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Tech Specs.

 

NVIDIA nForce3 Specifications:

Networking

  • NVIDIA IEEE 802.3 Media Access Control (MAC)
    • Supports 10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet/Fast Ethernet/Gigabit* Ethernet
      • Supports HomePNA 2.0 PHYs
      • Advanced Communication Riser (ACR) and Communications and Networking Riser (CNR) interface support
  • High performance networking features
    • TCP segmentation offloads*
    • Jumbo frames*
    • Checksum offloads*
  • NVIDIA StreamThru™ technology
    • Isochronous controller paired with HyperTransport results in fastest networking performance

Storage

  • RAID 0 disk striping support for highest system and application performance
  • RAID 1 disk mirroring support for fault tolerance
  • RAID 0 +1 disk striping and mirroring support for highest performance with fault tolerance
  • Support for both SATA and ATA-133 disk controller standards
  • Dual independent SATA controllers**
    • Supports up to 4 SATA disk drives simultaneously
  • Integrated SATA PHY with support for two drives**
  • Digital SATA interface for external PHY with support for two drives**
  • Fast Ultra ATA-133 disk driver controllers
    • Each interface supports two devices, for support for up to six devices
    • Supports UltraDMA modes 6-0 (UltraDMA 33/66/100/133)
    • Industry-standard PCI bus master IDE register set
    • Separate independent IDE connections for 5V-tolerant primary and secondary interfaces

Connectivity

  • AGP interface
    • Supports AGP3.0 - 0.8 V signaling for 8× and 4× with Fast Writes data transfers
    • Supports AGP2.0 - 1.5 V signaling for 4×, 2×, and 1× modes with 4× and 2× Fast Writes data transfers
    • Supports graphics address remapping table (GART) features
    • The AGP3.0 8× 533 MT/s (million transfers per second) interface provides the user with the ability to upgrade the external graphics card, thus avoiding obsolescence. An external AGP add-in card achieves higher performance than it would on existing platforms.
    • AGP interface is backward compatible with the AGP2.0 specification.
  • USB 2.0
    • Single USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI) / Dual USB 1.1 Open Host Controller Interface (OHCI)
    • Support for up to 8 ports
    • Supports transfer rates at high speed (480 Mbps), full speed (12 Mbps), and low speed (1.2 Mbps)
    • Dynamically configures slower devices for best utilization of bandwidth
    • Allows USB concurrency
  • PCI interface
    • Integrates a fast PCI-to-PCI bridge running at 33 MHz. It includes an arbiter that supports six external master PCI slots. Features of the PCI interface include:
      • PCI 2.3-compliant, 5 V tolerant
      • Supports six external PCI slots at 33 MHz
      • Supports six bus master arbitration
      • PCI master and slave interfaces
      • Supports both master-initiated and slave-initiated terminations
      • Bidirectional write posting support for concurrency
      • Flexible routing of all four PCI interrupts
      • Supports read ahead: memory read line (MRL) and memory read multiple (MRM)

Performance

  • HyperTransport technology
    • High throughput (8.0GB/sec.)*
    • Low voltage
    • Differential

Audio

  • AC ’97 2.1 compliant interface
  • 7.1 surround sound audio**
  • Supports 2, 4, or 6, or 8-channel audio
  • Dual AC-Link – supports up to two codecs
  • 16-bit or 20-bit stereo output and 16-bit input streams
  • Supports input, output, and general purpose input/output (GPIO) channels for host-based modems
  • Separate independent functions for audio and modem
  • Supports ACR and CNR interface
  • S/PDIF output (stereo or AC-3 output)

Mobility

  • Power management
  • Full support for AMD PowerNow! technology
  • ACPI 2.0 compliant
  • Support for ACPI C3 state
  • Low power 0.15 μ process
  • Maximizing real estate efficiency enabling small form factor designs
    • Single chip solution
    • Lower latency for higher performance

* NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra, 250Gb, and 250 only.
** NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra