X-bit labs

First Mass Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250: Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 Review

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/07/2004 | 03:15 PM ]

Today we would like to offer you a review of the first mass mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250 chipset. Finally the so long-awaited product appeared in the mass market and we can see what it is capable of.

Table of contents:

• NVIDIA nForce3 250: Closer Look
  
• Specifications
  
• Features
  
• PCB Design
  
• BIOS and Overclocking
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance
  
• Performance in PCMark04
  
• Performance in Office and Content Creation Applications
  
• Performance in 3DMark 2001 and 3DMark03
  
• Performance in 3D Games
  
• 3D Performance with a Graphics Card on NVIDIA GPU
  
• Performance during Archiving and Media Encoding
  
• Performance in 3D Modeling
  
• Conclusion
  

Lately, AMD has been very successful in promoting its processors of the Athlon 64 family into the market. Such CPUs are enjoying better sales and higher popularity among enthusiastic users, who have always liked AMD products more, as well as among suppliers of ready systems. On the other hand, the situation in this market is far from ideal, mainly because of the lack of good chipsets for the Athlon 64 platform. In fact, VIA K8T800 is the only more or less satisfactory chipset for Athlon 64, although it is not free from certain deficiencies, either. And this situation still took place despite the fact that all major companies active in the chipset market (save for Intel, of course) have already offered their solutions. They are VIA Technologies, SiS, and NVIDIA.

Let’s recall the shortcomings of the existing chipsets for Socket 754 and Socket 940 platforms. SiS launched its SiS755 chipset, which had acceptable characteristics and high performance, according to our own tests (see our article called ECS 755-A2 Socket754 Mainboard on SiS755 Chipset Review). However, SiS couldn’t solve some manufacturing problems. As a result, SiS755 is practically unavailable – there are no mainboards based on it in stores. The competing product, the NVIDIA nForce3 150, is widespread, but its functionality scope is rather limited. For example, it cannot work with SerialATA devices. What’s more disappointing, this chipset doesn’t support 800MHz frequency of the HyperTransport bus, but clocks it at 600MHz only. Moreover the width of the HyperTransport bus (it connects the chipset with the processor) is twice as small. As a result, the peak bandwidth of the CPU-chipset bus is only 1.8GB/s instead of 3.2GB/s.

This fact explains the low performance of nForce3 150-based mainboards compared to mainboards on other chipsets in many applications, critical to the data transfer rate between the CPU and chipset, even in spite of the fact that the memory controller in Athlon 64 systems resides right in the CPU. The third chipset available, the VIA K8T800, is less vulnerable to our criticizing, but this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to criticize at all. VIA K8T800 exposes its weakness at overclocking since it cannot clock the FSB and the AGP/PCI buses asynchronously. As a result, raising the CPU clock rate above the nominal, we also increase the frequencies of the AGP/PCI buses, thus making the devices attached to those buses non-operational. Particularly, the SerialATA controller from the chipset South Bridge is usually the first to fail during CPU overclocking.

Thus, until recently, there was no absolutely perfect chipset for Socket 754/Socket 940 systems and we were waiting for updated versions of existing products with all their drawbacks eliminated. For example, VIA promised to launch its updated K8T800 Pro, while NVIDIA was preparing its nForce3 250. According to the schedule, mainboards on these chipsets were supposed to come into mass production along with the arrival of the Socket 939 version of the Athlon 64 CPU. However, we already see first mainboards on these chipsets emerging.

NVIDIA was the first company to start limited shipments of its nForce3 250 long before May, when the Socket 939 platform is expected to arrive. Some mainboard makers close to NVIDIA tried to take advantage of the situation and started producing new mainboards for Socket 754 without waiting for the new processor socket. Among the luckiest companies was Chaintech that quickly offered an update to its ZNF3-150 mainboard we have already reviewed (see our article called Socket754 Platform: 13 Mainboards Roundup). Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard, the new product from Chaintech, came in our test lab to show its own advantages as well as the strong points of the chipset it is based on.