Introduction
NVIDIA today has released a new chipset for the Athlon XP processor that offers the same great south bridge features that the nForce3 250 Gb chipset has, and we’re here to show it all to you today.
NVIDIA has long been preparing a new line of platform technology for the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX line of processors and it was released with the announcement of the nForce3 250 Gb chipset. Today we are seeing this same platform technology being announced for the Athlon XP line of desktop processors.
The nForce2 chipset has been arguably the best optionfor the Athlon XP processors since its release WAY back in July of 2002. It has since been upgraded to support 400 MHz FSB processors with the nForce2 Ultra 400 and now gets what will probably be its final release, the nForce2 Ultra 400 Gb. This update is really in fact a south bridge update, offering the user and manufacturers a lot more options. Performance on the chipset you’ll see isn’t changed at all as the SPP (north bridge) remains the same.
For the Athlon 64 platform, however, ths nForce3 250 Gb chipset constitutes an entire chipset upgrade, as the nForce3 chipset is a single chip solution. Over the original NVIDIA offering for the Athlon 64 platform, you can expect to see some performance increases as well as the additional features that we are going to go over in detail on the following pages including Gigabit networking, a firewall, SATA and RAID and an overclocking / system utility.