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Conclusions

The K8N Neo and the NForce 3 250Gb are important for the evolution of the desktop and motherboard. The NForce3 brings improvements to both the OEM and consumer; Nvidia has alleviated some of the concerns of the OEMs by integrating a lot of features directly into the southbridge that negates the need for a bevy of external chips (like on the K8NNXP). Other features such as RAID and the hardware firewall add a lot of value into the pacakge. The RAID option which we have not touched on yet is robust allowing the user to define a RAID partition over both SATA and IDE drives in RAID0, RAID1, RAID1+0 and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) mode. A demonstration I saw down at Editor's Day was extremely impressive - the Nvidia RAID setup was playing 9 full DVD streams without slowdown. Killing one of the drives resulted in about a second of delay time before a backup drive kicked in. The K8N Neo and the NForce 3 platform will be excellent for the workstation duties.

The onboard firewall is quite extensive and we will be following up on how it performs in an upcoming article. That said, there should be no reason why anyone who is looking to upgrade to the K8N Neo should not be running it as firewalls are as necessary as system patches nowadays.

The NForce 3 250Gb is not perfect however. We did not see a lot of improvements on the benchmark side over either the 150 or the K8T800. I think the performance difference between the K8T800 and the NForce 3 chipsets were a bit overstated as both platforms have their strengths as well as areas that could use improvement. However the NForce 3 250Gb and the K8N Neo bring features that VIA will be hard pressed to match in the near future.

The K8N Neo should be available soon and is the board to get if one is in the market for a socket 754 solution despite a couple minor issues. The GbE, RAID features and firewall are things that should not be overlooked easily especially when they should come at little to no additional expense.