Just reporting what I read dude. And that still doesn't ixnay the fact that the chipset is good. No need to call me stupid.
And the N-Force chipset REPLACES the northbridge. *edit* (from the site you posted: "nForce is NVIDIA's new northbridge and southbridge to be utilized on mainboards. . . If the nForce lives up to the expectations that surround it, you may never again use the terms "northbridge" or "southbridge" when referring to this product.
") The GeForce2 processor is connected to that chipset.
Page 26 PC World December Issue
"In test with popular games, we found virtually no visable difference at many resolutions between a system running a NVidia's integrated graphics and and the same system with a GeForce 3 card. The GeForce 3 Card pulled ahead however when we went to 1280 by 1024 and above, at 32 bit color."
The same article goes on to say that an athlon 1200 matched several athlon 1333's (1 point difference) and performed well compared to P4 system specs.
The Maximum PC issue I read used a XP 1900+ and the results were even better. The point is that the system as a whole performed better. That doesn't mean that the GeForce2 processor performed better. It means that the WHOLE DAMN THING WORKED BETTER. The fact of the matter is that for a BUDGET system no one is going to shell out for a 1280x1024 monitor or above.
*edit* (Twin Bank Memory Architecture is laid out pretty simple as this: 128-bit DDR "Intelligent" Memory Interface utilizing NVIDIA's Crossbar Memory Controller (that is stock on the GeForce3 Vid cards) that ends up producing for us 4.2GB per seconds of bandwidth between the IGP and the 266MHz DDR memory. Now while this may sound as though we are just throwing out numbers, keep in mind this is four times the memory bandwidth supplied by PC133 SDRam. Also a single channel of RAMBUS only supplies 1.6GB/s or 3.2GB/s in dual channel configurations like the Pentium4 uses.
Considering that CPUs over 1GHz can theoretically consume 2.1GB/s you see that one of the big bottlenecks of the "old" basic mainboard platform is memory bandwidth and of course the dreaded latency.)
I will admit, however, that I made it sound like the GeForce 2 could keep up. I apologize.