A source reports NVIDIA’s plans to start shipping its long-awaited nForce3 250 chipset next month. This will be the company’s top core-logic for this year and early 2004 and will also become the firm’s third single-chip mainboard core-logic ever.

NVIDIA discussed its NVIDIA nForce3 150, NVIDIA nForce3 250, NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb and NVIDIA nForce3 Go 150 at this year’s Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan. The company originally said it would ship the series 250 parts in November, but looks like there is likely to be a relatively short delay with the shipments.

The nForce3 250 family of chipsets support AMD 64-bit Socket 940 and Socket 754 processors and is ready to power both high-end AMD Opteron and AMD Athlon 64 FX microprocessors as well as performance-mainstream AMD Athlon 64 chips. The nForce3 250 products are very likely to bring a number of advanced features its predecessor – NVIDIA nForce3 Pro 150 – lacks, such as 2 Serial ATA-150 ports as well as external 2 Serial ATA-150 PHY support in addition to presently available AGP 8x, PCI, 2 ATA-33/66/100/133 channels with RAID 0,1 and 0+1 support, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, USB 2.0, etc.

An advanced version of the nForce3 250 series – the nForce3 250Gb – adds Gigabit Ethernet support and promises to be the world’s first core-logic to integrate GbE inside the chip.

The informer denied to comment on about the version of the nForce3 250 to be actually shipped in December 2003. But in case the general information from the source is correct, NVIDIA will be able to provide a native Serial ATA-150 support this year, a bit later than the market expected the company to roll-out its new products.

Mainboard makers were not ready to comment on availability of nForce3 250-based mainboards. There is also no information about pricing of NVIDIA’s upcoming nForce3 250 and nForce3 250Gb.