Nvidia is planning to shortly introduce a new generation core logic chipset to support upcoming 400MHz FSB (front side bus) Barton-core Athlon XP processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), said Drew Henry, Nvidia's senior director of platform product management, in a telephone interview run with DigiTimes. He gave no details on the product's name and design, however, saying only that Nvidia would maintain its lead in product specifications. Read more for the first review of a new S2 stepping nForce 2 northbridge (instead of A2) paired with an as well updated southbridge (A4 stepping) mainboard: the Leadtek K7NCR18D Pro II. Currently, Nvidia's nForce2 is the only chipset supporting DDR400 standard, dual-channel memory architecture and a 400MHz FSB, Henry said. Although rival VIA Technologies is said to claim that its new KT400A would be able to deliver performance greatly closer to the nForce2 through single-channel memory architecture, Henry noted that the nForce2 still leads in performance, as it can offer higher speed support for standards like USB 2.0 and AGP 8x graphics technologies. Our german partnersite HardTecs4U has had the opportunity to run the latest Leadtek K7NCR18D Pro II with the updated chipset revisions through the benchmark courses. An interesting detail is that H-Oda's tool WCPUID identifies the S2 (as printed on the chipset) as C1 from which we already heard that it would be the nForce 2 refreshment. This allows the assumption that S2 and C1 steppings are the same. Our colleagues from HT4U were able to reach a maximum FSB of 230Mhz. Read the Leadtek K7NCR18D Pro II review | german Read the Leadtek K7NCR18D Pro II review | Babelfish english translation