The 250 revision of the nForce 3 featured the world’s first native Gigabit Ethernet interface and a hardware-optimized Firewall.

This makes the firewall an on-chip function, in theory reducing the overhead on the CPU and increasing throughput.

However, the most notable omission from the nForce 3 chipset is the quality integrated SoundStorm audio found in nForce2 boards, supposedly for cost reasons.

The nForce 3 chipset is a single die solution, as opposed to the historical northbridge / southbridge combination, and reportedly there was not enough space left for audio functionality.

An alternative explanation has been proposed that the Dolby technology licensing for SoundStorm that Nvidia originally obtained for the chipset of Microsoft's Xbox allowed Nvidia effectively license-free implementation on the contemporary Nforce1 and Nforce2, but implementation on Nforce3 would have required new license payments.

In PCI-compatible mode, all hardware acceleration is switched off, negatively affecting the performance of the display adapter.

SiS, ULi and VIA also had problems with their chipset drivers (mainly agp.inf), but quickly released patches to correct these issues.

"[1] To date, Nvidia has not released a complete chipset driver package for nForce3 and Windows Vista.