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
nForce3-250 Specifications
NETWORKING
- NVIDIA IEEE 802.3 Media Access Control (MAC)
- Supports 10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet/Fast Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet*
- High performance networking features
- TCP segmentation offloads*
- Jumbo frames*
- Checksum offloads*
- NVIDIA StreamThru technology
- Isochronous controller paired with HyperTransport for fastest networking performance
- Supports HomePNA 2.0 PHYs
- Advanced Communication Riser (ACR) and Communications and Networking Riser (CNR) interface support
SECURITY
- NVIDIA Firewall technology*
- Industry's only native firewall solution
- Unmatched performance and protection
- Advanced management features
- Remote access, configuration, monitoring
- Command line interface (CLI)
- WMI scripts
STORAGE
- RAID 0 disk striping support for highest system and application performance
- RAID 1 disk mirroring support for fault tolerance
- RAID 0 +1 disk striping and mirroring support for highest performance with fault tolerance
- Support for both SATA and ATA-133 disk controller standards
- Dual independent SATA controllers**
- Supports up to 4 SATA disk drives simultaneously
- Integrated SATA PHY with support for two drives**
- Digital SATA interface for external PHY with support for two drives**
- Fast Ultra ATA-133 Disk Drive Controllers
- Each interface supports two devices, for support for up to six devices
- Supports UltraDMA modes 6-0 (UltraDMA 33/66/100/133)
- Industry-standard PCI bus master IDE register set
- Separate independent IDE connections for 5V-tolerant primary and secondary interfaces
CONNECTIVITY
- AGP interface
- Supports AGP3.0 - 0.8 V signaling for 8x and 4x with Fast Writes data transfers
- Supports AGP2.0 - 1.5 V signaling for 4x, 2x, and 1x modes with 4x and 2x Fast Writes data transfers
- Supports graphics address remapping table (GART) features
- The AGP3.0 8x 533 MT/s. (million transfers per second) interface provides the user with the ability to upgrade the external graphics card, thus avoiding obsolescence. An external AGP add-in card achieves higher performance than it would on existing platforms.
- AGP interface is backward compatible with the AGP2.0 specification.
- USB 2.0
- Single USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI)/Dual USB 1.1 Open Host Controller Interface (OHCI)
- Support for up to 8 ports
- Supports transfer rates at high speed (480 Mbps), full speed (12 Mbps), and low speed (1.2 Mbps)
- Dynamically configures slower devices for best utilization of bandwidth
- Allows USB concurrency
- PCI interface
- Integrates a fast PCI-to-PCI bridge running at 33 MHz. It includes an arbiter that supports six external master PCI slots.
Features of the PCI interface include:
- PCI 2.3-compliant, 5 V tolerant
- Supports six external PCI slots at 33 MHz
- Supports six bus master arbitration
- PCI master and slave interfaces
- Supports both master-initiated and slave-initiated terminations
- Bidirectional write posting support for concurrency
- Flexible routing of all four PCI interrupts
- Supports read ahead: memory read line (MRL) and memory read multiple (MRM)
PERFORMANCE
- HyperTransport technology
- High throughput (6.4GB/sec)**
- Low voltage
- Differential
AUDIO
- AC '97 2.1 compliant interface
- Supports 2, 4, or 6-channel audio
- Dual AC-Link - supports up to two codecs
- 16-bit or 20-bit stereo output and 16-bit input streams
- Supports input, output, and general purpose input/output (GPIO) channels for host-based modems
- Separate independent functions for audio and modem
- Supports ACR and CNR interface
- S/PDIF output (stereo or AC-3 output)
MOBILITY
- Power management
- Full support for AMD PowerNow! technology
- ACPI 2.0 compliant
- Support for ACPI C3 state
- Low power 0.15 µ process
- Maximizing real estate efficiency enabling small form factor designs
- Single chip solution
- Lower latency for higher performance
** NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb and 250 only.
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prisoner881 - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
#18, I know it's full duplex, but even then you will have a hard time getting full utlization under normal working conditions. Benchmarks are designed to run things at unrealistic rates. The point is, although I don't encourage it, you can certainly put Gigabit on the PCI bus and get very usable performance out of it. In most cases, the limiting factor is going to be CPU utilization anyway.JADS - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
External HDDs could make good use of a Firewire connection, especially now it is whizzing along at 800MBit/s.The multi CPU implementation sounds interesting, of course AMD will completely fail to capitalise on it by not making the FX dual processor capable. How many enthusiasts (AMD wise) could resist the chance of dual FX-53s, especially with the possibility of overclocking them? You have the distinction between the 2xx series and the FX due the removal of ECC/Registered memory in the FX 939 series, so they essentially serve two different markets.
sprockkets - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
Why would you need firewire with USB2? OK, ipod and camcorders.I have one question. Since you use a browser to configure the firewall, does this mean it is OS independant, i.e., I can use it in Linux without needing drivers to run it?
Soundstorm not present on here, oh well, almost all uATX boards had the MCP and not MCP-T so it didn't matter anyhow, and it doesn't work in Linux anyhow. VIA sound is troublesome in Linux too. I rather use my own sound card. Just hope there is a driver for the cool LAN adapter.
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
#10 -LAN is Duplex. Gigabit on PCI with overhead can do about 820mb/sec in industry standard tests. nVidia's on-chip LAN could output about 1840 mb/sec in the benchmarks we have seen. This is more than twice as fast IF you have a source that can actually output 1GB in both directions.
#11 -
PCI Express will be seen on Intel boards very soon. AMD boards will not move as rapidly to the Intel PCI Express standard.
#12 -
Firewire is not on-chip. Undoubtedly many mfgs will add firewire with an additional chip on-board nF3-250.
fla56 - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
''No one can possibly complain about the feature-set of nForce3-250''to add my vote to what's already been said, no firewire for my iPod and no SoundStorm/DolbyDigital for that lovely Yamaha amp I just bought mean i think someone needs to calm down a little about all that excitement (and learn a little about the difference between megabits and bytes by the sound of things)
i wonder if they'll release Soundstorm as a PCI eXpress card....
Reflex - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
#8: Actually, to date nVidia has had a *very* troublesome PCI implementation, anyone with a PCI RAID controller and a 4 disk RAID 0 array can tell you that. It is so bad, in fact, that prototype NF3-150 boards for Opteron used AMD PCI chips just to avoid using the nForce3 integrated PCI bus. I am not certain if these boards ever reached production status however.As for this chipset, it looks nice, but honestly I'll wait until there is a PCI Express solution out there, I was just forced due to power problems destroying my equipment to upgrade my motherboard prematurely, and I don't intend to buy another until the next wave of features is available...
DAPUNISHER - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
Keep your eyes open for my AN50R listing for sale at rock bottom pricing in the FS/FT forum when the 250 is on shelves :Dfla56 - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
prisoner881 - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
Looks like another error on the "Conclusion" page. Last sentence, second paragraph says "We expect that some enterprising companies, which specializes in catering to the computer enthusiast, will slip in some Socket 954 boards based on the Ultra chipset with a Gigahertz HyperTransport."Socket 954? Methinks that ought to be Socket 754.
arswihart - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
What about firewire connectors, do you guys think they'll be added to production boards?