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NVIDIA’s nForce3 250Gb chipset

Geoff Gasior
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ALTHOUGH NVIDIA’S nForce2 chipset was a darling of the enthusiast and gaming community, the company’s nForce3 150 didn’t fare so well. The nForce3 150 was available as early as the Opteron launch, but the chipset’s comparably weak feature set and initially uninspired performance drove many to VIA’s faster and more feature-rich K8T800 chipset.

The K8T800 has enjoyed the lead in both features and performance since its introduction, but the tables may turn with the release of NVIDIA’s nForce3 250Gb chipset. The 250Gb beefs up the nForce3’s HyperTransport link and adds Gigabit Ethernet, Serial ATA and IDE RAID, a working AGP/PCI lock, and a hardware-accelerated firewall to the chipset’s arsenal of integrated features.

Can the nForce3 250Gb’s updated feature set and performance help NVIDIA capture the Athlon 64 chipset crown? Read on to find out.

More on-chip features for the 250Gb
The nForce3 250Gb retains the same single-chip design as its predecessor, the nForce3 150, but beyond that, there are few similarities between the two chips. Apart from sharing an AGP 8X interface, two ATA/133 ports, and AC’97 audio with the nForce3 150, the 250Gb is all new. Some of the chipset’s more notable new features are:

  • Serial ATA — Serial ATA support didn’t make it into the nForce3 150, but NVIDIA redeems itself by supporting a total of four SATA devices on the 250Gb. The chipset has internal ports for two Serial ATA devices, and another two ports can be served through an external PHY chip.

  • Robust RAID — The nForce3 250Gb supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD arrays across all four of its Serial ATA ports, but that’s not all. RAID arrays can also be configured using drives connected to the 250Gb’s two ATA/133 IDE channels, and the chipset even supports RAID arrays that span both Serial ATA and ATA/133 drives. The 250Gb’s support for ATA/133 RAID is particularly notable because the VIA VT8237 south bridge only supports RAID for Serial ATA drives.

    In addition to supporting multiple RAID arrays on or across multiple storage channels, the nForce3 250Gb can be configured with spare disks and even hot standby drives for mission critical arrays. The 250Gb also supports on-the-fly rebuilds for mirrored arrays.

  • Gigabit Ethernet — The price of Gigabit networking hardware is falling at a remarkable rate, making 1000Mbps networks an affordable reality for businesses and even bandwidth-hungry enthusiasts. Gigabit Ethernet is nothing new in the motherboard world, where GigE chips have been riding the PCI bus and Intel’s CSA north bridge link for some time. However, the nForce3 250GB’s Gigabit MAC resides directly on the chip where it has unfettered access to the chipset’s HyperTransport bus.

    Although the nForce3 250Gb’s Gigabit MAC is integrated into the chipset, it uses a PHY chip to act as an Ethernet transceiver. The 250Gb’s GigE implementation supports TCP and checksum offloads to reduce CPU utilization, plus jumbo frames to improve throughput by reducing frame overhead.

  • A hardware-accelerated firewall — I’ll look at the nForce3 250Gb’s firewall in more detail in a moment. However, it’s worth noting here that the firewall in the only native, hardware-accelerated one of its kind. Acceleration should help reduce the firewall’s CPU utilization, and NVIDIA is even letting third-party software developers take advantage of the nForce3 250Gb’s dedicated firewall hardware.

    The firewall’s hardware components have benefits beyond lower CPU utilization, though. Because it partially resides in hardware, the firewall is enabled instantly when a machine is powered on. Software firewalls that rely on drivers and other programs can only protect a machine after it boots into the OS and all the necessary drivers and programs are loaded, leaving a small window for attacks to take hold.

  • A wider, faster HyperTransport link — NVIDIA caught some flak for the nForce3 150’s relatively pokey 16-bit/600MHz downstream and 8-bit/600MHz upstream HyperTransport connections, but the nForce3 250Gb’s HT links are 16-bit and 800MHz in both directions. The nForce3’s faster HT connection nicely matches the K8T800’s 16-bit/800MHz HyperTransport link, but this isn’t just a case of keeping up with the Jonses; the 250Gb’s integrated Gigabit Ethernet and Serial ATA RAID need more bandwidth than a slower HT link can provide.

