First Mass Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250: Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 Review

by Ilya Gavrichenkov
04/07/2004 | 03:15 PM

Lately, AMD has been very successful in promoting its processors of the Athlon 64 family into the market. Such CPUs are enjoying better sales and higher popularity among enthusiastic users, who have always liked AMD products more, as well as among suppliers of ready systems. On the other hand, the situation in this market is far from ideal, mainly because of the lack of good chipsets for the Athlon 64 platform. In fact, VIA K8T800 is the only more or less satisfactory chipset for Athlon 64, although it is not free from certain deficiencies, either. And this situation still took place despite the fact that all major companies active in the chipset market (save for Intel, of course) have already offered their solutions. They are VIA Technologies, SiS, and NVIDIA.

Let’s recall the shortcomings of the existing chipsets for Socket 754 and Socket 940 platforms. SiS launched its SiS755 chipset, which had acceptable characteristics and high performance, according to our own tests (see our article called ECS 755-A2 Socket754 Mainboard on SiS755 Chipset Review). However, SiS couldn’t solve some manufacturing problems. As a result, SiS755 is practically unavailable – there are no mainboards based on it in stores. The competing product, the NVIDIA nForce3 150, is widespread, but its functionality scope is rather limited. For example, it cannot work with SerialATA devices. What’s more disappointing, this chipset doesn’t support 800MHz frequency of the HyperTransport bus, but clocks it at 600MHz only. Moreover the width of the HyperTransport bus (it connects the chipset with the processor) is twice as small. As a result, the peak bandwidth of the CPU-chipset bus is only 1.8GB/s instead of 3.2GB/s.

This fact explains the low performance of nForce3 150-based mainboards compared to mainboards on other chipsets in many applications, critical to the data transfer rate between the CPU and chipset, even in spite of the fact that the memory controller in Athlon 64 systems resides right in the CPU. The third chipset available, the VIA K8T800, is less vulnerable to our criticizing, but this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to criticize at all. VIA K8T800 exposes its weakness at overclocking since it cannot clock the FSB and the AGP/PCI buses asynchronously. As a result, raising the CPU clock rate above the nominal, we also increase the frequencies of the AGP/PCI buses, thus making the devices attached to those buses non-operational. Particularly, the SerialATA controller from the chipset South Bridge is usually the first to fail during CPU overclocking.

Thus, until recently, there was no absolutely perfect chipset for Socket 754/Socket 940 systems and we were waiting for updated versions of existing products with all their drawbacks eliminated. For example, VIA promised to launch its updated K8T800 Pro, while NVIDIA was preparing its nForce3 250. According to the schedule, mainboards on these chipsets were supposed to come into mass production along with the arrival of the Socket 939 version of the Athlon 64 CPU. However, we already see first mainboards on these chipsets emerging.

NVIDIA was the first company to start limited shipments of its nForce3 250 long before May, when the Socket 939 platform is expected to arrive. Some mainboard makers close to NVIDIA tried to take advantage of the situation and started producing new mainboards for Socket 754 without waiting for the new processor socket. Among the luckiest companies was Chaintech that quickly offered an update to its ZNF3-150 mainboard we have already reviewed (see our article called Socket754 Platform: 13 Mainboards Roundup). Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard, the new product from Chaintech, came in our test lab to show its own advantages as well as the strong points of the chipset it is based on.

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.

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.

The new nForce3 250 chipset can control the FSB and AGP/PCI frequencies independently by itself. Moreover, manufacturers of mainboards who now have got some experience in building nForce3-based mainboards will probably implement the option of locking the AGP/PCI frequencies at their nominal values (66/33MHz). Overall, it’s highly probable that nForce3 250-based mainboards will be quite suitable for overclocking. For example, the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard we tested had no problems with fixing the AGP/PCI clock rates. This allowed us to overclock the processor by increasing the FSB frequency, without worrying about any peripheral devices.

Of course, the option of overclocking the AGP bus, independently of the FSB, remained here, too. The BIOS Setup of the future mainboards will have such an option. Though earlier many mainboards on the NVIDIA nForce3 150 had the PCI frequency set synchronously with the FSB (it equaled FSB/6), while today the nForce3 250 has the PCI clock rate set synchronously with the AGP (it equals AGP/2).

