Introduction

Socket A: Still alive and kicking

While AMD’s Athlon 64 processors are stealing all the headlines (in particular, the 3000+ and 3400+), AMD’s venerable Athlon XP CPUs still account for the bulk of AMD’s sales. After all, with Athlon XP 2500+ chips selling for $85 or less online, many gamers are finding this processor in particular is a bargain that’s too hard to pass up. And how could you blame them? The Athlon XP 2500+ is based on AMD’s Barton core. It features a 512KB L2 cache, 333MHz front-side bus, and runs at 1.83GHz. In fact, since it utilizes the same 11.0 multiplier setting as the Athlon XP 3200+, a lot of enthusiasts have purchased XP 2500+ chips and cranked up the bus speed to 200MHz, yielding the exact same 2.2GHz clock speed as the Athlon XP 3200+!

DFI LANPARTY NFII Ultra B

ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe

Basically, with the Athlon XP 2500+ you’re getting a lot of performance without having to put a huge dent in your bank account. This little chip is definitely a FiringSquad Bull’s Eye product.

But now that you’re sold on the Athlon XP processor, what motherboard do you choose to go with it? NVIDIA’s nForce2 chipset is definitely the platform of choice for the Athlon XP, specifically the nForce2 Ultra 400.

This chipset supports AMD’s 400MHz front-side bus, which means it’s capable of supporting AMD’s fastest Athlon XP processor, the 3200+. In addition, its dual-channel memory architecture is capable of pumping up to 6.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth to the processor, ensuring that it’s well fed with data. And to top it all off, NVIDIA’s nForce2 chipset is capable of delivering Dolby Digital 5.1 audio to your ears. The nForce2 chipset even supports dual networking capability.

Love that LANPARTY logo

Typical ASUS looks

Narrowing down your choices to an individual motherboard is a complicated process though. First and most important is of course price. If you can’t afford a $150+ motherboard upgrade obviously you can weed some products out, but there are still a ton of nForce2 options out there that are relatively inexpensive.

What we’ve done today however is take two of the latest, most feature-packed nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboards on the market: the ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Wireless Edition and the DFI LANPARTY NFII Ultra B and compare them. Both of these motherboards are targeted towards the high-end gamer and hardware enthusiast. They support all of the nForce2’s key features, as well as the goodies that are optional for motherboard manufacturers to implement such as the Dolby Digital capable MCP-T and NVIDIA’s DualNet networking. ASUS and DFI also add features unique to their respective boards, taking the nForce2 platform to entirely new levels.

ASUS backplate

LANPARTY backplate

If you’re familiar with the Athlon XP motherboard market, you probably know that both of these boards are second-generation nForce2 Ultra 400 designs. The original variants of both were highly regarded, but ASUS and DFI both felt the need to spice up the equation a little bit more. This means that we should be in for a really fun head-to-head comparison. And while there can only be one winner, neither one of these motherboards should disappoint. In fact, the board that finishes in second place may actually be more ideal for your individual needs. We’ll try to cover both of these boards with enough depth so that you can sort out which board is best for your particular situation/environment.