Questions on nForce3 250

[irenealan]

Just wonder other than the PCI/AGP lock, what other advantages does the nForce3 250 board gives over the 150 board?

Can I use Dual Channel since I read something about nForce3 250 offers dual channel!

Thanks.

 

[Shimmishim]

basically there are no real advantages except for the locked pci/agp

you can look at benchies of the 250 and see that it is almost identical to the 150...

as i've said before, wait for some more boards to come out to decide or later revisions...

 

[Dman877]

And the 250 doesn't have soundstorm audio, just standard ac97 (which may or may not matter). It also has faster lan and built in firewall.

 

[TheBoy]

Dual channel depends on the processor, it's not on the socket 754s. It's on the Athlon 64 FX Series and will be on the socket 939 athlon 64s.

 

[jdogg707]

The only reason I will buy a 250 board when it comes out is because my current A64 board (MSI K8t Neo-FISR2) sucks a big one and I want to be able to overclock without disabling my hard drives or causing my video card not to work properly, I miss my Intel AGP/PCI lock, but love my A64!

 

[joe2004]

I think the major problem with overclocking Athlon 64 is not PCI/AGP lock but crapy memory controller that cannot handle high frequencies and low latencies in the same time. There is much to be desired for improvement.
I for one do not understand why is that Intel chipset can handle memory the same whether 2x512 with 4 banks or 2x256 with 2 banks while AMD CPUs cannot do that. This thing goes on and on and it is the problem now as well.

 

[jdogg707]

Originally posted by: joe2004
I think the major problem with overclocking Athlon 64 is not PCI/AGP lock but crapy memory controller that cannot handle high frequencies and low latencies in the same time. There is much to be desired for improvement.
I for one do not understand why is that Intel chipset can handle memory the same whether 2x512 with 4 banks or 2x256 with 2 banks while AMD CPUs cannot do that. This thing goes on and on and it is the problem now as well.

What do you mean high frequency and low latencies? The latency is only as low as the memory will allow it. There are kinks that need to be ironed out of course, and hopefully that will be done when the Socket 939 Dual Channel chips come out. There are a lot of people hitting very high frequencies with these chips using boards like the Shuttle AN50R, and even the MSI nForce3 250 board got up to 300MHZ...hopefully we'll start to see better results as the chips mature.

 

[mechBgon]

As a chipset, the nForce3 250 family will support Socket 939, 940, 754 and dual 940. That'll do for a start, yes? Mmmm, dual Opterons on nForce3 Pro 250Gb... *drool*

A test I saw (let's assume it's accurate) showed that the full-duplex gigabit Ethernet throughput of nForce3 250Gb exceeded even that of a server-class 64-bit/100MHz PCI-X NIC on a server-class dual-Xeon board, and not by a small amount... it was about 40% higher! I got uses for that down at work. Hypertransport =

Integrated hardware-accelerated firewall and TCP/IP checksum offloading, the ability to create RAID arrays across any and all of the hard drives in the system (both PATA and SATA), accomodations for up to four SATA drives natively PLUS up to three PATA channels... ok, so it has no SoundStorm audio. I'll accept that tradeoff for my purposes.

 

[joe2004]

What do you mean high frequency and low latencies?

Well I have chips that run monstrous frequencies with the most aggressive latencies in Intel board of mine but they cannot manage anything close to that in AMD board.
Try overclocking with :
1. 4 banks 2x512
2. 2 banks 2x256
3. 1 bank 1x256
...
in AMD board, whichever setup, for example in K8 board. You will quickly notice that AMD emory controller has serious problem with multiple banks setup or with low latencies combined with multiple banks. It is better than in N-Force 2 boards but still a far cry from what Intel setups can do. I love AMD chips and use them in most of my computers but the truth is they are not capable of memory handling the way Intel chips are.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: joe2004

What do you mean high frequency and low latencies?

Well I have chips that run monstrous frequencies with the most aggressive latencies in Intel board of mine but they cannot manage anything close to that in AMD board.
Try overclocking with :
1. 4 banks 2x512
2. 2 banks 2x256
3. 1 bank 1x256
...
in AMD board, whichever setup, for example in K8 board. You will quickly notice that AMD emory controller has serious problem with multiple banks setup or with low latencies combined with multiple banks. It is better than in N-Force 2 boards but still a far cry from what Intel setups can do. I love AMD chips and use them in most of my computers but the truth is they are not capable of memory handling the way Intel chips are.

That hasn't been my observation. I wish I had a dollar for every time a panicky i875P or i865PE owner has destabilized his system by using 2-2-2-6 timings at DDR400 speeds. Like this guy and about 100 other people I've referred to that thread for the same cure.

 

[jdogg707]

Originally posted by: mechBgon

Originally posted by: joe2004

What do you mean high frequency and low latencies?

Well I have chips that run monstrous frequencies with the most aggressive latencies in Intel board of mine but they cannot manage anything close to that in AMD board.
Try overclocking with :
1. 4 banks 2x512
2. 2 banks 2x256
3. 1 bank 1x256
...
in AMD board, whichever setup, for example in K8 board. You will quickly notice that AMD emory controller has serious problem with multiple banks setup or with low latencies combined with multiple banks. It is better than in N-Force 2 boards but still a far cry from what Intel setups can do. I love AMD chips and use them in most of my computers but the truth is they are not capable of memory handling the way Intel chips are.

That hasn't been my observation. I wish I had a dollar for every time a panicky i875P or i865PE owner has destabilized his system by using 2-2-2-6 timings at DDR400 speeds. Like this guy and about 100 other people I've referred to that thread for the same cure.

I agree with mechBgon here, Intel chipsets hate low latencies, but love higher frequency, hence why a lot of memory manufacturers had to change their specs on DDR400 and the Intel DC chipsets to 2-3-2-6, because they wouldn't do 2-2-2-6.