Page 13 - Conclusion

So here we are at the end of this article, the conclusion. I feel safe to say that the mainboard is one of the most feature packed Athlon XP mainboards to date. It comes at a steep price though. But hey, you will get a lot for that money. Four USB 2.0 ports, two LAN ports (one 10/100 and one 10/100/1000) excellent if you want to use your PC as router, also onboard Dolby Digital sound. The IEEE 1394 FireWire and next to the IDE ports an additional RAID and Serial ATA controller. That's the true power of this mainboard. Then there is DPS technology. I'm pretty sure it'll work yet it's not something I'd personally need and both with and without the DPS the system behaved exactly the same. But for the sake of performance versus stability I welcome it.

Integrated devices like RAID, sound, LAN and connectivity it all functioned excellent plus of course installed & ran without problems. LAN we had to test on 100Mbit as we do not have 1000Mbit in our office yet. 100Mbit/sec ran peachy though and with two fast HD's about 80% of the bandwidth was utilized which makes it a very fast network integrated solution. Reported 1 Gigabit speeds are somewhere at 80MB/sec which of course in this day and era is totally overkill, it sure is nice to be prepared on what's to come though.

The sound subsection, nice. Great quality, Dolby Digital, what do we need to say more.  Additionally, the nForce2 Ultra 400 integrates SoundStorm 3D positional audio into its Audio Processing Unit (APU) enabling a Dolby Digital 5.1 real-time encoder which is quite funky. We also love the DualBios function. If you screw up then switch the BIOS and you are back in business. No need to RMA the mainboard this way, nice !

It really is high value and the total package is truly great, I mean you get a lot with this board and won't probably have the need to upgrade for a long time. I have no problem in recommending the 7NNXP to you. It behaved very stable and if you choose an Athlon XP platform it's probably one of the best mainboards available as it will support the entire range including the new 400 MHz FSB Athlons. You will not make a bad choice by buying it.

Product: K7 Triton series 7NNXPMore info: Gigabyte
MSRP: 199 USD
Seen on Guru3D.com pricewatch for 172 USD, click here.