In The Flesh
Click for a bigger picture.
The eagle-eyed among you may well have seen this board elsewhere. You might even know its name.
Since this is a look at the chipset more than anything, I won't cover layout nuances or anything like that, apart from mentioning that for a single-chip design, it appears to be well set out.
The board does supply everything needed for a successful first look at nForce3 250. We've got access to the native ATA and SATA implementations, the USB2.0 ports and there's even a CPU socket and AGP slot for me to stick a CPU and graphics card in and fire the thing up. Wonders will never cease.
Memory support, as you can probably guess from the application of only 3 DIMM slots, plus the CPU used, is limited to 3GB.
It's not an NVIDIA reference board, keep that in mind when looking at the performance numbers. Traditionally, reference boards tend to overstate performance a little, their creators keen to give off a slightly false sense of speed, compared to shipping retail examples. With a non-reference board, we've got a decent look at performance you should be able to experience elsewhere in other boards.
A quick squizz at the test setup and then the pretty graphs.