  • A working AGP/PCI lock — The nForce3 150 was supposed to have a working AGP/PCI lock, but retail boards never quite got it right. NVIDIA is adamant that the nForce3 250Gb’s AGP and PCI locks work, which should be music to the ears of overclockers looking to crank up the CPU clock without running graphics cards or other system components out of spec. However, it will ultimately be up to motherboard manufacturers to support bus locking and overclocking.

  • Two more USB ports — Though it’s only a minor upgrade, it’s worth mentioning that the nForce3 250Gb supports eight USB 2.0 ports—two more than the nForce3 150.

The SoundStorm APU’s hardware acceleration and Dolby Digital encoding capabilities are sorely absent from the nForce3 250Gb, but at least the chipset’s strong Serial ATA, RAID, and GigE implementations soften the blow. The plentiful on-chip peripherals also make the 250Gb’s lack of PCI Express support easier to swallow. I suspect that few users will encounter PCI bandwidth sharing problems with the nForce3 250Gb.

Serving up ForceWare
The nForce3 250Gb’s updated hardware spec looks impressive, but it takes more than just on-chip resources to make the 250Gb sing. NVIDIA has updated its ForceWare driver package to take advantage of the 250Gb’s capabilities, and the new software is pretty slick.

NVIDIA’s nvRAID utility lets users manage and configure multiple arrays, spare disks, or hot standby drives connected to the 250Gb’s ATA/133 and Serial ATA ports. The utility could use a remote notification scheme for disk failures, though.

On the audio front, NVIDIA has updated its mixer software to fit in with ForceWare’s slick user interface. Unfortunately, the 250Gb’s anemic audio capabilities don’t offer much in the way of exciting features for the mixer to exploit.

There’s only so much software can do to take advantage of the 250Gb’s RAID and audio capabilities, but its hardware-accelerated firewall is different. Although key components of the firewall reside in hardware, the interface is all software.

Users can opt to control the 250Gb’s firewall with a command-line interface, but the default web-based interface is pretty sweet. The firewall supports both stateful and stateless inspections, port blocking and filtering, remote administration, and WMI scripts in addition to protection against spoofing, sniffing, and ARP cache poisoning. The firewall can prevent a system from acting as a DHCP server, too. If all that sounds like Greek to you, NVIDIA includes a set of predefined profiles and setup wizards to help uninitiated users through the process of configuring the firewall.

The firewall’s wizards mostly cover opening ports for specific types of applications, such as game servers, IM clients, and email. Pre-defined security profiles manage the rest of the firewall’s capabilities, and users can easily create new profiles of their own or modify existing ones to suit their needs. If you’re really paranoid about network security, you can even run the firewall in stealth mode where the machine is essentially invisible to the outside world—hackers can’t attack what they can’t see.

Combined with the 250Gb’s hardware acceleration, NVIDIA’s personal firewall software is a pretty compelling option for both home users and corporate environments. The fact that the firewall is so easy to configure and use could be particularly beneficial for those uncomfortable running a firewall they can’t easily adjust.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

Processor Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0GHz
Front-side bus HT 16-bit/800MHz downstream
HT 16-bit/800MHz upstream
HT 16-bit/600MHz downstream
HT 8-bit/600MHz upstream
HT 16-bit/800MHz downstream
HT 16-bit/800MHz upstream
Motherboard Abit KV8-MAX3 Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-150 NVIDIA reference
North bridge VIA K8T800 NVIDIA nForce3 150 NVIDIA nForce3 250GB
South bridge VIA VT8237
Chipset drivers VIA Hyperion 4.51 NVIDIA ForceWare 3.13 NVIDIA 4.08
Memory size 512MB (1 DIMM)
Memory type Corsair XMS3500 DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
Hard drive

Western Digital Raptor WD360GD Serial ATA hard drive
Maxtor 740X-6L 40GB 7200RPM ATA/133 hard drive

Audio VT8237/VT1616 Envy24PT/VT1616 nForce3 250GB/ALC655
Graphics ATI Radeon 9800 XT with Catalyst 4.3 drivers
OS Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 1, DirectX 9.0b

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing. If you’re looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, Corsair’s RAM is definitely worth considering. We ran all the systems with 2-7-3-3 memory timings.

