Let’s now see what we have in heavy tests like X2: The Threat and Tomb Raider:

All returns to the norm in Tomb Raider. The performance of NVIDIA nForce3 250 has grown somewhat, nearly matching that of the VIA K8T800. However, we again witness the inexplicable failure of the nForce3 250 before its main competitor in X2: The Threat. Thus, we wouldn’t draw any parallels between the performance of the nForce3 250 and the type of the graphics card you use. Yes, there is a correlation, but not strong enough for us to say that this chipset works better with a certain graphics card.

Performance during Archiving and Media Encoding

nForce3 250 wins the tests of data zipping and video encoding. The single-chip architecture of this chipset seems to be more suitable for processing streaming data.