Overall, NVIDIA nForce3 250 chipset, especially in its “advanced” nForce3 250Gb version, seems to be a chipset, generously endowed with various functions. You can see it from the following table, which compares the characteristics of the new chipsets from NVIDIA with specifications of other Socket 754/Socket 940 chipsets:

You see that the NVIDIA nForce3 150 was obviously an obsolete product with poor characteristics, while the nForce3 250 looks winning: all deficiencies of the previous product have been amended and the characteristics have been adjusted to comply with today’s conventional standards. They also enriched the product with a couple of exclusive, distinguishing things that make the nForce3 250 into the most tempting product.

This is theory, though. We’ll see what we have in practice shortly, examining the first off-the-shelf mainboard on the nForce3 250. It is the Zenith ZNF3-250 from Chaintech.

Specifications

You experience a kind of déjà vu taking a look at the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250. And really, this mainboard uses the same PCB design as the older product, the Zenith ZNF3-150 (on the nForce3 150 chipset). This somewhat strange solution from the engineering department of Chaintech, which didn’t allow to use the potential of the new nForce3 250 chipset to the full extent, probably results from their vital desire to save time and money on the PCB development and also to be the first in the market, ahead of the competitors. And Chaintech managed to achieve this goal, as their Zenith ZNF3-250 is really the first massively available mainboard on the nForce3 250. On the other hand, this drive for being the first had a negative effect on the resulting product, which we will soon discuss. Right now, let’s take a closer look at the accessories.

Zenith ZNF3-250 comes in a large box, stuffed with various thingies. Like other Zenith series products, the Zenith ZNF3-250 is targeted at the most demanding user, so the rich accessories shouldn’t surprise you. These are the things you receive with the mainboard:

• CDs with drivers and utilities and bundled software, including WINDVD, Norton AntiVirus, ProMagic, Image It and so on;
• Two round aerodynamic ATA-100/133 cables and a similar FDD cable;
• Four SerialATA cables;
• Two power cables for SerialATA HDDs;
• CBOX3, a panel for the front of your system case with a card reader, IEEE1394 port, two USB 2.0 ports, a headphones output and microphone input and DigiDoc, a POST-code indicator;
• Chaintech Multimedia card with two IEEE1394 ports, three audio jacks and an optical SPDIF output;
• Optical SPDIF cable;
• I/O shield;
• A set of screwdrivers;
• A syringe of thermal compound;
• The user manual and a poster with its abbreviated version.

The accessories are really numerous and gorgeous. The Zenith ZNF3-250 is probably the best product in this respect. Anyway, the additional devices are good, but the performance of the mainboard itself is what interests us most.

Features

Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 is equipped with a Socket754 and supports all modern CPUs from the Athlon 64 family that have a single-channel memory controller. This mainboard will also have no problems with the upcoming Athlon 64 3700+. Regrettably, the processor with the 3700+ performance rating is going to be the fastest model for the Socket 754 platform; faster CPUs will come out designed for the Socket 939. So, when purchasing a Socket 754 mainboard like the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250, you should be aware that your system upgrade opportunities will be somewhat limited. In perspective, AMD wants to turn Socket 754 into a socket for low-cost CPUs, like the Athlon XP on the Paris core (it comes with 256KB of the L2 cache and without x86-64 technology support).

The Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 is based around the same PCB as its predecessor, Zenith ZNF3-150, and this fact explains why not all of the chipset capabilities have been implemented in the mainboard. Yes, the two chipsets (nForce3 150 and 250) are pin-compatible, but the latter chipset has much broader functionality. As a result, the only difference between the two Zenith mainboards from Chaintech is the faster HyperTransport bus in the ZNF3-250. This is not little, though. The nForce3 150 chipset was criticized for clocking the HyperTransport bus that connects the chipset to the processor at a very low rate. This limitation of the chipset, even though the memory controller is integrated into the processor in Athlon 64 systems, resulted in a performance reduction caused by the lower bandwidth of the CPU-chipset channel. Now the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 has got rid of this disadvantage and Athlon 64 processors can communicate with the chipset at full speed in this mainboard.

As for other advantages of the nForce3 250 over the predecessor, Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard doesn’t show them up. This mainboard, like the older product, has only six USB ports, while SerialATA and RAID arrays support is implemented via external onboard controllers. In fact, all that the chipset is responsible for in the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard is the support of two ATA/133 channels and six USB 2.0 ports. The back panel of the mainboard carries only two of the USB ports. The rest are attached to the CBOX3 panel which outputs two ports to the front panel of your system case, while two more are used to attach the card-reader.

All other capabilities of this mainboard are provided by external controllers. Networking options are implemented through a Gigabit Ethernet BCM5788KFB controller from Broadcom. The Fast Ethernet logical-level controller integrated into the NVIDIA nForce3 250 didn’t make Chaintech engineers happy.

