After taking a look at VIA's K8T800 chipset last week and NVIDIA's nForce3-150 chipset internally in our labs, it's clear that both chipsets failed to offer AGP/PCI lock and lacked features that would impress the high-end home user. There were instances where certain manufacturers were able to implement AGP/PCI lock on certain motherboards, namely Abit, but majority of them did not bother to do so. The problem was a tough one to crack, since the chipset never had support for the aforementioned feature initially. NVIDIA's nForce-150, on the other hand, supported an AGP/PCI lock, but due to manufacturer's mistake, it wasn't implemented on many boards either. According to NVIDIA, many board makers wrote the BIOS incorrectly, which disabled the feature. Whatever the reason may be the initial socket 754 chipsets weren't for the high-end overclocker.

Things started to turn better when VIA introduced a much better implementation of its K8T800 chipset, the K8T800 Pro. The "Pro" added a working AGP/PCI lock and the immediate overclocking yields were apparent. NVIDIA also jumped on the bandwagon and introduced its 250 and 250Gb chipsets. Both the 250 and 250Gb are pretty much identical to each other expect that the regular 250 does not come with native onboard Gigabit support and NVIDIA's hardware firewall. Although VIA's K8T800 Pro was a much better turnaround than its earlier offering, the 250 series of chipsets were loaded with far more features than what VIA could offer. Of course, the main problem is the lack of feature-rich southbridge (VT8237) that only supports two IDE and SATA connectors with RAID 0, 1 and JBOD RAID offerings. NVIDIA's southbridge or MCP (Multimedia Control Processor) featured four IDE and SATA drives on the same controller with RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 support. The 250 series of chipsets even allowed the home user to combine both IDE and SATA drives in a RAID array of any sort. This means that the chipsets saw both varieties of drives equally and performed exactly the same. Not to mention that you could now hot-swap the drive (only with RAID 0+1) while the system was still functioning. Add the hardware firewall and native onboard Gigabit support and NVIDIA made the 250Gb an even more attractive choice. NVIDIA took features and performance of the socket 754 platform to the next level. Although VIA couldn't possibly attract enthusiasts with the features they were offering natively, they were probably holding their breath to compete against NVIDIA with performance. By the way, motherboard makers could still add onboard features to make the VIA K8T800 Pro a more attractive choice, but that added to higher production costs and expensive end products.

We have already found VIA's K8T800 Pro to be a great performer against the regular 250 chipset. In almost all scenarios, the K8T800 Pro was able to outperform or come fairly close to the regular 250 chipset, which actually comes quite close to the K8T800 Pro in terms of its features. Since it is more of an economical version to NVIDIA's high-end family of chipsets, the chipset maker decided to disable its hardware firewall and native Gigabit support, two of the most attractive features on the chipset itself. The high-end RAID implementations are still there, so consider the 250 to have a slight edge over VIA, but it's the only chipset that compares to the K8T800 Pro (aside from SiS, possibly).

Today we have another Asus solution that is based on the regular 250 chipset. The K8N product line consists of two products, the K8N and K8N-E Deluxe. The deluxe version is equipped with the high-end 250Gb instead of the more economical offering of the K8N. How well does the K8N compare to the rest of socket 754 boards? Does NVIDIA's 250 offers enough features and performance to make it a recommendation over VIA's K8T800 Pro? How well does it overclock? Read on and find out

Looking for more motherboards, check out Newegg.com for more choices.