Introduction

We all remember how the nVidia nForce series of chipsets started many years ago for the AMD Athlon XP line of processors. The release of the first nForce chipset was plagued with many problems to the point where it was not taken seriously within the AMD community and release of the nForce 2 also generated a lot of doubt.

Once the benchmarks started floating around the big wide world web and the overclocking ability of this chipset was discovered and exposed, it quickly become the biggest thing for AMD since slice bread for...err...us. VIA came back with numerous chipsets like the KT333, KT400, KT400A and more to compete in this market against the popular solution nVidia had on offer. All the VIA chipsets introduced, while offering good features, weren't enough to catch the heart of the true AMD user who opted for the arguably better Dual Channel DDR Athlon XP solutions available from nVidia.

Enter the AMD Athlon 64 arena and we have the competition between the VIA K8T800 and nVidia nForce 150 which was quite fierce at the end of last year. nVidia are back on the job again releasing their newest incarnation of the nForce, the nForce3 250 and nForce3 250GB with native Gigabyte networking. nVidia sent us their reference nForce3 250GB motherboard a little while ago and we will see what the newest chipsets from nVidia offers us over the previous nForce3 150 chipset and if it has what it takes to move from your current Athlon system.

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