Socket 939 Battle – VIA vs. Nvidia
 

We've already extensively covered AMD's move to Socket 939, which eliminates the registered RAM requirement from Socket 940 and makes for slightly cheaper and faster systems. In that article, we ran performance benchmarks using an MSI board equipped with VIA's latest chipset, the K8T800 Pro - a slight improvement on the K8T800 used in many Socket 940 boards. At the time, Nvidia's new chipset for Socket 939 was not yet ready. We finally got our hands on an MSI motherboard using the new nForce3 250Gb chipset and took it for a spin.

In this article, we'll compare and contrast performance and features for the two new Socket 939 motherboard chipsets: K8T800 Pro and nForce3 250Gb. We'll be using boards from the same vendor, MSI, to help minimize variations that can come from the various components and tweaks performed by different motherboard vendors. The results of this is probably not the definitive story of which is faster, as boards using the same chipsets from different vendors may perform slightly differently. But it should be a good indication of the overall average performance and feature set difference you can expect from motherboards using these new chipsets from Nvidia and VIA. AMD also released a new Socket 754 CPU just recently, the Athlon 64 3700+. Both VIA and Nvidia will have versions of their latest and greatest for that format as well.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...129TX1K0000532