Conclusion
There is no doubt in our minds that the AMD Athlon 64 will take a great leap forward in overclocking circles with the launch of the nForce3 250 chipset. At last, now that the PCI bus can be controlled, the full potential of the processor can be achieved.Throughout our testing the motherboard proved extremely stable. Any failures were clearly down to pushing the processor or memory too far, not the chipset. Even at a driven clock speed of 250MHz, stability was assured when the CPU was within its limits. We had to search for Windows applications to unlock the full potential of the test motherboard; hopefully features such as multiplier adjustment will be added into the bios soon.
If you are keen to release the full potential of your Athlon 64, you could do a lot worse than nForce3 250 if our sample from Gigabyte is anything to go by. Let's hope that retail production boards are as good, or better, when they start to hit the shelves over the next few months.