The test systems’ Windows desktops were set at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

Our tests and methods are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

Memory performance
The Athlon 64’s on-die memory controller should put the chipsets on equal footing in our memory performance tests.

Sandra’s memory bandwidth tests produce nearly identical results for all three chipsets, but the K8T800 has a more pronounced advantage over the nForce3 250Gb in Cachemem’s bandwidth tests.

Linpack shows essentially identical performances for each chipset, but…

Cachemem’s memory latency test shows a big improvement from the nForce3 150 to 250Gb.

Memory performance (continued)
I’ve color-coded the various cache levels (L1 is yellow, L2 amber, and main memory is orange) to make for easier reading. The graphs are presented in rough order of overall access latency, from highest to lowest.

Our nifty 3D graphs clearly show the nForce3 150’s higher memory access latencies, but the K8T800 and 250Gb are pretty closely matched.

Winstones

The nForce3 250Gb is every bit as fast as the 150 in the latest Winstone benchmarks, which puts the chipset either a hair behind or ahead of the K8T800.

LAME MP3 encoding
We used LAME 3.92 to encode a 101MB 16-bit, 44KHz audio file into a very high-quality MP3. The exact command-line options we used were:

lame –alt-preset extreme file.wav file.mp3

The 250Gb trails the pack in our MP3 encoding test, but only a second and a half separate the results for all three systems.

DivX video encoding

NVIDIA finds redemption in our DivX encoding test, where both nForce3s edge out the K8T800.

Sphinx speech recognition
Ricky Houghton first brought us the Sphinx benchmark through his association with speech recognition efforts at Carnegie Mellon University. Sphinx is a high-quality speech recognition routine that needs the latest computer hardware to run at speeds close to real-time processing. We use two different versions, built with two different compilers, in an attempt to ensure we’re getting the best possible performance.

There are two goals with Sphinx. The first is to run it faster than real time, so real-time speech recognition is possible. The second, more ambitious goal is to run it at about 0.8 times real time, where additional CPU overhead is available for other sorts of processing, enabling Sphinx-driven real-time applications.

The nForce3 250Gb is just barely faster than the K8T800 in Sphinx.

Cinebench 2003 rendering and shading
Cinebench is based on Maxon’s Cinema 4D modeling, rendering, and animation app. This revision of Cinebench measures performance in a number of ways, including 3D rendering, software shading, and OpenGL shading with and without hardware acceleration.

There isn’t much variation in Cinebench scores until we get to the OpenGL Hardware test, where the 250Gb and K8T800 have a slim lead over the nForce3 150.

SPECviewperf workstation graphics
SPECviewperf simulates the graphics loads generated by various professional design, modeling, and engineering applications.

The nForce3 250Gb brings up the rear in three of the viewperf tests, but manages to pull off a win in ugs-03. The results are all pretty close, though.

ScienceMark
ScienceMark measures performance with several common scientific computing type algorithms, including single-precision and double-precision floating-point matrix math using the popular BLAS routines. First up are some physics problems.

The 250Gb leads the way in the Molecular Dynamics and Primordia tests, but falls behind in Cipher AES encryption. Again, the results are all pretty close.

ScienceMark 2.0’s matrix math test don’t show much variation in the field, either. The 250Gb is slower than the 150 and K8T800, but only by the slimmest of margins.

picCOLOR image analysis
We thank Dr. Reinert Muller with the FIBUS Institute for pointing us toward his picCOLOR benchmark. This image analysis and processing tool is partially multithreaded, and it shows us the results of a number of simple image manipulation calculations.

The 250Gb is just barely off the pace in picCOLOR. Here’s a look at the individual test scores:

The Video+Trgn and Graph Copy tests are a little slower on the 250Gb; by a little, I mean just barely.

Quake III Arena

Quake III Arena blows open what has otherwise been a pretty unexciting set of benchmark results and shows the 250Gb way out ahead of the nForce3 150 and K8T800.

Unreal Tournament 2003

Unreal Tournament 2003’s scores are a little less varied, though.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is based on the Quake III engine, so it’s no surprise that the 250Gb does well here.

Serious Sam SE

Comanche 4

The 250Gb puts on another impressive performance in Serious Sam SE, but Comanche 4 shows no real advantage for any chipset.

3DMark03

Scores remain close in 3DMark03.

