nForce3-250 - Part 2: Taking Athlon 64 to the Next Level

Final Words

nVidia prides themselves as the graphics card manufacturer and chipset maker that caters to gamers and computer enthusiasts. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow to see ATI making moves to the forefront in the graphics card business, and to see nVidia's hard-won market share in the AMD chipset business get lost in Athlon 64 to VIA. nVidia would tell us that nForce3-150 was interim, and that now the market gets more serious. Regardless of the words, it does look like nVidia has really concentrated on making the nF3-250 family all that the nF3-150 was not.

The feature set of the nForce3-250Gb is excellent and well-balanced. We finally see a working PCI/AGP lock on an Athlon 64 board, which is good news for overclockers. The on-chip Gigabit LAN and Firewall are also welcome features that will make today's LAN gamers very happy once they have taken a test drive. The easy set-up of the Firewall for an avid LAN gamer will have them smiling in no time. No, there isn't Sound Storm or premium audio, but we think it's a fair tradeoff for nVidia, since they remain the only chipset vendor with a single-chip solution for Athlon 64.

nVidia also has demonstrated conclusively that their rumored problems with 1000 HyperTransport for socket 939 are a thing of the past. We were particularly excited to see that the nForce3-250Gb Ultra could also be used on Socket 754 boards, since it means that we may see a couple of nF3-250 overclocking dynamos in the near future. Dropping HT from 1000 to 800, dropping a multiplier, fixing the AGP lock, and cranking the bus means an easy route to the Athlon 64 overclocks that have seemed so elusive up to this point for the average overclocker.

The "any drive" SATA/IDE RAID is slick as we've seen and answers many enthusiast's worst nightmares. Finally, performance from an nVidia IDE solution is also up to the best available. However, this certainly does not mean that nForce3-250Gb is perfect, because it isn't. The downside is that CPU overhead is still higher than we would like. Perhaps with driver updates, we will see this area continue to improve. It would be a mistake, though, to place too much on the CPU overhead and overlook the wonderfully flexible setup, 8-drive RAID potential, and hot-spare mirroring that nVidia introduces with the full-blown versions of nForce3-250 family.

Performance testing showed nForce3-250 to perform about the same as the best Socket 754 boards that we have tested - no better and no worse with everything the same. This is pretty much what we have come to expect with the maturing Athlon 64 chipsets and the on-chip memory controller of the A64. There is, however, a little unexpected boost. While the best ATI graphics cards perform about the same in NF3-250 as they do in other Athlon 64 boards, the combination of nForce3-250 and nVidia graphics yields a nice performance boost. In this case, the sum is a little more than the parts, which is undoubtedly much easier to do when you manufacture both the chipset and the graphics card.

We are certainly impressed with nForce3-250Gb right now, but the real test comes with the introduction of the chipset with Socket 939. This chipset was clearly meant for that AMD socket, but the competition becomes stiffer with updated chipsets from both VIA and SiS for the new platform. If we were in the market for a top Athlon 64 today, we would search for a high-end nForce3-250Gb board - which you should be able to buy in a couple of weeks. The feature set and performance make it a great choice in today's market, but the main standout here is features because performance of all the chipsets is very similar. If you are an overclocker, then nForce3-250 may be your only choice for a working AGP lock - assuming production motherboards follow through. This is not to minimize the fact that there are a few VIA boards with additional multipliers for FSB and lower processor multipliers, which make some decent overclocking possible, but that solution is not nearly as flexible as a working AGP lock.

What about 939 and dual-channel? We suspect good things from the nF3-250 family, but until we see chips, boards, and the competitors' updates, the jury is still out.