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Epox 8KDA3+ Nforce 3 250Gb reviewed
Nvidia has made quite a brand with Nforce and it certainly did a good job to become one of the market leaders with only Via to fight in recent days. There are few high end players in the Athlon market. Nvidia is still focusing only on AMD Athlons and up until now, we've heard no news of any Nforce Pentium 4 chipset
This is not Nvidia's first Athlon 64/FX chipset as it has already shipped the Nforce 3 150 for quite some time. The Nforce 3 150 is not that successful because of its lack of a fast Hypertransport link that works at 800MHz and has 16 bits upstream and 16 bits downstream. It was only able to deliver 600 MHz Hypertransport HT with 16 bit upstream and 8 bit downstream while still claiming that this is enough for all the necessary devices that shares this HT link.
The Nforce 3 250 Gb is Nvidia's first Gigabit LAN chipset that finally features not only 800MHz Hypertransport with 16 bit/16 bit upstream and downstream but 1000MHz Hypertransport as well. Future Nforce 3 Ultras will use this faster HT for 939 Athlon XP CPUs. The Gb in the chipset name stands for Gigabit as this chipset uses an Nvidia integrated 1Gb/s LAN card with some firewall options. This time Nvidia developed RAID that supports S-ATA and IDE drives but the chipset still lacks some nice Nforce audio features. Creative can relax for now, I guess.
Nvidia supports RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1. Raid 0 is the most popular among enthusiasts since it will merge two drives to act as one and will make it much faster then it would be when you use only one. You need two identical hard drives for this option, although Nvidia claims you can do it with only one. Raid 1 will give you ability to do mirroring of the drive content on another drive and it's a very useful backup method. RAID 0+1 will offer you mirroring and stripping at the same time but you have to use four hard drives and that isn't cheap and very rarely used in normal working environment.
Nvidia Firewall is a very nice option and the goal is to provide a "personal firewall" sometimes called "desktop firewall" which is in contrast to "gateway firewalls" - usually dedicated computers that are placed between two networks. Nvidia offers a web based interface for tuning up those options but wants to send a clear message that it is a hardware provider and it will leave the software part of the job to companies like Microsoft and Norton to provide. We tried it and it works.
Motherboard
Epox has always made overclocker friendly motherboards and this is no exception. We had the opportunity to play
with one of the first boards ever, very early revision but still completely functional and almost ready to go in the
shops. At test time, we were notified that revision 0.3 will be ready very soon but it was too late for us to stop the
current review. Revision 0.2 was surprisingly stable all the time and we didn't have any problems with the board.
The first thing that you notice on the board is that the two S-ATA connectors are placed between CPU and the AGP slot - a very unusual place. We learned that this was Nvidia's decision since this is how it did it for its reference design but the next revision of Epox board will place those connectors away from this unusual position. The board is equipped with one AGP slot and six PCI slots, a quite unusual number these days. I guess that these six PCI slots force Epox to place the AGP slot so close to memory slots which is not the best solution. If you are not careful you could possibly damage your expensive AGP card while inserting it into the slot. Epox said to us that it will consider this for future motherboards and will make more space between AGP and memory. The board offers three memory slots, enough for three GB of memory but it would be nice to see a board with four slots. I guess the version of the board for 939 pins will have four, since it will need dual memory configuration to benefit from the dual channel memory controller that will end up embedded into an Athlon 64 CPU.
Two IDE ports still remain and they are coloured yellow. They will allow you to use your old IDE drives and your CD/DVD devices. The connector that simply won't die, for the floppy drive, is placed on the left far side of the motherboard close to four S-ATA connectors, in addition to the two mentioned above. The good thing is that this chipset is passively cooled since we don't like the noise of one more cooler in our system. We always liked Epox' LED display that reports if you have an error which is very useful when you test the machines or when you overclock. It's perfects since you can easily see what's gone wrong. I see this LED as one of the best innovations in motherboard business. It's just too painful when you have to discover what went wrong with motherboard and don't have any help.
The back panel of this board is very unusual as the SPDIF and Optical outs are at the place of the first missing COM port. A parallel port is placed on top and the second COM port is right where it should be. As Nforce 3 supports Firewire you will find two ports close to two USB ports, that are topped with Gigabit LAN. Keyboard and mouse port are just where you would expect them to be.
Test
We tested this board with
Athlon 64 3200+ clocked at 2000 MHz
2x512 MB Corsair DDR 550 PC4400 CL2
Western Digital 8 MB cache 80 GB Drive
Sapphire Radeon 9800XT Ultimate
Akasa Athlon 64 cooler
We haven't had any problems making the board run. We just plugged everything in and it worked from the first boot. We had no problems installing Windows apart from with Nvidia's IDE driver. Since I had two partitions I installed drivers on second partition with a new Windows XP PRO installation and then everything worked fine.
I tested using the standard applications with a lot of games that I like to use when I test the motherboards with some synthetic benchmarks. I tested this motherboard against another Epox board based on K8T800 chipset.
