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: 4-Drive SATA RAID and IDE RAID
Integrated RAID capabilities have become common with most of today's chipsets. Most competing chipsets provide the ability to use SATA RAID 0 (Striping) for Performance or RAID 1 (mirroring) for Data Protection. The nForce3-250 chipset takes these capabilities even further, however, with four drives instead of the two supported by other chipsets. These 4 drives can also be configured as RAID 0+1, which combines both striping and mirroring for speed and data protection.
RAID Level 0+1 Disk Striping and Mirroring
Cross-Controller RAID
The nVidia RAID solution is also unique in supporting both Serial ATA (SATA) and parallel ATA disk devices within a single RAID array. Users don't need to worry about whether hard drives are SATA or IDE - - the nVidia RAID controller treats both IDE and SATA drives the same and allows them to be combined in any way in the RAID controller. A single setup procedure applies to all drives, which makes it possible to use all the storage devices available. Users can also expand the number of drives easily without worrying about whether the drive is IDE or SATA.On-the-Fly Rebuilds and Spare Disk Allocation
Corporate RAID users are accustomed to RAID arrays with "hot spares" and on-the fly rebuilds, but those RAID 5 features have been expensive additions to a home PC. The nVidia RAID controller adds both these features to a home PC that is running any type of mirroring. If a disk fails, RAID 1 allows continuous operation by taking advantage of the mirrored data copy in the array. The nVidia RAID solution goes a step further and lets a user rebuild a new mirrored copy for the data while the system is up and running, without disrupting user and application access to the data set. Rebuilding on the fly eliminates down time and maximizes protection for critical storage resources.nVidia RAID 1 also lets users designate spare drives that can be configured as hot standbys, protecting arrays in the event of a disk failure. A shared spare can protect multiple arrays of drives, or a dedicated spare can serve as a hot standby for a particular drive array. The spare disk feature, which offers protection that goes beyond mirroring data, has traditionally been limited to high-end RAID systems. Truthfully, the RAID capabilities that nVidia has built into nForce3-250 will blow away almost any high-end home user. This isn't RAID 5 on a home PC, but the flexibility and data protection capabilities are truly impressive.
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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...