Chipset: nForce3 250Gb Review :: The Board

This is a chipset review. As such, the reference board sent by NVIDIA is not representative of any retail boards. Nonetheless, I feel it's important to describe the board if a board was sent. The board that NVIDIA sent was a NVIDIA branded reference board in a WaveMaster case. The system was outfitted with 1 Seagate Parallel Hard disk drive and 2 WD 36 GB Raptor HDDs in Striped mode. The video card included with the test system was a 5950 Ultra reference card. Finally, the memory included with the system was 512 MB of Corsair XMS memory.

The reference board is a standard ATX case 305x240mm in dimensions. As almost all boards available today are these dimensions it's a easy fit into the case that NVIDIA provided with the test system. As a reference motherboard, the 250 Gb may not be indicative of a shipping motherboard, and may include extra features not found in a retail motherboard. It's meant as a point of reference only.

The board comes with 2 DIMM (Dual In-line Memory Module) slots for total support of up to 2GB of non-ECC unregistered DDR memory. Of course as a reference board this can vary from retail but the Athlon 64 CPU only supports 2 GB of memory because it's a single channel memory solution, so it's unlikely that motherboard manufacturers will include more than 2 slots.

Hard drive support on the board is provided by 4 SATA connectors onboard and 2 PATA connectors onboard. This allows for up to 4 SATA hard disk drives and up to 4 IDE devices to be connected to the system at any given time. Hopefully the manufacturers that make boards with this chipset will also utilize this configuration. Of course, my Med-ATX case wouldn't fit more than 7 drives, but it's still useful for those people that have a full tower case.

The reference board comes with 6 PCI slots. I'm sure that there will be boards with 5 slots, but the reference board comes with the full 6 slots. Hopefully manufacturers will include all 6, as I prefer the expandability and flexibility that 6 slots provide. It's especially useful when using the motherboard with a 2-slot video card like the GEFORCE FX 5950 Ultra.

The board supports up to 8 USB 2.0 slots. NVIDIA outfitted the reference board with 2 USB 2.0 ports, but I imagine that board manufacturers will include 4 as standard with 4 more available via cable to make the total of up to 8. This compares favorably with the nForce3 150 boards which came with up to 6 USB 2.0 ports and brings it up to the industry standard.

NVIDIA outfitted the reference board with an AGP 3.0 compliant 8x slot. Again this is standard for chipsets at the moment. PCI-Express, the interface that will replace the AGP specification will arrive in a short while, but for now, AGP 8x is the standard. I haven't had any issues with NVIDIA motherboard chipsets and AGP 8x since the Parhelia and the original nForce, and the reference board accepted and identified ATI 9800XT as an AGP8x part without problems.