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First Mass Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250: Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 Review (page 2)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

NVIDIA nForce3 250: Closer Look

Before we go into details about the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard, I would like to tell you about the features and peculiarities of the chipset this mainboard is based on.

The nForce3 250 chipset has one basic point of difference from the predecessor as it clocks the HyperTransport bus at the bus full speed. The updated chipset supports 800MHz HyperTransport frequency and provides a bandwidth of 1.6GB/s in each direction. Moreover, Athlon 64 CPUs with 1GHz HyperTransport are expected to come out soon and the nForce3 250 can work with this bus frequency, too, although this ability is not yet officially announced (but BIOS Setups of nForce3 250-based mainboards have x5 multiplier for the HyperTransport clock rate already).

The second point where we see some changes is the IDE controller. nForce3 150 supported three Parallel ATA channels and no SerialATA ones, while nForce3 250 has more advanced and relevant features for a modern chipset: two Parallel ATA-100/133 channels and four SerialATA-150 channels. To implement more than two SerialATA channels, mainboard manufacturers will have to use an additional physical-level controller. Anyway, nForce3 250 provides the best support of the SerialATA interface of all available chipsets, many of which may have SATA, but only two channels. The RAID-related functions are also wide-reaching with the nForce3 250. For example, this chipset allows building arrays from both SerialATA and Parallel ATA hard disk drives. Moreover, the chipset-integrated RAID controller supports arrays of level 0+1, a really unique feature.

No other chipset in the today’s market can offer you anything close to that. Such features will only become available in solutions from other manufacturers in the coming summer.

Talking about how good the IDE controller of the nForce3 250 chipset is, we should anyway be aware of NVIDIA’s traditional troubles with the release of the appropriate driver. For example, we had to wait for a few months after the chipset’s own release to get an IDE driver for the nForce3 150, which would have WHQL certification and no compatibility problems. The situation may repeat with the nForce3 250 again – you can already buy an off-the-shelf mainboard on this chipset, but you don’t receive a RAID driver at all.

The third improvement of the nForce3 250 chipset against the predecessor is the increased number of supported USB 2.0 ports. We now have eight USB ports at our disposal, while the nForce3 150 supported only six. Thus, the nForce3 250 provides you the same number of USB ports as other modern chipsets do.

Contrary to users’ requests, the new version of NVIDIA’s chipset for Athlon 64 still comes without an audio processing unit (APU), the advanced audio solution from the company. Thus, we will have to put up with ordinary AC’97 sound. In all probability, NVIDIA’s engineering team encountered some technical problems: the single electronic chip of the nForce3 chipset just cannot accommodate a fully-fledged audio processor. Thus, the admirers of the APU sound should wait for external audio chips from NVIDIA.