Hexus have thrown up their review of Nvidia's upcoming nForce3 250 mainboard! Here's a snip.
It's been an almost insufferable wait for the second generation of Athlon 64 and Opteron chipsets from AMD's chipset partners. While the initial products - VIA's K8T800 and NVIDIA's nForce3 150 spring immediately to mind - are competent and allowed the processors to breathe freely and perform well, there's always been a couple of annoying niggles, as is always the case with the very first revisions of such things. That AMD dumped a lot of northbridge logic onto the processor was a reason for the early promise, so the task of building a competent supporting core logic set was much reduced. Integrating the memory controller onto the processor, along with easy interconnect with other connected system essentials with HyperTransport, means that chipset partners for Athlon 64 and Opteron (ALi added themselves to that list recently with the purchase of AMD's own 8000-series stuff) had time and effort to focus on getting the rest right.
This had the adverse effect of slingshotting the adverse parts of the chipsets into the limelight, with many online technology commentators quick to jump on initial flaws (while print magazines generally papered over the cracks, more fool them). The base criticisms with the early chipsets from VIA and NVIDIA centered mainly on one thing: the inability for either core logic set to lock the AGP and any primary or secondary attached PCI busses. While some boards claim to implement the lock, and indeed there might be the odd rogue board that does by means of clever engineering, it transpired that, as far as the base chipset was concerned, none did. K8T800 and nForce3 150 are physically unable to clock those busses discretely, instead deriving the clocks via a divider from the driven CPU frequency, itself derived from the base HyperTransport clock.
nForce3 250: Second generation Athlon 64
It's been an almost insufferable wait for the second generation of Athlon 64 and Opteron chipsets from AMD's chipset partners. While the initial products - VIA's K8T800 and NVIDIA's nForce3 150 spring immediately to mind - are competent and allowed the processors to breathe freely and perform well, there's always been a couple of annoying niggles, as is always the case with the very first revisions of such things. That AMD dumped a lot of northbridge logic onto the processor was a reason for the early promise, so the task of building a competent supporting core logic set was much reduced. Integrating the memory controller onto the processor, along with easy interconnect with other connected system essentials with HyperTransport, means that chipset partners for Athlon 64 and Opteron (ALi added themselves to that list recently with the purchase of AMD's own 8000-series stuff) had time and effort to focus on getting the rest right.
This had the adverse effect of slingshotting the adverse parts of the chipsets into the limelight, with many online technology commentators quick to jump on initial flaws (while print magazines generally papered over the cracks, more fool them). The base criticisms with the early chipsets from VIA and NVIDIA centered mainly on one thing: the inability for either core logic set to lock the AGP and any primary or secondary attached PCI busses. While some boards claim to implement the lock, and indeed there might be the odd rogue board that does by means of clever engineering, it transpired that, as far as the base chipset was concerned, none did. K8T800 and nForce3 150 are physically unable to clock those busses discretely, instead deriving the clocks via a divider from the driven CPU frequency, itself derived from the base HyperTransport clock.
nForce3 250: Second generation Athlon 64
