WEll look at it this way... the NForce2 does have better features, but its up to the company that make the boards to impliment them. I have a gigabyte G7VAXP KT400 board that ive been using for about 6 mo and its great, for the non-overclocker. It hhas firewire, USB 2.0, as well as onboard sound and lan. Now most NForce2 boards also have these features but one thing they dont have that the gigabyte board has is RAID, now befor ppl jump on me about this, they do have RAID but the only implimentations ive seen is for SATA, which i dont have. Now ABIT does have a converter but only allows one more device to be attached (toatl of 5 possible drives). Now for me I NEED a RAID controller, simply b/c i have a ton of HDD to attach, and some devices perfer to be alone on a channel.
RAID aside I think that the duel DDR is the best feature of the NForce2, along with the memory controller of course. The rest of the board is nothing special if you have a decient sound card.
In sum if you are a budget person like you said then the KT400 wont disappoint and have barton comaptibility and good performance for all apps if paired with a good CPU (ppl like to compare the two chipsets but they are both great in performance). I would just get a KT400 (Gigabyte is my fav ) with nice features and spend the extra $20 on a better procesor 1700+ to say a 2100+ if you can swing it.
werd