TODAY we get the chance to give you a preview of some very interesting products coming down the pike from AMD and NVIDIA. This is a somewhat unique opportunity. Both products are noteworthy for their performance, and they make a very potent combination together. However, this particular combination of parts won't be widely available for some time yet.

AMD's last desktop processor launch was the Athlon XP 2600+, and those chips are only just now becoming available to PC manufacturers. End-user versions of the 2600+ probably won't be widely available for a few weeks, based on everything I've heard. It may take even longer than that.

Similarly, NVIDIA announced its nForce2 core-logic chipset in mid-July (we wrote up a technology preview at the time), and the company promised retail product availability in August. The month of August came and went, and no products showed up. We didn't hear a peep out of NVIDIA about nForce2's schedule, but the fact of the product delay was obvious.

Now, AMD and NVIDIA are teaming up to introduce the combination of the Athlon XP 2800+ processor and the nForce2 chipset. I have played with the preproduction versions of AMD's Athlon XP 2800+ and Asus's nForce2 motherboard, and they are both quite nice. The Athlon XP 2800+ runs at 2.25GHz on a 333MHz bus, and the nForce2 feeds it data from dual banks of DDR333 memory. The combination is as nearly as potent as my Kansas City Chiefs' offense. Read on to find out why.