USB 2.0 transfer rates

The nForce3 250Gb shows significantly higher USB read speeds than its predecessor, though the K8T800 still rules our USB performance tests.

The 250Gb does, however, manage lower CPU utilization during USB transfers.

Ethernet performance
We evaluated Ethernet performance using the NTttcp tool from the Microsoft’s Windows DDK. The docs say this program “provides the customer with a multi-threaded, asynchronous performance benchmark for measuring achievable data transfer rate”. Sounds like what we’re after.

We used the following command line options on the server machine:

ntttcps -m 4,0,192.168.1.25 -a

..and the same basic thing on each of our test systems acting as clients:

ntttcpr -m 4,0,192.168.1.25 -a

Our server was a Windows XP Pro system based on Chaintech’s Zenith 9CJS motherboard with a Pentium 4 2.4GHz (800MHz front-side bus, Hyper-Threading enabled) and CSA-attached Gigabit Ethernet. A crossover CAT6 cable was used to connect the server to each system.

The 250Gb’s on-chip Gigabit Ethernet blows away the PCI-bound solutions found on our K8T800 and nForce3 150 boards. This one isn’t even close, folks. Note that only the nForce3 250GB is using integrated, chipset-based Ethernet in these tests, so these results aren’t exactly an apples-to-apples affair. However, the other chipsets simply don’t support GigE without the use of a separate, PCI-based controller chip.

Update 6/13/2005 — We recently discovered that the ntttcp CPU utilization results included in this review were incorrect. The CPU utilization results have been removed, but they didn’t factor prominently into our overall conclusion, so that remains unchanged. A full explanation can be found here.

Disk I/0 performance
Our disk controller performance tests use a Maxtor 740X-6L 7,200RPM hard drive for “parallel” ATA (PATA) and a Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 10,000RPM hard drive for Serial ATA (SATA). Because we use different drives for PATA and SATA, scores aren’t comparable between the two. PATA scores should only be compared with each other. The same goes for SATA scores.

Because the nForce3 150 doesn’t feature an integrated Serial ATA controller, its results were obtained using the motherboard’s PCI-bound Silicon Image Sil 3114 SATA controller.

The 250Gb’s integrated SATA controller manages better average read and write speeds than VIA’s VT8237 south bridge, which only barely edges out the nForce3 in the burst speed test.

The nForce3 250Gb’s disk access times and CPU utilization are also better than the competition. Serial ATA was a long time coming for the nForce3, but it’s certainly arrived in style.

Audio performance
We chose to test audio CPU overhead and leave sound quality testing for our individual motherboard reviews. Output quality depends so much on the codec chips paired up with the south bridge audio controllers, we can’t really evaluate south bridge audio quality alone.

Because the nForce3 250Gb’s basic AC’97 audio implementation lacks even driver-emulated hardware acceleration, we can only run RightMark’s “software” DirectSound tests. To spice things up, our nForce3 150 platform uses VIA’s Envy24PT audio controller rather than the chipset’s integrated AC’97 audio.

Audio is definitely not the 250Gb’s forte. The chipset’s CPU utilization in the DirectSound 2D test is particularly high, and performance in the DirectSound 3D test is only average.

Conclusions
With the nForce3 250Gb, NVIDIA has undoubtedly raised the bar for Athlon 64 chipsets. Our performance results suggest that the 250Gb is at least as fast as, if not faster than, the K8T800. However, the relative closeness of most of our benchmark scores isn’t conclusive enough to declare the nForce3 250Gb a winner on performance alone. That’s where the 250Gb’s robust arsenal of integrated peripherals and excellent ForceWare software enters the picture. The 250Gb may not bring back the SoundStorm APU, but the chipset’s Gigabit Ethernet, flexible RAID, and hardware-accelerated firewall implementations set a new standard for the competition to meet.

The Athlon 64’s on-die memory controller forces chipset manufacturers to compete more on features and peripheral performance than ever before, and that’s exactly where the nForce3 250Gb’s strengths lie. Motherboards featuring the new chipset should be available in a few weeks’ time, and if they exploit the 250Gb’s full potential, they should be well worth the wait. It may have taken some time for NVIDIA to bring the nForce3 up to speed, but the nForce3 250Gb is at least a couple of steps ahead of the rest of the Athlon 64 chipset field.

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