NForce3 - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Nvidia NVIDIA Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles... nForce3

CPU support	Athlon 64 Athlon 64 The Athlon 64 is an eighth-generation, AMD64-architecture microprocessor produced by AMD, released on September 23, 2003. It is the third processor to bear the name Athlon, and the immediate successor to the Athlon XP... , Sempron Sempron Sempron has been the marketing name used by AMD for several different budget desktop CPUs, using several different technologies and CPU socket formats. The Sempron replaced the AMD Duron processor and competes against Intel's Celeron series of processors...
Predecessor	nForce2 NForce2 The nForce2 chipset was released by Nvidia in July 2002 as a refresh to the original nForce product offering. The nForce2 chipset was a platform for motherboards supporting AMD's Socket A CPUs along with DDR SDRAM...
Successor	nForce4 NForce4 The nForce4 is a motherboard chipset released by Nvidia in October, 2004. The chipset supports AMD 64-bit processors and Intel Pentium 4 LGA 775 processors.-nForce4/nForce4-4x:...

The nForce3 chipset was created by Nvidia

NVIDIA

Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...

as a Media and Communications Processor. Specifically, it was designed for use with the Athlon 64

Athlon 64

The Athlon 64 is an eighth-generation, AMD64-architecture microprocessor produced by AMD, released on September 23, 2003. It is the third processor to bear the name Athlon, and the immediate successor to the Athlon XP...

processor.

Features of the nForce3

When the Athlon 64 was launched, the Nvidia nForce3 Pro150 and VIA

VIA Technologies

VIA Technologies is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory, and is part of the Formosa Plastics Group. It is the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets...

K8T800 were the only two chipsets available. The 150 chipset was widely criticized at launch for using a 600 MHz HyperTransport

HyperTransport

HyperTransport , formerly known as Lightning Data Transport , is a technology for interconnection of computer processors. It is a bidirectional serial/parallel high-bandwidth, low-latency point-to-point link that was introduced on April 2, 2001...

interface, when VIA had implemented the full AMD specification at 800 MHz, even though overall performance of the 150 was still good.

Later revisions fixed this omission, and using a HyperTransport interface, the nForce3 chipset is able to communicate at up to 8 GB/s with the CPU. This reduces system bottlenecks when using high-bandwidth devices. For example, the Gigabit Ethernet transmits at 100 MB/s; if the Ethernet were not on the chipset, a saturated gigabit Ethernet link would use 75% of the bandwidth of the 133 MB/s PCI bus.

The 150 also noticeably lacked features. Subsequent revisions of the chipset corrected these omissions. The chipset is offered in different versions, reflecting socket types and features.

nForce3 250 - Socket 754
Socket 754
Socket 754 is a CPU socket originally developed by AMD to succeed its Athlon XP platform . Socket 754 was the first socket developed by AMD to support their new consumer version of the 64 bit microprocessor family known as AMD64.-Technical specifications:Socket 754 was the original socket for...

, basic value chipset, 800HT, does not include on-chip Gigabit LAN or on-chip Firewall.

nForce3 250Gb - Socket 754 or 939, 800HT, includes gigabit LAN and on-chip Firewall.

nForce3 Ultra - Socket 939
Socket 939
Socket 939 is a CPU socket released by AMD in June 2004 to supersede the previous Socket 754 for Athlon 64 processors. Socket 939 was succeeded by Socket AM2 in May 2006. It is the second socket designed for AMD's AMD64 range of processors.-Availability:...

, 1000HT, gigabit LAN, Firewall, Dual-Channel unbuffered, for Athlon 64/Athlon 64 FX.

nForce3 Pro250 - Socket 940
Socket 940
Socket 940 is a 940-pin socket for 64-bit AMD server processors. This socket is entirely square in shape and pins are arranged in a grid with the exception of four key pins used to align the processor and the corners...

, 1000HT, gigabit LAN, Firewall, for Opteron.

Perhaps most notably, the 250 revision of the nForce 3 featured the world’s first native Gigabit Ethernet

Gigabit Ethernet

Gigabit Ethernet is a term describing various technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second , as defined by the IEEE 802.3-2008 standard. It came into use beginning in 1999, gradually supplanting Fast Ethernet in wired local networks where it performed...

interface and a hardware-optimized Firewall. The Nvidia Firewall technology utilizes the ActiveArmor

ActiveArmor

ActiveArmor is a hardware firewall designed by Nvidia that's built into their higher range nForce4 Ultra chipset motherboards.It can reduce CPU load by making some simple layer 2 checks on incoming packets and discarding obviously malicious packets before they are sent to the CPU...

secure networking engine. This makes the firewall an on-chip function, in theory reducing the overhead on the CPU and increasing throughput. The firewall also uses IAM, or Intelligent Application Manager, to provide application-based filtering.

