have no idea which of those problems (if any) can be linked conclusively to the VIA chipset, but I'm betting that several of them can be.

Because of the remaining problems, and one of the worst days I've ever faced in terms of multiple system failures, I eventually traded up from the ASUS A7V133 to a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP. That step solved even more of my old problems, but it still didn't cure all my ills. Diablo II wouldn't run using 3D hardware acceleration without locking the system hard, I was quite surprised at the results of my investigation into the best memory timing parameters, and I had to go to great lengths to find a work-around for the stuttering problems I was still having. While the Gigabyte GA-7VAXP motherboard was a huge step forward, even that board failed to demonstrate the kind of broad-ranging compatibility and stability that I had always expected from other systems.

That brings us to the motherboard hokey pokey. One day the network controller on my GA-7VAXP simply vanished from the system in a fit of techno-pique and a puff of mysterious illogic. Enter the Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro motherboard, courtesy of my extended service plan with Fry's. This is the first and only motherboard I've seen that works with every device I own and has no software incompatibilities with any of the dozens of applications I've installed. Granted, it was a royal pain to get the board working, thanks to its ridiculously low tolerance for heat-sink and fan mounting discrepancies, but I've been quite pleasantly surprised at its compatibility and stability over the last few weeks.

I can use all my hardware with it. I can use all my software with it. Every USB device I've tried has simply worked. My sound card works—without my having to hunt around for the right PCI slot or any nonsense like that. The video card works. The system doesn't "stutter" at all like it used to. I've even stopped using Powerstrip to tweak my PCI Latency settings, which was previously necessary, because my system runs smoothly without it. I can run my CAS2 memory at CAS2. I can enable FastWrite in the system BIOS, and it actually speeds up the system (believe it or not, it greatly hindered performance in the past). I can enable DMA access for all my drives without any issues. It's like I'm running a Pentium-based system with an Intel motherboard; i.e., stuff actually works!

Performance

And, as they say in television ads for useless dreck, that's not all! Improved compatibility/stability is not the only benefit of running an nForce2-based motherboard. No, sir. It also outperforms all the other VIA motherboards I've had, by a very significant margin in some cases. As I've detailed previously, I use 3DMark 2003, Quake III Arena (Q3A), and Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT2k3) for benchmarking. For sake of reference, the data in the following table were taken with all the same hardware and software in place, save for different motherboards. The Catalyst v3.5 drivers were used for the video card in both cases, and only the front-side bus (FSB) clock rates differed as shown.

As you can see, even though the CPU in the GA-7VAXP was overclocked slightly, the GA-7N400 Pro still easily outperforms it. Though the 3DMark numbers differ by less than 1%, Q3A is faster by 8.1% while UT2k3 is faster by a whopping 50.1%. That 50.1% increase in UT2k3 isn't illusory either; the game itself displays much better framerates, as do other games based on its engine (e.g., Splinter Cell). Similarly, the Q3A boost is also easily verifiable using Q3A or other games based on that engine.

In fact, the mother of all buggy games on my hard drive, Raven Shield, is now entirely playable. Whereas I was originally getting framerates in the low teens with the GA-7VAXP, I'm now getting the kind of framerates that one might expect. I still think the game has some serious optimization issues, but I no longer have to go through the ridiculous rigmarole described in my tips and tweaks section for Raven Shield just to render it barely playable. With the GA-7N400 Pro, the game is playable right out of the box, and that's a huge improvement.

Conclusion

To be sure, it's possible that the problems I've mentioned are not the fault of VIA chipsets. But, of course, it's possible that the sun won't rise tomorrow too. That's probably not a fair comparison of the odds, but I have to say that I feel pretty vindicated in the doubts I've expressed about VIA chipsets over the years. There are plenty of known incompatibilities and issues, and, naturally given my luck, I've encountered almost all of them and then some. Things are much different, however, with an nForce2 chipset.

Thus, what can be said with certainty is that I've had nothing but success with the nForce2-based GA-7N400 Pro motherboard, and that success stands in stark contrast to all the problems I've had with a host of VIA-based motherboards. The performance numbers surely do not lie either. If you're having problems with your VIA-based system, you might want to consider upgrading to an nForce2-based motherboard. I'd have done so much sooner if I'd known how much better my system would work.

I know this much: until VIA radically revamps its chipsets, I won't ever buy another motherboard with a VIA chipset. Period.

09/04/2003