Soltek NV400-L64: Purple, Practical, AND Performance!
by Wesley Fink on August 11, 2003 10:26 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Words
The Soltek NV400-L64 is a bargain-priced, single-channel nForce2 400 board whose primary reason for being is to compete with the VIA KT600 with a lower-cost NVIDIA chipset, and to provide compelling value for mainstream users. It meets both of these goals very well, and has to be considered a roaring success.The surprising performance of the single-channel nForce2 400, however, also makes the NV400-L64 the ideal board in situations that you might not have considered. Its top-notch gaming performance makes it an ideal choice for a top-performing gaming rig, and its low price will save the gamer some money, to be spent on a better video card, for example. While the gaming performance of the Soltek is excellent, it is not a knock-out punch, as its performance is very close to the gaming performance of top Ultra 400 boards.
For mainstream use in multimedia creation and general office work, the NV400-L64 is also a competent performer. If you are working on a limited budget and/or desire an excellent price point, you won’t be making any performance sacrifices with this Soltek. In fact, you may also save money buying memory. Top performance can be achieved on the NV400-L64 with just one stick of memory, compared to nForce2 Ultra 400 boards that need a matched pair of DIMMs for best performance.
Despite these positive remarks, there are some weaknesses in the nForce2 400 chipset. Applications like SpecViewperf 7.0 show that there are trade-offs with the single-channel solution. In truly demanding workstation applications, the Soltek NV400-L64 is no substitute for a top nForce2 Ultra 400 dual-channel solution.
It’s hard not to get excited about a board that sells for about $70 and outperforms the majority of Athlon boards in gaming. It’s easy to recommend the Soltek for a top-notch gaming rig, as well as a mainstream system that provides top-performance with few frills at a value price. It is not, however, the board that beats the nForce2 Ultra 400 in demanding applications.
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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. 2.0In 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.
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