Conclusion

This really is a tough conclusion to write. The differences are there but slim. As always it has to boil down to what you are looking for in a chipset. The only one not to have a clear advantage is the SiS 748. This chipset does not seem to have an edge in terms of technology over the others in any of the sections. This however does not mean its a bad chipset, in fact its far from it. Its a chipset with all the things that the average user would want. This makes it a could chipset to use on a motherboard for a home user. The price of motherboards for this chipset will likely be lower than the others.

The Nforce 2 400 chipsets are the oldest and you would expect them to have older technologies onboard. However this is not always the case. The use of Dual channel DDR on the ultra version was really sort after when it was introduced. The fact that VIA have only just introduced this to the socket A platform shows how far in front they were at that time. And the same reason for why VIA have released this last chipset for the ageing platform. It was the one thing that VIA did not have. Now the choice between the Nvidia and the VIA offerings are much closer.

The Price is also a great factor in these conclusions. The motherboards with the SiS chipset definitely seem to be the cheapest on the market. While the Nforce 2 400 is still a relatively expensive chipset to purchase. The KT880 hasn't really hit the stores as yet and so price is hard to tell, but VIA normally have a very competitive pricing structure which may give them the nod over Nvidia for more budget conscious people.

If your looking for the most feature packed motherboard then apart from its lack of Firewire support then the KT880 is the one to go for, now VIA have given it the Dual Channel DDR its should be up there on performance with the Nforce 2 400 Ultra. It has the most memory support and a gigabit LAN onboard as well as two Serial ATA ports built into the South bridge. Plus it has a the option of 7.1 audio.

Not surprisingly it has to come down to the Nforce 2 ultra 400 and the KT880. Now on a personal preference level I would have to go with the VIA KT880 simply because it is likely to have a better pricing structure. The Nforce 2 ultra 400 and the KT880 have very similar performance both in real world and synthetic tests. There is also the argument that if you are using an Nvidia graphics card you may get a little bit extra performance on the graphics side due to the chipset being tested on Nvidia graphics cards, and a little driver tweaking in favour of the way Nvidia cards work.

So for a solid mainstream system, I would look at the KT880. If your a gamer who may believe you will get more using an Nvidia chipset then its certainly worth still looking at the Nforce 2 Ultra 400, you cant lose any performance even if it does cost you a few extra pounds. You are definitely likely to have less graphics driver problems.