The same engineers gave up the AC’97 audio support included into the nForce3. Instead, ZNF3-250 comes equipped with an Envy24HT, a PCI audio controller from VIA that supports eight-channel sound and 192kHz/24bit mode, usually available only in hi-end audio solutions. The analog part of the audio subsystem is perfectly implamented: overall, the ZNF3-250 has an excellent audio solution.

The chipset’s SerialATA controller was also discarded. Engineers had to give up its implementation because of the peculiarities of the PCB, which the Zenith ZNF3-250 inherited from its older mate. Anyway, the mainboard has a SerialATA-150 Sil3114 controller from Silicon Image onboard that offers you four SerialATA channels and an option of uniting the attached hard disk drives into RAID arrays of levels 0, 1 and 0+1. The functionality of the mainboard thus didn’t suffer and if the use of the redundant onboard controller doesn’t tell on the price of the product, I think this solution should be considered acceptable. Moreover, considering the problems NVIDIA has with RAID drivers, the use of the time-tested controller instead of the one integrated into the chipset may be quite justified.

That’s not all, though. Besides the above-described things, the PCB of the ZNF3-250 carries a VIA VT6306 chip, which is responsible for three IEEE1394 ports.

Thus, notwithstanding the old PCB, the Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard offers you the richest functionality. The CBOX3 panel that you receive with the mainboard also contributes to enhancing the functionality scope.

CBOX3 is in fact a panel to be installed into the 5¼-bay of the system case. The panel carries the following connectors: two USB 2.0 ports, a headphones output and microphone input, one IEEE1394 port, a card reader and an indicator of POST codes, called DigiDoc. If you use the exclusive software (the DigiDoc utility), you may have the indicator show the processor temperature at work. CBOX3 comes with three “skins” so you can use it in system cases of different colors without spoiling their color design.

Besides three DDR DIMM slots, an AGP 8x slot and five PCI slots, the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 has a unique CMR slot (Chaintech Multimedia Raiser) for installation of the CMC 7.1 card. You find this card among the mainboard’s accessories and it serves to output certain I/O ports to the outside of the system case. The I/O panel of the ZNF3-250 mainboard itself carries just two PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard, two COM ports, one LPT and two USB 2.0 ports, an RJ-45 connector for Gigabit Ethernet and three audio jacks. The CMC 7.1 adds the following: two IEEE1394 ports, three audio jacks and an optical SPDIF output.

I could gripe, though, that the mainboard has only four available USB 2.0 ports (counting the CBOX3 in), which may be not enough for a modern computer system.

PCB Design

Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 has the same impressive looks as its predecessor, using the same black PCB with orange slots and gold-plated connectors. The extravagant coloring is not the only curious thing about the design of the mainboard – it is distinguishable for the CPU voltage regulator module in the first hand.

First, it is implemented according to a rarely-seen four-phase circuit to provide highest-stability current under high loads. Second, this module is equipped with the RadEX cooling system of a very original construction. Chaintech engineers probably took their inspiration from ABIT with its OTES cooling solution employed in MAX3 mainboard series. Although the CPU voltage regulator doesn’t require active cooling in modern mainboards, Chaintech placed an aluminum heatsink on all MOSFETs, covered it with a casing and set a 20mm fan to direct the airflow at the heatsink. Moreover, there is a copper heat pipe inside the sole of this weird cooler, which facilitates heat transfer, moving heat from the warmest areas of the heatsink to the coldest.

Again, it’s quite useless to have a special cooling system installed onto the CPU voltage regulator module – the module can live happily without it. On the other hand, the RadEX system employed in the Chaintech ZNF3-250 does help to reduce the inter-case temperature in a way. It also cools the MOSFETs very well, that’s for sure.

When testing Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 in practice, we noticed that the Vcore was always higher than the nominal norm. Moreover, we were greatly displeased with the fact that this mainboard didn’t support the Cool’n’Quiet technology. The system hangs up completely when the processor driver or a special-purpose utility tries to change the multiplier with the Cool’n’Quiet technology enabled. I hope the Chaintech engineers will solve this problem in the next versions of the BIOS.

Although the RadEX’s “exhaust” has appeared at the mainboard connections panel, it still contains enough connectors: two PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard, two serial and one parallel port, an RJ-45 network connector, a couple of USB ports and three audio jacks.

