nForce3-250 - Part 1: Taking Athlon 64 to the Next Level
by Wesley Fink on March 23, 2004 11:55 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
nForce3-250Gb Reference Board: Basic Features
| Motherboard Specifications | |
| CPU Interface | Socket 754 Athlon 64 |
| Chipset | nForce3-250GB single-chip |
| Bus Speeds | 200MHz to 250MHz (in 1MHz increments) |
| PCI/AGP Speeds | Synchronous or Asynchronous PCI/AGP Fixed at 66/33 to 100/50 (in 1MHz increments) |
| Core Voltage | None available on Reference Board |
| HyperTransport Frequency | 1000MHz (1GHz) |
| HyperTransport Width | 16-bit Upstream and 16-bit Downstream |
| DRAM Voltage | None available on Reference Board |
| AGP Voltage | None available on Reference Board |
| HyperTransport Voltage | None available on Reference Board |
| Memory Slots | Two 184-pin DDR DIMM Slots Single-Channel Configuration Regular Unbuffered Memory to 2GB Total |
| Expansion Slots | 1 AGP 8X Slot 6 PCI Slots (up to 6 may be available) |
| Onboard Serial ATA RAID | nF3-250GB (4 Drives, 0, 1, 0+1) |
| Onboard IDE/IDE RAID | Two Standard ATA133/100/66 (4 drives) Drives may be configured as IDE RAID |
| Onboard USB 2.0/IEEE-1394 | 8 USB 2.0 ports supported by nF3-250 No Firewire - Must use additional chip |
| Onboard LAN | 1Gigabit Ethernet on-chip by nF3-250GB |
| Onboard Audio | AC '97 2.1 6-Channel supported by nF3-250 |
| BIOS Revision | Reference Board 1/31/2004 |
Reference Boards are normally quite different from the production boards that will later appear with the Reference Board chipset. While certain component arrangements may be retained from a Reference Board, the board is designed for testing and qualification, and generally not for production. Normally, they are also designed to be tested on the bench, out of any case.
Many, including AnandTech, complained that nForce3-150 was simply out-of-date when it came to integrated features. nForce3-250 definitely does not suffer from that problem. The nF3-250 feature set is as up-to-date as the 150 is not. You could still build an extremely capable system with the nF3-150, but many of the features had to be provided with add-on chips, which increased production costs. nForce3-250 moves from deficient to feature-rich, and competes very well with the best solutions from VIA and SiS. Standard features include 4-drive SATA Raid, 8 USB 2.0/1.1 ports, ATA133 IDE/RAID, AC '97 2.1 6.1 channel audio, and on-chip firewall. The enthusiast version adds on-chip high-speed Gigabit LAN, similar in concept to Intel's CSA. This moves LAN to the chip itself and away from the PCI bus bottleneck.
Click to enlarge.
Fully decked out, nForce3-250 provides features available nowhere else, like on-chip 1Gb Ethernet, on-chip firewall, 4-drive SATA RAID, and both SATA and IDE RAID that can be combined.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
71 Comments
View All Comments
Reflex - Wednesday, March 24, 2004 - link
#39: In my honest opinion, the lack of Soundstorm is an improvement. The APU they were using was a lot of marketing, but relatively poor quality. Even the 'cheap' off brands had better chips available, and nowadays with Via's Envy line the Soundstorm is very, very out of date. I think its absence represents the reality that nVidia did not see enough of a benefit in trying to become a full fledged audio processing company, and since most motherboards without nForce chipsets have other solutions it wasn't a huge value-add(many NF2 boards did not even utilize the nVidia solution).Any serious enthusiast would be using a Turtle Beach, M-Audio(or other Via Envy solution), or Audigy anyways, at least if sound quality mattered to them at all. Soundstorm was decent in its time, but they did not try to compete when the next generation arrived(Audigy/Envy) and they weren't top of the line when they were introduced(TB Santa Cruz had that crown).
Its a risk/reward scenerio, and the rewards did not outweigh the risks of the heavy investment it would take to keep up with the big boys.
GoatHerderEd - Wednesday, March 24, 2004 - link
Why did I say it is mostly for servers, and also it would be good for laptops. erg! You get the point.GoatHerderEd - Wednesday, March 24, 2004 - link
I don’t understand why they don’t have fire wire. It can’t be that hard to include it, and MB manufacturers would be very happy with that since they wouldn’t need to mess with another chip and leads. It would also help in the whole SFF and laptop areas.For all the people wining about the sound, I still think they are aiming this at servers and workstations. Plus gamers would want the pci sound anyways, I know people who add pci sound even with the awesome nforce 2 sound, go figure.
Finally, enough bitching about the typos, once is enough. I don’t see you with a reference board in hand!
jlfowler78 - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
I'm disappointed there's no PCI-Express support. What's the deal with that? When will nVidia make a chipset like the n3-250 plus PCI-Express? Geez, even SiS has a good chipset w/ PCI-E.xt8088 - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
Have at another NForce 3 250 review at http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dX...This review mentioned the lack of APU, and it had the benchmark tests.
Shinei - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
I'm fairly certain that this is just a generic board to test the chipset out with, it's not going to be the final product put out by GigaByte or Abit... After all, most nForce2 boards have 3 DIMM slots, while the GigaByte GA-7Nxxx series all had 4...Now that nVidia's shown that they can still make motherboard chipsets, I think it's time they showed us they can still make video cards that rock your pants off.
Regs - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
Wow @ 2.4 Ghz. But Only 2 DIMMs for RAM? Please tell me other boards will have more than 2! Im running with 2x 256 + 1 x 512 Dimm. It would kill my bank account to waste another 100 bucks on ram.TrogdorJW - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
#31 - You ever tried to make a gaming engine multi-threaded? How about making it really multi-threaded so that you might get a 50-100% boost in performance by adding a second processor? I won't say it can't be done, but it is a *major* change in design philosophy and coding. My experience with multi-threaded applications is that they are much more complex to get working properly. The only game so far that I've heard of trying to use multi-threading was Quake 3, and it didn't work very well. I think the estimate of 3 or more years before games start taking advantage of multi-threading is pretty optimistic, but we'll see.Doormat - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
Wow, this is the first product in a few months that has been interesting (though, the coming NV40/R420 war will be fun to watch).The gigE interests me because I'm looking at a home media network that would be seperate from my normal network, and looking at putting out simulatenous DVD/HDTV feeds over the network was kinda iffy on 100Mbit networks (HD can be up to 19Mbit/s, DVDs are probably anywhere from 2Mbit/s to 4 or 5Mbit/s).
My only gripe is that the socket 939 chips arent ready yet. I'm waiting for those to show up before I make a move.
wassup4u2 - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
Then again, the NF3-150 reference board had a "working" AGP/PCI lock...