A source close to nVidia has revealed to Xbit-Labs that nForce 3 250/250GB will be launched next week. The big news with nForce 3 250/GB is the integrated firewall. nForce 3 150 biggest bottleneck has also been corrected since the HT-bus’ speed has been updated. Both nForce 3 250 and 250GB are singlechip-solutions like nForce 3 150, which means that there are no south and northbridge on nForce 3 mainboards. nVidia has instead chosen to integrate the agp-controller into the southbridge, and that way cutting the costs. This also means that the processor’s signals has less road to travel, since it doesn’t need to go via a northbridge to get to the, for example IDE-controller.
Another long awaited integrated feature with nForce 3 250/250GB is the builtin support for S-ATA. nForce 3 250GB will be the only chipset with integrated support for 1Gbit.
nForce 3 250/250GB will be available for socket 754, 939 and 940. nVidia hopes to steal an even bigger part of the AMD64-market which is dominated by VIA today.
For more information go here.
You aware readers have maybe noticed that the site hexus.net had an article up about nForce 3 250GB with benchmarks and everything. By their preliminary numbers the performance looks to be identical with VIA’s K8T800. The review was taken offline because of misunderstandings between nVidia and them but will soon be online again. We will return when more reviews show up.