So we have actually lost only two USB ports, and this makes Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard less appealing to the user. Besides the two USB ports at the back panel, the mainboard supports four ports more: two of them are occupied by the card reader from the CBOX3 panel, and the remaining two are outputted to the front panel of the system case by means of the same CBOX3. As a result, the mainboard offers the user just four ports out of eight possible, which the NVIDIA nForce3 250 chipset supports.

The PCB design is overall good, without any serious drawbacks. Some common problems remain there, though. Such as the installed AGP graphics card blocking the DIMM slot clips. The additional 12V power connector is located in the middle of the mainboard and the attached cable hangs over the CPU cooler. Besides that, the FDD connector is placed before the PCI slots and may cause some problems if you’re installing full-size expansion cards.

The Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 cools the chipset by means of a small passive aluminum heatsink of an intricate design. I should confess that the mainboard was stable with this cooling, although the chipset heats up considerably. That’s why I would recommend that you use active cooling or mount a larger heatsink on the chipset.

Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 produces little noise: the 20mm fan from the RadEX system is practically noiseless. You can even turn this fan off altogether, since this would provoke no problems, save for a minor increase of the temperature of the MOSFETs in the CPU voltage regulator unit.

BIOS and Overclocking

Chaintech positions its Zenith series mainboards as platforms for PC enthusiasts. Keeping this fact in mind, I hoped to find rich overclocking options in the BIOS Setup of the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard. My expectations came true.

All overclocking-related options are gathered in the BIOS Setup of the mainboard, in the Frequency/Voltage Control page:

Let me describe the options in detail:

• You can change the FSB frequency. The range formally stretches from 200 to 400MHz with 1MHz increment. Considering that nForce3 250 chipset allows locking the AGP/PCI clock rates, this widest range may be not just a marketing trick. However, this is spoiled by the fact that Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 doesn’t allow reducing the CPU multiplier. That’s why this highest FSB frequency ceiling turns to be quite useless;
• The AGP clock rate can be set up independently from 66 to 100MHz with 1MHz increment. The PCI frequency equals AGP/2, i.e. is also set independently from the FSB;
• You can manually adjust the Vcore from 1.45V to 1.7V with 0.025V increment. Thus, the Vcore can be 0.2V above the rated voltage at highest. This may be not enough for good overclocking;
• You can adjust the Vmem from 2.6 to 2.9V with 0.1V increment;
• You can change the voltage on the AGP bus: from the nominal 1.5V up to 2.2V. It’s quite a mystery why we need such a high voltage on the AGP;
• You can adjust the voltage sent to the chipset. You can increase this value from the normal 1.6V to 1.7V, 1.8V or 1.9V. As you know, the option of increasing the chipset voltage is very useful for successful overclocking.

To our regret, the mainboard appeared incapable of controlling the voltage of the HyperTransport bus, but what was even worse, it didn’t allow changing the CPU multiplier in the BIOS Setup. Thus, overclockers who use Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 will lack operational modes with a reduced multiplier and an increased FSB frequency (over 200MHz). Such operational modes may be very interesting with respect to memory types, especially overclocker memory modules, because the maximum frequency on the memory bus that modern Athlon 64 processors support with the normal FSB frequency is only 400MHz.

As for the rest of overclocking-related capabilities, we should point out the opportunity to reset the processor parameters in case of over-overclocking. Sometimes the manufacturers forget about this option or implement it incorrectly. If you press and hold the INS key during the system boot-up process, you enter the BIOS Setup and correct the wrong parameters. Moreover, in some cases, the mainboard can reset the wrong parameters by itself, after shutting down and starting up again. The BIOS of Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 uses the Award microcode and has certain peculiarities. For example, you cannot disable the onboard external controllers (network, audio and SerialATA RAID ones) in the BIOS Setup. By the way, there are also no jumpers onboard to disable those devices. In other words, you can only turn them on/off in the operation system.

At the same time, the BIOS allows fine-tuning the memory subsystem by changing the timings and setting the desired working frequency.

Chaintech includes the DigiDoc utility with its mainboard for monitoring the system status from the Windows environment. It monitors the processor and system temperatures, the rotation speeds of the CPU cooler and the system fan, and all main voltages.

As for the practical overclocking tests, we decided to take an Athlon 64 3200+ processor for them, which was rated for work at 2.0GHz. Right now, this Socket 754 processor allows reaching highest FSB clock rates without changing the CPU multiplier. The Thermaltake Silent Boost K8, an ordinary air cooler, was responsible for cooling this CPU. We also used special overclocker memory modules, OCZ PC4000 Gold Edition, which were guaranteed to work at frequencies up to 500MHz. This memory allowed us to overclock our Athlon 64 3200+ without increasing the memory frequency divisor (it was set as 1/10 of the CPU frequency during our tests, or “DDR400” as the BIOS Setup termed it).

