SUMMARY: We have rounded up four of the most popular AMD Athlon 64 Socket 754 motherboards from Gigabyte, MSI, ASUS and Shuttle which are based on nVidia's nForce 3 250 and 250GB chipsets and compared their packages, features and performance. Who will the overall winner be? Read on and find out!
We first had a look at the nForce 3 250GB platform from nVidia when it was released earlier this year and we can honestly say without a doubt that it was one of the best chipsets to accompany your AMD Athlon 64 processor with its rich features such as native RAID and Gigabit networking. Thanks to an extremely fast MCP we have super fast Serial ATA transfer speeds, excellent networking support and so much more.
Youll probably want to read back over our initial review (link just above) of the chipset back from April of this year to get a proper understanding of everything the chipset has to offer since we will not be covering chipset specific features in this article.
When a chipset like this hits the market there is only one thing to do - get motherboards from the biggest names in the industry, benchmark them to hell and back (sorry too much Doom 3) and show you guys the results to see who has the better motherboard.
We will be looking at all the familiar faces today: MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte and Shuttle. We will be seeing if there is a difference in performance amongst the motherboards and how they do as far as their packages and features go.
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