X-bit labs

MSI Displays NVIDIA nForce3 Pro 250 Mainboard.

Category: Mainboards

by Anton Shilov

[ 11/21/2003 | 02:27 PM ]

There were not a lot of NVIDIA nForce3 Pro 250-based mainboards demonstrated at Comdex Fall this year. Even though NVIDIA is very likely to formally announce the new platform and communication processor for AMD Athlon 64 microprocessors very shortly, only a number of mainboard manufacturers are ready to showcase their products based on the core-logic presently.

Micro Star International was one of the very few companies to display NVIDIA nForce3 250-based mainboard at Comdex in Las Vegas this week. Fortunately, X-bit labs’ Editor in Chief Anna Filatova managed to picture the unique mainboard during the show one of these days.

The MS-7030 mainboard is not yet ready – it lacks MOSFETs, capacitors, two DIMM slots out of three and also some other components. Nevertheless, it features a number of additional controllers to support a couple of extra Serial ATA-150 connectors as well as some multimedia and I/O options.

Please click to enlarge.

The nForce3 250 family of chipsets support AMD 64-bit Socket 940 and Socket 754 processors and is ready to power both high-end AMD Opteron and AMD Athlon 64 FX microprocessors as well as performance-mainstream AMD Athlon 64 chips. The nForce3 250 products are very likely to bring a number of advanced features its predecessor – NVIDIA nForce3 Pro 150 – lacks, such as 2 Serial ATA-150 ports as well as external 2 Serial ATA-150 PHY support in addition to presently available AGP 8x, PCI, 2 ATA-33/66/100/133 channels with RAID 0,1 and 0+1 support, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, USB 2.0, etc.

An advanced version of the nForce3 250 series – the nForce3 250Gb – adds Gigabit Ethernet support and promises to be the world’s first core-logic to integrate GbE inside the chip.

In early November a source close to NVIDIA indicated the company’s plans to ship the nForce3 250-series core-logic for AMD’s 64-bit microprocessors in December 2003.