NVIDIA's nForce2 Performance Review

Media Encoding Performance

We'll start off with a "quick" conversion of a DVD rip (more specifically, Chapter 40 from the Star Wars Episode I DVD) to a DiVX MPEG-4 file. We used the latest DiVX codec (5.02) in conjunction with Xmpeg 4.5 to perform the encoding at 720 x 480.

We set the encoding speed to Fastest, disabled audio processing and left all of the remaining settings on their defaults. We recorded the last frame rate given during the encoding process as the progress bar hit 100%

MPEG-4 Encoding Performance - Xmpeg 4.5 DiVX 5.02 Conversion Frame Rate (higher is better) NVIDIA nForce2 VIA KT333 66.3 64.3 | 0 | 13 | 27 | 40 | 53 | 66 | 80

The nForce2 gains a 3% advantage over the KT333, but clearly nothing tangible.

MP3 Encoding Performance - LAME 3.91 Time in Seconds to Encode 170MB .wav File NVIDIA nForce2 VIA KT333 90 90 | 0 | 18 | 36 | 54 | 72 | 90 | 108

There's no difference in MP3 encoding either.