It\’s been a good while now since the dust settled over the Athlon 64 launch. At release, the only chipset available to buyers was Via\’s K8T800 which, whilst being a good chipset, was plagued by the lack of a PCI/AGP lock for overclocking. Performance was good, and it needed to be, since it was the only tenable chipset solution at launch.

NForce 3 made its first appearance in its 150 guise, supporting the original FX 51 / 53 CPU\’s based on the 940 pin socket. Boards such as the Asus SK8N Deluxe were first to market and looked set to be more popular than their Via counterparts, but it took some time for the first NForce 3 boards to appear on the cheaper, more readily available socket 754 platform. Perhaps the earliest to hit the shelves was another NForce 3 150 chipset utilised in Shuttle\’s SN85G4. Unlike the 940 pin CPU\’s it didn\’t benefit from using dual channel memory, nor did it require the use of Registered DDR RAM. Performance, however, wasn\’t up to scratch, with some companies, like Abit, simply not making a board with the chipset on.