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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Curt Oien - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
PCI EXPRESS ?prisoner881 - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
There's a huge gaffe on the On-Chip Gigabit page. It states that Fast Ethernet runs at "100MB/sec" and Gigabit runs at "1000MB/sec." "MB" is shorthand for mega<i>bytes</i>, not mega<i>bits</i>. Megabits should be abbreviated "Mb."Normally I wouldn't be this anally-retentive, but the poor usage leads to another problem later on down the page. The article states that Gigabit Ethernet running at "1000MB/sec" is faster than the PCI bus which runs at "133MB/sec." The PCI rate figure is correct, but the Gigabit figure makes it look like Gigabit is about 8 times faster than the PCI bus itself. <i>It's not!</i> The PCI bus runs at (133Mbytes/sec X 8 bits/byte = ) 1064Mbit/sec, which faster than Gigabit. The article is very misleading in this respect.
In truth, the PCI bus can almost never reach its peak 133MB/sec rate (usually it's around 100MB/sec) but then again Gigabit can't reach it's peak either.
Regardless, the article is completely incorrect when it indicates a Gigabit card would overwhelm a PCI bus. This is not true.
BikeDude - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
Argh... I keep forgetting that it's 1000Mbps _full duplex_... nVidia are indeed correct, the PCI bus is only half that speed. :-/--
Rune
BikeDude - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
First off: GB is GigaByte. Wesley wrote "GB" more than once while actually referring to Gigabit (bit has lowercase b).Next, 1000Mbps is roughly 125MB/s (theoretical peak I expect). 33MHz 32-bit PCI is roughly 133MB/s. I dislike PCI Gb implementations as the next guy, but I'd still like to know how nVidia managed to come up with the half speed figure? Perhaps nVidia's PCI-bus implementation is sub-par? (which is a real issue! Via has struggled with really bad PCI performance for years :-( )
Finally there's 6-channel audio; What happened with Soundstorm and Dolby encoding implemented in hardware? (I currently use only the SPDIF connectors on my nForce2 and get surround sound both in games and while playing DVDs -- is there no way to get this functionality with Athlon64?)
Hopefully the next article will shed some light on some of these issues. Cheers! :)
--
Rune
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
gigE is awesome and worth it. i dunno about the firewall but eh. 45MB/s network transfers are fun.Kristopher
Verdant - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
schweet... when is my 16x nforce 250 mobo comming the the mail?klah - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
hmmm.. seems that last page was slipped in from the November SiS article. weird.Phiro - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
yeah, the SiS 755FX plug at the end was sort of a red-herring - didn't fit at all with the article, which was soley about Nvidia, it didn't need SiS's recent efforts tacked on the end at the last second.A couple things:
1) to all you nay-sayers about the worth of gigabit ethernet - I thumb my nose at you! Let's not play chicken or the egg games here, let's just usher in new *desired* technology as smoothly as possible - having gigabit ethernet will push me to replace my netgear 10/100 switched hub, not the other way around.
2) Anandtech, what's with the nvidia ass kissing? When you say things like 'Nvidia assured us.." and "We did test Nvidia's claim... [and we believe it]" - come on, a little healthy doubt is a good thing. Just because they supplied you with a reference nforce3 250 mobo doesn't mean you have to see how far you can stick your tongue up their butt. Honestly, the article felt like it leaned toward Nvidia abit. Believe it or not, you can report on a product without it sounding like some money changes hands or something.
mechBgon - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
*drool*bldkc - Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - link
What's with the SiS 755 crap at the end of the article? Someone didn't proof read, huh? That is also obvious in the spelling errors. Excellent article. Better than recent ones. I do wish that you had been able to include the performance portion, cuz now I'm itching to see them.One thing tho, how many people have several gigabit systems at home? I know I will not upgrade any of mine until they are replaced, so it will be awhile. Therefore I am not too excited at this point, especially if the high speed wireless standards work out to high enough throughput to allow real time multi-media transfers. Love the on chip firewall, but Zonealarm is still the only useful application specific solution I know of. Not that I'm an expert, I am far from it, but the Blackice debacle was seen coming long ago.