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ASUS SK8N + AMD Opteron 144: Uniprocessor Workstation on AMD Opteron and NVIDIA nForce3 Professional (page 5)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 07/21/2003 | 05:53 PM ]

NVIDIA now offers the nForce3 chipset version aka nForce3 Pro 150. The chipset South Bridge (which is located on the same die with the North Bridge) contains NVIDIA 10/100 MAC (which is almost identical to the network controller used in nForce2), three-channel IDE controller, PCI controller, USB 2.0 controller, and supports AC’97 audio (nForce3 doesn’t have NVIDIA’s brand name APU). Of course, the absence of IEEE1394 interface support implemented in MCP-T of the nForce2 chipset catches your eye at once, but NVIDIA decided to give it up this time. Moreover, we were a little bit upset to find out that the PCI controller of nForce3 Professional supports only 33MHz 32bit bus and doesn’t allow using faster PCI devices, which could be of interest to high-performance workstation users.

However, the South Bridge of the nForce3 Professional has its indisputable advantages, too. Its most interesting peculiarity is the IDE controller. In the current chipset version it supports three ATA/133 channels and allows connecting up to 6 IDE devices. Moreover, the third controller channel can also support two SerialATA-150 HDDs if the mainboard is equipped with two IDE-to-SATA Bridge chips from Silicon Image. NVIDIA didn’t simply increase the number of supported hard disk drives. nForce3 Professional supports RAID as well. The current South bridge version supports RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 arrays, which can be built of any ATA HDDs connected to the controller integrated into the chipset.

Here are the formal specifications of the NVIDIA nForce3 Pro 150 chipset:

• HyperTransport bus with 3.6GB/s bandwidth for connection with the CPU;
• AGP 8x;
• Up to six 32bit PCI slots working at 33MHz;
• Triple IDE controller supporting three ATA/133 channels;
• 0, 1, 0+1 RAID arrays;
• Fast Ethernet 10/100Mbit/s  network controller;
• Six USB 2.0 ports;
• AC’97 version 2.1.

This fall NVIDIA is going to enlarge the features list for its nForce3 Professional by enhancing the integrated chipset South Bridge. The new chipset version for Opteron processors will be called nForce3 Pro 250. The enhancements will touch upon the network and IDE controllers. The network controller will support up to 1Gbit/s connections. The IDE controller of nForce3 Pro 250 will boast its own support of four SerialATA-150 channels and two Parallel ATA/133 channels, so that the nForce3 Pro 250 based systems will support up to 8 HDDs. The chipset will certainly retain the support of 0, 1 and 0+1 RAID arrays.