Introduction

One of Nvidia's shining achievements was the Nforce 2 chipset. Lauded with critical acclaim, a rich feature set and excellent overclocking compared to alternative solutions, the Nforce 2 was a smash hit and it arguably kept AMD in the performance race against Intel as VIA faltered a bit. Things looked very rosy for Nvidia's chipset development team until the arrival of the Athlon 64.

The announcement of Nvidia's Nforce 3 150 chipset was met with some muted reservations unlike the enthusiastic support that the venerable Nforce 2 was greeted with. The first major issue was OEM support: the Nforce 3 150 had a barebones southbridge which translated into a lot of 3rd party chips that OEMs needed to buy to provide similar functionality against the VIA K8T800. This of course drove prices up both in terms of engineering costs as well as chip costs. The second issue was specifications- the Nforce 3 150 had a HyperTransport bus speed of 600 Mhz and only an 8 bit link in each direction compared to 800 Mhz and 16 bit links for the VIA equivalent. In testing, the difference was negligible but the perception that this would make a difference also hurt Nvidia who was viewed as a technological leader with the Nforce 2 but was a step behind with the Nforce 3.

Fortunately, like after the lukewarm reception of the original Nforce, Nvidia is bouncing back with the Nforce 3 250 with a vengeance. Gigabit Ethernet, RAID and a hardware firewall highlight some of the new features on the southbridge which will make it very competitive with the K8T800. Nvidia was gracious enough to invite us to a tech demo when they were in town and we got to take a look at the Nforce 3 first hand. This will be a summation of what they showed us and what we've learned about the Nforce 3 from the literature made available to us. Nvidia demoed the Nforce 3 250 for us in person and the figures quoted were what we saw during the presentation but we did not conduct the tests ourselves firsthand.