nForce3-250 - Part 2: Taking Athlon 64 to the Next Level
by Wesley Fink on March 29, 2004 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
nVidia prides themselves as the graphics card manufacturer and chipset maker that caters to gamers and computer enthusiasts. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow to see ATI making moves to the forefront in the graphics card business, and to see nVidia's hard-won market share in the AMD chipset business get lost in Athlon 64 to VIA. nVidia would tell us that nForce3-150 was interim, and that now the market gets more serious. Regardless of the words, it does look like nVidia has really concentrated on making the nF3-250 family all that the nF3-150 was not.The feature set of the nForce3-250Gb is excellent and well-balanced. We finally see a working PCI/AGP lock on an Athlon 64 board, which is good news for overclockers. The on-chip Gigabit LAN and Firewall are also welcome features that will make today's LAN gamers very happy once they have taken a test drive. The easy set-up of the Firewall for an avid LAN gamer will have them smiling in no time. No, there isn't Sound Storm or premium audio, but we think it's a fair tradeoff for nVidia, since they remain the only chipset vendor with a single-chip solution for Athlon 64.
nVidia also has demonstrated conclusively that their rumored problems with 1000 HyperTransport for socket 939 are a thing of the past. We were particularly excited to see that the nForce3-250Gb Ultra could also be used on Socket 754 boards, since it means that we may see a couple of nF3-250 overclocking dynamos in the near future. Dropping HT from 1000 to 800, dropping a multiplier, fixing the AGP lock, and cranking the bus means an easy route to the Athlon 64 overclocks that have seemed so elusive up to this point for the average overclocker.
The "any drive" SATA/IDE RAID is slick as we've seen and answers many enthusiast's worst nightmares. Finally, performance from an nVidia IDE solution is also up to the best available. However, this certainly does not mean that nForce3-250Gb is perfect, because it isn't. The downside is that CPU overhead is still higher than we would like. Perhaps with driver updates, we will see this area continue to improve. It would be a mistake, though, to place too much on the CPU overhead and overlook the wonderfully flexible setup, 8-drive RAID potential, and hot-spare mirroring that nVidia introduces with the full-blown versions of nForce3-250 family.
Performance testing showed nForce3-250 to perform about the same as the best Socket 754 boards that we have tested - no better and no worse with everything the same. This is pretty much what we have come to expect with the maturing Athlon 64 chipsets and the on-chip memory controller of the A64. There is, however, a little unexpected boost. While the best ATI graphics cards perform about the same in NF3-250 as they do in other Athlon 64 boards, the combination of nForce3-250 and nVidia graphics yields a nice performance boost. In this case, the sum is a little more than the parts, which is undoubtedly much easier to do when you manufacture both the chipset and the graphics card.
We are certainly impressed with nForce3-250Gb right now, but the real test comes with the introduction of the chipset with Socket 939. This chipset was clearly meant for that AMD socket, but the competition becomes stiffer with updated chipsets from both VIA and SiS for the new platform. If we were in the market for a top Athlon 64 today, we would search for a high-end nForce3-250Gb board - which you should be able to buy in a couple of weeks. The feature set and performance make it a great choice in today's market, but the main standout here is features because performance of all the chipsets is very similar. If you are an overclocker, then nForce3-250 may be your only choice for a working AGP lock - assuming production motherboards follow through. This is not to minimize the fact that there are a few VIA boards with additional multipliers for FSB and lower processor multipliers, which make some decent overclocking possible, but that solution is not nearly as flexible as a working AGP lock.
What about 939 and dual-channel? We suspect good things from the nF3-250 family, but until we see chips, boards, and the competitors' updates, the jury is still out.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
46 Comments
View All Comments
Brickster - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
Can one expect the following from nf3-250?-939 Mobo
-DualChannel
-PCI-X
Any other chipsets for this?
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
"Certainly, we will see 4 DIMMs, or two matched pairs, on the dual-channel nForce3-250Gb Ultra version of this chipset."again totaly unconnected with reality.
in A64/Opteron the chipset has nothing to do with memory support. How much DIMMs are supported depends on CPU, mainboard and BIOS ONLY!
There will be NO DUAL CHANNEL nf3-250Gb-Ultra. Just like nf3-250Gb IS NOT SINGLE CHANNEL.
There will be DUAL CHANNEL S939 Athlon64 CPU.
