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NForce3 250 vs NForce 3 250Gb

As confusing as that may be to some, especially with some review sites mistakenly branding 250 chipsets as 250Gbs will not help the situation any. The 250 lacks a lot of the features that the 250Gb does. The advantage that the 250 boards have over the 250Gb boards is that the 250 MCP can just be dropped into place of the Nforce 150. This means the manufacturers that brought Nforce 3 150 boards to the market will not have to re-engineer their boards and should be able to get them to market quicker versus competitors who may have to do additional testing on new board designs. We suspect that Gigabyte has chosen this route because of the reason outlined above. Nonetheless, it is quite surprising that they did not choose to make a 250Gb based board as some of the features such as the hardware firewall are pretty significant in our eyes. One of the main critiques of the NForce 150 was the lack of features on the MCP unit, which made the K8T800 the more attractive solution. Just look at the relatively few manufacturers that produced 150 based boards as opposed to K8T800 boards. This is exacerbated by the fact that OEMs would have to add in chips for LAN, SATA, RAID, increasing the costs of production considerably. The 150 incarnation of the Gigabyte board, the K8NNXP, although loaded with features was on the pricey side, topping 200$.

In our NForce3 250 preview article we also note the differences between the NForce 250 and Gb featuresets.