X-bit labs

First Mass Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250: Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 Review (page 15)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/07/2004 | 03:15 PM ]

Old Quake 3: Arena and the new Unreal Tournament 2004 agree that the performance of the Chaintech mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250 chipset is up to the mark.

Now we will run two very interesting tests in X2: The Threat and Tomb Raider. The previous chipset from NVIDIA, the nForce3 150, used to be very slow in these two applications, much slower than the competing chipsets from VIA and SiS. Let’s see whether the nForce3 250 can put on a better performance here.

No, there’s no noticeable change. The new nForce3 250 is still behind the VIA K8T800 and SiS755, by 5% in X2: The Threat and by 3% in Tomb Raider. We thought that nForce3 150 used to lose in these two tests because of its lower-clocked HyperTransport bus. However, even though nForce3 250 has this bus working at its full speed, we still see the lag. So the reason should lie elsewhere.

Luciano Alibrandi from NVIDIA suggested that we test nForce3 250 with a graphics card based on a GPU from NVIDIA, too. The above discussed tests were run with an ATI RADEON 9800 XT, so we decided to check out this idea and installed an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 XT into our testbed.