Also, another topic not well understood at Anandtech, Tom's, etc.: A64/Opteron FSB speed, HyperTransport speed, etc. - they (the writers) are mixing up clock frequency in MHz, data frequency in DDR and MHz, bandwith in GB/s. They think FSB and HyperTransport is the same thing. They think that HyperTransport is 800MHz (or maybe 200MHz "quadrupelt") - maybe becouse of similarity with P4. They think that their nf3-250Gb has a "250MHz FSB". They don't explain to the users on what depends the memory clock in a A64 system. They think that "Dual CPU support" is a feature of the chipset.
Shame on you!
Diogenes2 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
I remain puzzled about the continuing declaration by Anandtech about the lack of AGP locks on NF3-150 boards..I have no way to confirm it ( with O-Scope, etc. )at this time, but I am running 265 FSB on my Gigabyte GA-K8NPRO, and having no problems with my Saphire 9800 Pro.. This was not the case with the KT800 board I experimented with for a while, which would not tolerate an FSB above 225, as far as AGP was concerned..
I recommend that when the NF3-250 boards hit the shelves, buyers take advantage of price drops on NF3-150 offerings.. I don't see the modest performance gains of the NF3-250 as anything to get excited about..
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
just 2 lines below, another error:"nVidia includes the hooks for AC '97 6.1 audio in nForce3-250"
6.1? Don't you mean 5+1 ("6-channel 5.1")????
OK. This can be a typo-mistake, but when you add all typos, totaly wrong infos, etc. - it is too much to bear!
amalinov - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
"Even with the memory controller on the chip, there is only so much real estate practically available on a single-chip chipset. "What???? This is not true! Where did you get such information?
SiS745, anyone? Single Chip: AGP+DDR memroy+PCI+UATA+AC97+...
also, current 0.13um, 0.15um is more advanced than SiS745.
Other single chip: ALi M1689, SiS630, SiS540
There IS enough real estate for a SoundStorm APU.
The problem can be pin-count, but is not.
Give us the area in mm2 and production technology in um of nforce3, nforce2 IGP, nforce2 MCP-T.... then can we speak.
Also give for comparation other chipsets - north&south&singlechip, other CPUs, other GPUs... give numbers for total transistors, total pins...
Generaly I think that the quality of articles in Anandtech and Tom's Hardware has declined VERY MUCH and is below acceptable now. Once these two were my favorite sites. Now I visit them only becouse they are big and so get the newest stuff and make MANY benchmarks. But if you need information about internals of a component and not its speed - they will most likely give you WRONG information. There are many other mistakes in mainboard and chipsets and other articles that start to annoy me...
tagej - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
I do not find it surprising at all that most customers don't care about the sound storm stuff. After all, the vast majority of PC users (outside of the geek market of course) have their PC hooked up to $9.99 basic speakers -- sound storm is not going to make a difference at all, and is simply not a selling point.The 250Gb certainly looks sweet at this point... I'll be watching closely to see how the first retail boards do.
aak97 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
Just wanna know, did the nForce3-250Gb ref board comes with any WinXP 64bits drivers? I'm sure a lot of people (including myself) will be interested in some benchmarks on the Preview version of WinXP 64bits.Foxbat121 - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
#4,The "customer" in the survey probably refers to nVidia's largest OEM like HP, eMachine etc. These companies only care about save a few $$ and probably only chose nForce2 without SoundStorm.
#7,
The whole point of SoundStorm is to use Dolby Digital encoding and output everything throught digital sound output where analog codec chip does not get in to the play. If you use analog ouput, you will be better of with a sound card.
KHysiek - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
Now with Intel adding Azalia high lever audio to it's boards NVidia looks clearly dumb with it's chipset w/o Soundstorm.clemedia - Monday, March 29, 2004 - link
"On the other hand, Soundstorm offers high quality 3d audio rendering, but it is _ALWAYS_ paired with that SAME crappy Realtek ALC650 chip, which offers lousy analog output quality"Apparently you COMPLETLY overlooked the fact that most (all, AFAIK) SoundStorm boards offered digital output which bypassed those codec's completly. Which just happens to be EXACTLY what I use, and was a major selling point, allowing me to send out my DD/DTS signal to my amp for DVD's as I use for regular computer use. VERY handy.
I would have no problem switching to something else if they offed a good DICE solution. (I think C-media makes a software DICE chip, but I would rather go with something better)