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In a move to enhance the competitiveness of its latest nForce3 core-logic products, NVIDIA will add a special dynamic overclocking capability into the software suit supplied with its chipsets for AMD’s 64-bit microprocessors. The feature is likely to boost the speed of NVIDIA’s newest chipset offerings in situations when extra speed is demanded by end-users.

While NVIDIA’s nForce3 250-series of chipsets deliver strong performance and feature-set compared to VIA K8T800 and SiS755 core-logic, they are not able to drive NVIDIA on the top in quite a number of cases. Nevertheless, the difference in speed is so negligible that a tiny performance boost will ensure that NVIDIA nForce3-based systems will win in benchmarks against all rivals, becoming a product of choice for performance-hungry computer enthusiasts.

NVIDIA supplies a number of flavours of the nForce3 core-logic for AMD Athlon 64-series of chips today: nForce3 250, nForce3 250Gb, nForce3 Ultra and the nForce3 250 Pro. The base capabilities of all four SKUs include 2 Serial ATA-150 ports as well as external 2 Serial ATA-150 PHY support in addition to AGP 8x, PCI, 2 ATA-33/66/100/133 channels with RAID 0,1 and 0+1 support, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, USB 2.0, etc. The nForce3 250Gb also has embedded Gigabit Ethernet controller, while the nForce3 Ultra and the nForce3 Pro are tailored for enthusiast as well as server/workstation applications respectively.

A report over ComputerBase.de suggests that NVIDIA’s AutoTuning feature will be able to maximize performance of personal computers based on nForce3 MCPs at most critical times when the power of central processing unit is heavily required. The software will overclock AMD64 microprocessors automatically by a margin set from BIOS, but in order not to damage the chip, a special thermal monitoring capability will also present for reliability purposes.

Even though it is not clear whether NVIDIA’s AutoTuning will tangibly improve performance, or only boost speed by a tiny margin, keeping in mind that the difference between chipsets performance for AMD64 is very insignificant, even a slight microprocessor overclock will give NVIDIA nForce3-based systems an advantage over competitors and will ensure that NVIDIA’s nForce3 products will be able to fight against new chipsets from VIA and SiS, such as VIA K8T800 Pro and SiS755FX.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipset...601064251.html

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