Our earlier experiments with speeding up Socket 754 mainboards showed that you can only reach high overclocking results by using ATA-100/133 hard disk drives. The use of SerialATA HDDs usually led to failures in the disk subsystem, even after a slight increase of the FSB frequency. The point is that many Socket 754 mainboards clock the PCI bus, to which the SerialATA controller attaches, synchronously with the FSB, and the frequencies of these two buses go up together. SerialATA controllers that use a serial interface with a data-transfer frequency of 1.5GHz for communicating with hard disk drives start experiencing problems even when the PCI clock rate grows to 36MHz.

The reviewed mainboard, Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250, is free from this problem, though. It clocks the FSB and PCI buses asynchronously, allowing the use of SerialATA drives.

Increasing the FSB clock rate smoothly, we reached the ceiling at 232MHz. On further growth of the FSB clock rate, the system lost stability. Regrettably, without the option of lowering the CPU multiplier, we hit the roof for this particular processor too soon. We also reached this result with other, older chipsets. Thus, the practical overclocking tests of the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 bring no surprises, even through NVIDIA nForce3 250 chipset is theoretically very suitable for overclocking.

Once again, Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 offers no means to control the CPU multiplier in the BIOS or from Windows-based utilities – the system hangs up when you try to use them. Anyway, we felt the positive effect of the asynchronous clocking of the AGP/PCI buses in our tests as the overclocked mainboard could work stably with SerialATA hard disk drives.

Testbed and Methods

The goal of our today’s testing session is checking out the performance level of the new chipset from NVIDIA, the nForce3 250. We compared Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 with mainboards on other Socket 754 chipsets: NVIDIA nForce3 150, VIA K8T800 and SiS755.

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3400+ (2.2GHz);
• Mainboards:
  • Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 (NVIDIA nForce3 250);
  • Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-150 (NVIDIA nForce3 150);
  • ABIT KV8-MAX3 (VIA K8T800);
  • ECS 755-A2 (SiS755);
• 1GB DDR400 SDRAM (2-3-2-6 timings);
• ATI RADEON 9800 XT graphics card (Catalyst 4.3 driver);
• Western Digital WD400JB HDD.

We ran our tests in Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0b installed. The BIOSes of the tested mainboards were set up for maximum performance.

The table below shows effective frequencies the processor was working at in the tested mainboards (as measured by the CPUZ diagnostic utility):

As you see, the difference is negligible, its influence on the test results can be dismissed.

Performance

Before discussing the test results, I think it is necessary to comment on the performance of the Athlon 64 processor in general. The architecture of Athlon 64 CPUs differs somewhat from other processors and diminishes the contribution of the chipset to the overall system performance.

Really, the memory controller constitutes the major part of any chipset for the Pentium 4 or Athlon XP processor. Traditionally, developing an efficient memory controller meant developing a fast chipset.

Athlon 64 architecture, however, puts the memory controller into the processor itself. Thus, all Athlon 64 platforms work with the memory at the same speed and show similar benchmark results in a majority of applications. Well, there are cases when bugs in the BIOS lead to an incorrect memory controller configuration, which results in a low performance, but this is in no way related to the chipset. Thus, there are other factors that determine the fastest platform for Athlon 64: efficient routing of data streams in the chipset, quality of HyperTransport and AGP buses and so on. However, these factors affect the resulting performance of the platform just slightly. So the fact that different chipsets for Athlon 64 show very similar level of performance shouldn’t surprise you.

There is also one more consequence to the things I’ve mentioned above: when evaluating a chipset for the Athlon 64 platform, you should always remember that the speed of the chipset is not the decisive factor as to its superiority over the competing products. The set of characteristics and overclocking opportunities are also two important factors for an Athlon 64 chipset.

The preliminaries over, let’s get to our tests.

Performance in PCMark04

We devote a separate section to Futuremark PCMark04, since this benchmark is synthetic, rather than real, although uses real-life algorithms.

Just as I have mentioned above, mainboards on different chipsets show about the same performance. The results in PCMark04 depend on the speed of the processor and the memory controller, which is integrated in to the CPU in Athlon 64 architecture.

