nForce3 150 versus nForce3 250

[Muse]

I upgraded my my main PC less than a year ago with a new mobo and cpu:

MSI K8N Neo-FSR/ V V2.0
AMD Athlon Venice core 3200+ 2.2 GHz CPU

The mobo died in a big way around 2 weeks ago so I'm looking for a replacement. Meantime I'm using my old mobo that has no SATA support.

I found a mobo that looks workable for me:

Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro, socket 754.

That mobo has the features I need, but it's nForce3 150 whereas the board that died has nForce3 250. I believe that's the nVidia chipset, and looking at the specs for the two boards, what I notice is that the MSI board supports 8 USB 2.0 ports whereas the Gigabyte supports just 4. What significance is that? Does that mean I have 1/2 the net bandwidth for USB devices? I plan to plug my GTXP breakout box's USB connector into one of the back USB ports (the breakout box has two USB connectors itself), and one or two devices into the two USB connectors on the front of the case.

 

[sonoma1993]

if I remember correctly, the nforce 3 150 chipset, for the hypertransport, had a 8bit down and 16bit up, I believe that what it was set at, where as the nforce 250 hypertransport has the full 16 bit up and down. Also the Nforce3 150 hypertransport ran at 600mhz instead of the 800MHz which the nforce3 250 runs at.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: sonoma1993
if I remember correctly, the nforce 3 150 chipset, for the hypertransport, had a 8bit down and 16bit up, I believe that what it was set at, where as the nforce 250 hypertransport has the full 16 bit up and down. Also the Nforce3 150 hypertransport ran at 600mhz instead of the 800MHz which the nforce3 250 runs at.

Yeah, I saw that in a review I found and wondered what it means in "practical terms." I assume that means the 150 chipset is slower. Just how significant is this? 8bit down and 16 bit up means what? Data on the bus from the peripherals to the DDR and/or CPU is slower for the 150 chipset? That would be my guess, but I'm not very deep into x486 architecture. Thanks for the information.

 

[Muse]

bump

Is this significant? I'm not currently a gamer, but do a lot of other computing.

 

[sonoma1993]

Originally posted by: Muse
bump

Is this significant? I'm not currently a gamer, but do a lot of other computing.

what kind of computing? if you are just doing like web surfing, email, typing, etc, you most likely wont notice the difference.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: sonoma1993

Originally posted by: Muse
bump

Is this significant? I'm not currently a gamer, but do a lot of other computing.

what kind of computing? if you are just doing like web surfing, email, typing, etc, you most likely wont notice the difference.

HDTV by PCI card, some data crunching (database applications), some ripping of CDs, DVDs (e.g. encoding with DVDShrink or DVD Fab Decrypter), all those other things you mention. I have an external SATA 500 GB HD, an internal too. Also a laptop on the wireless network, to which my two desktops are connected by ethernet. I don't have the network setup yet so the machines can transfer data over the network, but that's in my plans. Also I have an HP4M printer that I plan to install as a network printer with a Jetdirect card, that I already have but haven't installed yet. Currently, the printer's on the parallel port of my main PC.

I've been doing some online research tonight and I gather that gigabit ethernet is going to be much better implemented with the nforce3 250 chipset. I don't know what that implies but I would guess that it means that file transfers from one machine to another over the network would be slower? I just don't know what kinds of computing, what circumstances would show a difference.

 

[Muse]

I went ahead and bought the Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro MB I was considering. I read a review comparing (testing) a different Gigabyte nForce3 150 MB, the K8NNXP, against several nForce3 250 boards. I figure the comparison probably pretty much applies to the one I'm buying. The differences in the boards tested was slight, at most a few percent. In several tests, the Gigabyte ranked first.

The review