X-bit labs

News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News (page 6)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 06/14/2004 | 08:04 AM ]

ABIT Claims nForce3 250 “Unstable”

ABIT continued this week to demonstrate its position to provide its customers only the best and rock-stable solutions. The company’s anonymous representative told The Inquirer web-site that NVIDIA’s latest core-logic for AMD Athlon 64 processors – the nForce3 250-series – was not enough stable to serve ABIT’s mainboards. Later another source with knowledge of the mainboard maker’s plans told X-bit labs that ABIT still has NVIDIA nForce3 250 mainboards in the roadmap.

“There is a discussion about stability of NVIDIA nForce3 250-series of chipsets…” an anonymous source close to ABIT told X-bit labs.

“Why we are not optimistic about the nForce3 250-series? Well, let me put it this way: we are known for performance, stability, reliability and everything that is involved…” commented a source close to another well-known mainboard maker to X-bit labs.

ABIT KN8, the mainboard that may never become available, photo from Watch Impress web-site

“I can understand ABIT in regards of the nForce3 250. Despite of being very popular among enthusiasts, the previous-generation nForce2 core-logic appeared to be pretty unstable, especially when overclocking. One of the issues with the nForce2 were processor system bus’ frequencies jumping up and down by around 5%, another was lost BIOS settings stored in flash memory. Both troubles probably cost ABIT’s technical support a headache and now engineers from the company want to try everything really thoroughly so that not to run into the same problems again,” said Ilya Gavrichenkov, platform analyst for X-bit labs.

Some believe that NVIDIA will be able to solve all the possible problems with the nForce3 250-series with a revamped revision of the chips. Unfortunately, no one knows when this happens and when mainboard makers are confident about NVIDIA’s latest core-logic.

On the other hand, at least some manufacturers of mainboards, such as Chaintech, ship the nForce3 250-series based platforms now, which means that either they ignore certain possible issues or have ways to overcome the potential problems.