Performance in Office and Content Creation Applications

We traditionally use tests of the Winstone family to check out the system performance in ordinary Windows applications.

The results we got on different mainboards differ somewhat in these tests. The tests simulate work of a real user in a typical Windows environment and the disk subsystem and other factors affect the overall result. The SiS755-based mainboard shows the highest performance in the Winstone tests.

Performance in 3DMark 2001 and 3DMark03

Before measuring the fps rate in popular 3D games, we usually run 3DMark2001 SE and 3DMark03 for a start. Let’s do it today, too:

The results of the mainboards on different Athlon 64 chipsets are nearly the same. Note, however, that NVIDIA nForce3 250 is a worthy contender – it has a higher CPU score in 3DMark03 than its main rival, VIA K8T800.

Performance in 3D Games

Aquamark3 is a hard test that uses a real gaming engine of the last generation. You can see from the diagrams that NVIDIA nForce3 250 is faster than its predecessor, nForce3 150. As a result, the performance of nForce3 250 is nearly the same as that of other participating chipsets.

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.

3D Performance with a Graphics Card on NVIDIA GPU

In all tests that you see in this section of the review (and only in them), we changed our testbed configuration. We installed an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 XT graphics card (with the Detonator 53.03 driver) instead of the ATI RADEON 9800 XT.

As you see, the use of the graphics card with a graphics processor from NVIDIA affects the results slightly in most of the games. NVIDIA nForce3 250 wins in a majority of the tests, however, we saw the same situation with an ATI RADEON 9800 XT graphics card.

Let’s now see what we have in heavy tests like X2: The Threat and Tomb Raider:

All returns to the norm in Tomb Raider. The performance of NVIDIA nForce3 250 has grown somewhat, nearly matching that of the VIA K8T800. However, we again witness the inexplicable failure of the nForce3 250 before its main competitor in X2: The Threat. Thus, we wouldn’t draw any parallels between the performance of the nForce3 250 and the type of the graphics card you use. Yes, there is a correlation, but not strong enough for us to say that this chipset works better with a certain graphics card.

Performance during Archiving and Media Encoding

nForce3 250 wins the tests of data zipping and video encoding. The single-chip architecture of this chipset seems to be more suitable for processing streaming data.

Performance in 3D Modeling

nForce3 250 is good at doing the final rendering and working with professional OpenGL applications.

Conclusion

So, we have checked out the new chipset from NVIDIA for the Socket 754 platform in practice. Although nForce3 250 seems to be very similar to the previous product, nForce3 150, at least in the name, it actually inherited very little from the predecessor. The shortcomings of the nForce3 150 vanished completely, moreover, nForce3 250 with all its improvements is now the most feature-rich Athlon 64 chipset. Like competitor products, it supports eight USB 2.0 and SerialATA ports, but unlike them, it has an integrated RAID controller with an enhanced functionality and a 1GHz HyperTransport bus. The advanced version of this chipset, the nForce3 250Gb, also has Gigabit Ethernet and a hardware firewall.

NVIDIA’s chipset should also make an excellent platform for overclocking experiments as it allows clocking asynchronously the FSB and AGP/PCI buses. So you can overclock your Athlon 64 processor with the multiplier locked from above, without worrying about the peripheral devices.

The performance of the nForce3 250 is on the highest level, since it uses the HyperTransport bus at full speed. However, we found some unpleasant problems of mysterious nature, such as slower performance in certain computer games.

nForce3 250-based Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard we have tested today boasts both: advantages and drawbacks.

On the one hand, it offers the greatest working opportunities and an excellent set of accessories. This mainboard supports all modern standards, protocols and interfaces, including FireWire, SerialATA RAID, Gigabit Ethernet and hardware high-quality eight-channel sound. The CBOX3 panel you receive with the mainboard extends the functionality of your system case, adding a card reader and a POST controller to the mainboard features.

But on the other hand, this mainboard uses a PCB design from another product, which was based on the previous chipset version. As a result, many capabilities of the nForce3 250 are not implemented in Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250. The most unpleasant things are few USB ports and the use of external RAID controller instead of the one integrated into the chipset.

The mainboard also restrained our overclocking attempts – the range of voltages Zenith ZNF3-250 can give to the processor and memory will hardly please dedicated overclockers. Besides that, the mainboard cannot change the CPU multiplier, which also deprives it of a certain overclocking value.

Another disadvantage of Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 I’d like to single out is the missing support of the Cool’n’Quiet technology. This support may appear, though, in the new versions of the BIOS, so stay tuned for more updates from us!