Actual advantage for Nforce2 vs KT400-600

Alright, I know you can lock the PCI bus...

So then what is left to overclock?

RAM, CPU...North bus?

Everything SOUTH which is 1/2 the system is left untouched.

I dont know a whole lot about it..but it seems to me that with Nforce2, all you overclock it the RAM, CPU and how fast the cpu talks to the ram.

What about the rest of the system?!? I thought we were going for overall performance? Please everyones advice and knowledge on this.

higher memory bandwith due to the dual channel access the NF2 boards enjoy. The KT600 is an OK chipset but the NF2 revision2 boards still end up on top.

Here is an idea...replace the PC2700 ram with two 256MB sticks of high quality PC3200 DDR. Later on down the road if you make the jump to a NF2 board you'll be set for ram ahead of time.

you dont gain much of a performance difference from ocing everything else besides those 3.. if you dont belive me go read any benchmark between kt400-600 vs nf2 and you'll notice that nf2 wins all of the benchmarks

Have a hankering to o/c the southbridge?

Well yes actually....AGP, my SCSI controller is on my PCI buss, which in turn overclocks my SCSI hdds, which would overclock IDE hdds as well. HDD is the SLOWEST part of your PC simply because it has physical moving parts. ANYTHING you can do to make that faster, will improve OVERALL system performance, not benchmarks.(Everything is read from the hdd, am I wrong??) Cept maybe something comming from the network...but then it has to be written to the hdd.

How often are you going to using your northbridge at 100% bandwidth? I dont fold anymore...I am an average PC user. Playing games...after a certain point, you dont need all those FPS. True, benchmarks look good...but they do nothing for real life. Overclocking your hdd slightly will improve everything.

Benchmarks are NOT real life simulation.

its true the HDD is the slowest BUT not much is actually read from the HDD alot. my 7200rpm doesnt EVER lag me. I can hear it sometimes, really fast when maybe opennig a file, but the lag is about 1 second before everythnig gets loaded into RAM..and no more HDD access. HDDs will only slow you down if its near full or constantly being read from to due lack of RAM. I get rare to no lag from my HDD....as anythnigs loaded fast into the RAM.

Brunt said:

HDD is the SLOWEST part of your PC simply because it has physical moving parts. ANYTHING you can do to make that faster, will improve OVERALL system performance, not benchmarks...

Click to expand...

Your thought process is sound.

Your results could be a harddrive crash with permenant damage to the harddrive.....

Most modern hard drives are not capable of dealing with an OC'd PCI bus. They run maxed out already and can not tollerate being hammered by an OC'd PCI bus...they usually start writting errors and eventually just die.
nVidia knows this is an issue so the were nice enough to lock the PCI bus at the 33Mhz spec on the nForce2 boards. VIA chipsets will OC your whole PCI bus including the IDE controller....bad news in a big way....
nVidia's setup on the nForce2 boards is sweet because you can still OC the AGP bus if you feel the need..
I doubt seriously you could tell any difference at all between a standard and OC'd harddrive during normal use so its pointless to try anyway.

My advice would be to look into RAID setups if you need more harddrive speed....its safe and will provide much better results...

Well that is true, but I have ran at 39 pci mhz no problem for about a year and I didn't notice any problems. My scsi hdd controll is a 66mhz/33mhz controller, so its fine. My scsi is fast, 3.6ms seek times, and 160MB/sec bandwitdh, limited from the U160 controller, its a U320 hdd.
I am getting (2) SATA or (2) ATA100 160GB to run in raid 0. Not sure which one..I'll prob get SATA.

I am just saying..I would rather overclock the whole system, not just the cpu/ram. Letting you still overclock the AGP is nice though. There are advantages to overclocking the whole system vs getting mad FSB, because a lot of the FSB you wont ever really use in real life. 200 fps in a game? All you really need is 65, and thats nice.