The Epox K8T800 BIOS ran the Athlon 64 at 2010MHz faster then the Athlon 64 CPU spec but we noticed that even Nforce 3 250 Gb was running the CPU at that speed.
In all benchmarks Nforce 3 250 Gb was slower then Via's solution. In many cases, the difference was small but we kind of expected from Nvidia to kick Via's older chipset.
In 3Dmark03 the difference was less then 100 marks - a quite marginal result where VIA took the lead but still Nvidia was very close. Then again, in the CPU tests you could clearly see that K8T800 is faster then Nforce 3 250. 3dMark01SE as well favoured the Via chipset but just for 800 marks more while the Nature test gave almost identical results.
Sandra reported that memory was working significantly slower on Nforce 3 250 GB at least with this BIOS and that might be the reason for this huge performance difference. PC mark also verified those results. The Sandra 2003 shows that memory actually runs around 600 MB/s slower on Nforce 3 250 GB.
Games like Quake 3 and Aquamark 3 were significantly faster on Via's chipset then on Nvidia's but then again Unreal Tournament 2003 was marginally faster on Nforce 3 250 than on Via.
Nforce 3, according to our results, seems to be quite a nice performer but was outperformed by the K8T800 many times.
Just before we concluded this article we got the new BIOS that claims a huge performance increase up to 100 per cent performance gain with new Bios. We will retest and will let you know about this.
Conclusion
Nvidia did a good job, it seems but Via's job still seems to be better. I was expecting this chipset which
arrived over six months later to be the clear winner. This simply was not the case. Via is still faster even though
it's marginal in some cases.
Overclocking wise, the boards were the same, except that with the Nforce 3 250 Gb you should be able to set AGP and PCI speeds which should help in overclocking. Both motherboards are top class solutions so you won't regret buying either, and Nvidia's chipset has this firewall advantage.
I still don't understand why Nforce 3 250 - even with 16bit uplink and 16 bit downlink doesn't perform as well as the K8T800 does. The newer BIOS might change the situation but this is yet to be seen. All eyes were on the Nforce 3 250 that Nvidia promised in January, but in late April still the first boards are not on the shelves. This marks Nforce 3 250 as a May/June product. It seems that Nvidia needs the 939 CPU and its dual memory capabilities since this is where Nvidia excels.
The next fight is Nforce 3 250 Ultra versus VIA K8T800 PRO and fight goes to 1000 MHz arena or dual channel 939 CPUs. ยต
| Quake 3 |
640x480
|
1024x768
|
||
| Epox 8KDA3+ Nforce 3 250 GB |
310.8
|
305.1
|
||
| Epox 8HDA3+ VIA K8T800 |
343.8
|
330.9
|
||
| Aquamark |
640x480
|
1024x768
|
||
| Epox 8KDA3+ Nforce 3 250 GB |
111.7
|
101.8
|
||
| Epox 8HDA3+ VIA K8T800 |
124.4
|
110.9
|
||
| 3Dmark 2001SE |
Nature
|
1024x768
|
||
| Epox 8KDA3+ Nforce 3 250 GB |
132.5
|
19960
|
||
| Epox 8HDA3+ VIA K8T800 |
132.4
|
20779
|
||
| UT 2003 Fly |
640x480
|
1024x768
|
||
| Epox 8KDA3+ Nforce 3 250 GB |
271.9
|
261.2
|
||
| Epox 8HDA3+ VIA K8T800 |
277
|
260.8
|
||
| UT 2003 Bot |
640x480
|
1024x768
|
||
| Epox 8KDA3+ Nforce 3 250 GB |
94.3
|
94.6
|
||
| Epox 8HDA3+ VIA K8T800 |
94.5
|
94.5
|
||
| PC Mark 2002 |
CPU
|
Memory
|
HDD
|
|
| Epox 8KDA3+ Nforce 3 250 GB |
6485
|
8106
|
1074
|
|
| Epox 8HDA3+ VIA K8T800 |
6466
|
9163
|
1106
|
|
|
P4 3.2C
FSB 800 Epox 4PCA3+ 875 |
6571
|
4955
|
N/A
|
|
| Sandra 2002 |
Epox 8KDA3+
|
Epox 8HDA3+
|
P4 3.2 GHz
|
|
| CPU |
7657
|
7837
|
8121
|
|
|
3059/4072
|
3036/3653
|
3283
|
||
| Memory |
2522
|
3026
|
4842
|
|
|
2522
|
3032
|
4861
|
||
| Multimedia |
8492
|
8614
|
12083
|
|
|
11337
|
11257
|
12899
|
||
| Composite Figures |
3Dmark03
|
Nature
|
CPU Test 1
|
CPU Test 2
|
| Epox 8KDA3+ Nforce 3 250 GB |
6433
|
36.3
|
81.9
|
11.1
|
| Epox 8HDA3+ VIA K8T800 |
6510
|
36.8
|
83.7
|
11.5
|
See Also
Epox K8T800 vs Leadtek Nforce 3 in AMD Athlon 64 battle
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