nForce3-250 - Part 1: Taking Athlon 64 to the Next Level

nForce3-250 Specifications

• NVIDIA IEEE 802.3 Media Access Control (MAC)
• Supports 10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet/Fast Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet*

- Supports HomePNA 2.0 PHYs
- Advanced Communication Riser (ACR) and Communications and Networking Riser (CNR) interface support
• High performance networking features
• TCP segmentation offloads*
• Jumbo frames*
• Checksum offloads*
• NVIDIA StreamThru technology
• Isochronous controller paired with HyperTransport for fastest networking performance

• 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

• 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

• 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)

• HyperTransport technology
• High throughput (6.4GB/sec)**
• Low voltage
• Differential

• 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)

• 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