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Storage/Connectivity

As we mentioned earlier, one important feature NVIDIA left out of nForce3 150 was native Serial ATA support. This omission has been corrected in nForce3 250, as the chipset features dual Serial ATA controllers, with one device per controller. Like VIA’s K8T800, motherboard manufacturers can use an external physical layer to add support for two more devices, bringing support for up to four Serial ATA drives. (Silicon Image has been used frequently in the past, although other manufacturers can be used.) nForce3 250 also has dual parallel ATA-133 controllers (four devices supported total) for those of you with older drives.

nForce3 250 continues to offer RAID support. Levels 0 (striping), 1 (mirroring), 0+1 (striping and mirroring), and JBOD (just a bunch of disks) are supported, which can all be managed with NVIDIA’s NVRAID software. One feature that sets NVIDIA’s RAID solution apart from others is its support for cross-controller operation. This means that your RAID array can consist of both Serial ATA and parallel ATA hard drives. Competing solutions from other manufacturers only provide Serial ATA RAID support.

Besides cross-controller support, another cool feature NVIDIA's RAID solution supports is spare drive. With this feature you can install an additional hard drive that can be assigned as a spare; this spare drive can be used if a mirrored drive in your RAID 1 or RAID 0+1 array fails. If this occurs, the spare drive will kick in and automatically start rebuilding the array, replacing the drive that went down. The entire process is invisible to the user, you don’t have to power down and you can replace the bad drive later.

For connectivity, nForce3 250 supports USB 2.0 (up to 8 ports), 6 PCI slots, and AGP 8X. In addition, once PCI Express devices roll out later this year, nForce3 250 will be ready.

Audio/Video

Unlike the nForce/nForce2 family, one feature you won’t see NVIDIA heavily promoting with nForce3 150 or nForce3 250 is audio. The Dolby Digital audio processing unit (APU) found in previous chipsets didn’t make the transition to nForce3. The chipset does provide an AC’97 interface, which is capable of supporting 2, 4, or 6-channel audio, but this probably comes as a letdown to many gamers and hardware enthusiasts. Likewise, nForce3 250 lacks the integrated GeForce4 MX graphics found on NVIDIA’s nForce2 IGP.

NVIDIA feels that the typical Athlon 64 user is more of an enthusiast who already has their own graphics solution. As AMD’s 64-bit platform works its way down into the value market, NVIDIA plans to add an integrated chipset option, but you won’t see that today.

Processor support

Like nForce3 150, NVIDIA’s nForce3 250 chipset supports all of AMD’s latest 64-bit processors, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, and Opteron. nForce3 250 also supports 2P configurations, meaning the chipset is capable of supporting two processors. This feature could allow NVIDIA to make a play into servers and high-end workstations. In fact, during our meeting with NVIDIA they had a dual Opteron system up and running based on an nForce3 250Gb reference board.

When AMD migrates to Socket 939 later this year, nForce3 250 will be ready. Manufacturers are validating their designs now so the transition should be seamless.