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First Mass Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250: Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 Review (page 3)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

The above-listed innovations – the accelerated HyperTransport bus, the support of SerialATA and RAID arrays, more USB ports – are the basic traits of all chipsets belonging to the nForce3 250 family. The family includes several models, targeted at different user groups. Besides the regular nForce3 250, we will also see nForce3 250Gb with enhanced functionality and the nForce3 250Gb Ultra for the upcoming Socket 939 platform.

Although only nForce3 250 comes in mass quantities into the market today, we will outline the nForce3 250Gb in brief. This chipset will differ from the regular nForce3 250 by the support of higher-speed network connections. The ordinary nForce3 250 like a majority of today’s solutions supports Fast Ethernet with a bandwidth of 10/100Mb/s. nForce3 250Gb, contrary to the simpler version of the chipset, supports Gigabit Ethernet (1Gb/s bandwidth). The implementation is very much similar to Intel’s CSA technology: the logical-level controller is integrated into the chipset. This allows doing without the PCI bus for data transfers and avoiding this potential bottleneck. The physical-level controller resides outside the chipset. It’s clear that being right in the core of the chipset, the Gigabit Ethernet controller of the nForce3 250Gb can provide a faster real speed than standard PCI controllers.

Moreover, nForce3 250Gb features an internal hardware full-function firewall, which increases the security of the system when you are working on a network.

Regrettably, we haven’t had yet a chance to check the networking capabilities of the nForce3 250Gb in practice, so let’s wait until there are off-the-shelf mainboards based on it. Overall, with the arrival of the nForce3 250Gb and nForce3 250, the nomenclature of nForce3 family chipsets gets extended to four models. It looks like that:

The overclocking opportunities of the nForce3 250 are also worth mentioning. First of all, nForce3 chipset family differs from other alternatives because NVIDIA engineers packed the clock generator into the chipset itself. Thus, you can control frequencies of various buses on nForce3-based mainboards by means of general-purpose utilities. Unfortunately, the utilities for the old version (nForce3 150) turned to be incompatible with the new nForce3 250.

One of the basic advantages of the nForce3 150 was its ability to clock asynchronously the processor and AGP/PCI buses. An overclocker could increase the FSB clock rate without affecting the clock frequencies of the AGP and PCI – otherwise, the system may become non-operational. However, many mainboard makers couldn’t correctly implement this function in the BIOS, so many end products didn’t allow locking AGP and PCI clock rates at their nominal values using the options present in the BIOS Setup. That’s why overclocking with the help of software utilities that control the clock generator led to better results on nForce3 150-based mainboards – those utilities could set up the frequencies with higher precision.