nForce3-250: Which Boards Have On-Chip LAN?
by Wesley Fink on August 6, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
How Can You Tell if a Board Has On-Chip Gigabit LAN?
According to nVidia, the easiest way to determine if a motherboard has on-chip Gigabit LAN is to "look for nForce3 250Gb/Ultra badges or the NVIDIA Firewall as a feature, since they have to use nForce's GigE controller. Some boards brand NVIDIA GigE separately; others do not...those boards with a regular nForce3 250 badge do not have the GigE controller."
To give you a clear idea of what nVidia is talking about - if the board has any one of the 3 logos above, then you can assume that the board has on-chip LAN.
To provide a better idea of how manufacturers are using the logos, take a look at the Gigabyte 939 board above.
The Asus K8N-E shows the 250Gb label that you will see on some Socket 754 boards.
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ZobarStyl - Friday, August 6, 2004 - link
sorry log post; didn't the article say that a 250 Gb or Ultra could have an external LAN chip that was still removed from the PCI bus which was the same end result? I looked up the Gigabyte board and saw the same thing as #1 did and I'm a little confused though, NewEgg lists the K8NSNXP as 250 vanilla, can we clear this up?ZobarStyl - Friday, August 6, 2004 - link
Palek - Friday, August 6, 2004 - link
On a related note, there is at least one motherboard for the Socket A family that also has nVidia Gbit LAN and firewall, namely the EPoX 8RDA6+Pro. This mobo uses the new nF2 Ultra400+Gigabit MCP. People not yet ready to make the jump to AMD64 can stick with Athlon and still enjoy these new features. See http://www.ocworkbench.com/2004/epox/8rda6+pro/g1....gtech41 - Friday, August 6, 2004 - link
Neither Gigabyte board uses the on-chip GB LAN. Thek8nsnxp uses only the basic 250, while the 939 uses the Marvell 8001 PCI controller (not the 88E111 PHY like the Asus or MSI). Both also use the ICS 1883 PHY for for a second LAN port, but that's just a 10/100 link to the chipset. Easy way to tell-look at the drivers. If any LAN controller uses drivers other than nVidia's unified ones then it's a PCI part.