However, the most notable omission from the nForce 3 chipset is the quality integrated SoundStorm

SoundStorm

SoundStorm was an advanced integrated 5.1 sound technology certification developed by Nvidia for the nForce and nForce2 platforms based on the nForce audio processing unit .-Certification:...

audio found in nForce2

NForce2

The nForce2 chipset was released by Nvidia in July 2002 as a refresh to the original nForce product offering. The nForce2 chipset was a platform for motherboards supporting AMD's Socket A CPUs along with DDR SDRAM...

boards, supposedly for cost reasons. The nForce 3 chipset is a single die solution, as opposed to the historical northbridge

Northbridge (computing)

The northbridge has historically been one of the two chips in the core logic chipset on a PC motherboard, the other being the southbridge. Increasingly these functions have migrated to the CPU chip itself, beginning with memory and graphics controllers. For Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Fusion...

/ southbridge

Southbridge (computing)

The southbridge is one of the two chips in the core logic chipset on a personal computer motherboard, the other being the northbridge. The southbridge typically implements the slower capabilities of the motherboard in a northbridge/southbridge chipset computer architecture. In Intel chipset...

combination, and reportedly there was not enough space left for audio functionality.

The nForce3 also supports SATA

Sata

Sata is a traditional dish from the Malaysian state of Terengganu, consisting of spiced fish meat wrapped in banana leaves and cooked on a grill.It is a type of Malaysian fish cake, or otak-otak...

technology, as well as RAID 0+1 striping and mirroring. The chipset can accommodate up to four high bandwidth SATA-150 devices.

Windows Vista Incompatibility

Nvidia announced before the public release of Windows Vista

Windows Vista

Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...

that they would not release chipset drivers for the AGP-based nForce2 for the operating system. They subsequently decided to also drop support for nForce3 in late February 2007, after the release of Vista. Nvidia is thus the only major mainboard chipset manufacturer that is not supporting a chipset designed for 64-bit processors with Vista. The chipset drivers packaged with Windows Vista are usable, but as a result of not being specifically designed for the nForce2 and 3 chipsets, they do not take full advantage of the hardware and lose some functionality. One such problem disables safe removal of IDE and SATA drives.

One issue concerning the lack of natively supported drivers for the nForce3 chipset in Windows Vista has come up with the public release of the operating system and the affordability of dual core systems. In these dual core systems with ATI graphics chipsets above the Radeon 9XXX series, Windows Vista disables the ATI display drivers designed for the operating system and defaults to the PCI-compatible drivers. Windows reports this as Code 43 Error. In PCI-compatible mode, all hardware acceleration is switched off, negatively affecting the performance of the display adapter.

This problem is caused by memory allocation routines in dual core systems with ATI display drivers . With single core processors, this issue does not exist. ATI has claimed Nvidia's chipset driver is the issue. AMD has released announcement about the matter in knowledge base entry #737-24498. SiS, ULi and VIA also had problems with their chipset drivers (mainly agp.inf), but quickly released patches to correct these issues.

As recently reported, Nvidia seems to have changed their minds about not providing an update for the problem and are now saying that the problem will most likely be resolved with an "MCP driver update."

To date, Nvidia has not released a complete chipset driver package for nForce3 and Windows Vista. However, Nvidia has posted individual 32 bit pre-release networking and audio drivers for Windows Vista Beta 1 that support the nForce3 series (and 64 bit). It is also possible that nForce4 chipsets may experience similar problems with the RAID and ATA drivers.

Even using nforce3 with an Nvidia card causes it to only negotiate AGP 4x not 8x, and causes the system to restart repeatedly.

There are however workarounds allowing the use of the Windows XP 32bit nForce3 GART driver under Vista 32bit, allowing use of AGP8x, and providing a more stable system. The method is described in this forum thread.

The same workaround exists for Vista x64 users via the Windows XP 64bit nForce3 Beta GART driver. The driver is located here. This driver is not signed so in order to boot the system, you will have to Disable Driver Signature Enforcement at the boot menu or install Readydriver Plus to do it automatically.

Nvidia offers chipset driver download in the "Legacy" product category on its download page.

External links

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