NVIDIA nForce3 Pro and Opteron 144 Review

The nForce3 Pro chipset is a single chip design that integrates the best of the MCP-T line of south bridges of their nForce2 line and adds in some features that high end users are asking for. On this chipset you’ll find Gigabit Ethernet, both IDE and Serial ATA RAID supporting RAID 0 and RAID 1, as well as the usual features like USB 2.0, integrated audio, etc…
The NVIDIA nForce3 Professional motherboard chipset, coupled with an Opteron 144 processor running at 1.8 GHz is a powerful workstation setup. In our workstation application tests and benchmarks, the Opteron comes out slightly ahead of the Intel P4 processor running at almost twice the frequency AND with HyperThreading enabled on a platform that doesn’t require registered memory. That in itself is quite impressive and shows what AMD64 architecture can offer in the future as well, should we see the expected increase in clock speed.
In our short round of tests aimed at the desktop market, we saw that the Opteron 144 processor was doing well, but perhaps not what we were looking for quite yet. The memory scores on the synthetic benchmarks show the potential for the AMD64 architecture, especially in DDR400. While the results are positive, with the Opteron winning many of the benchmarks even at a speed of only 1.8 GHz, there are a couple of places they need to improve on before the desktop CPU launch on September 23rd.

NVIDIA nForce3 Pro and Opteron 144 Reviewed @ AMDmb