First post, by swaaye
I've been wanting to play around with nForce 1 (aka 420) so picked up the MSI K7N420 Pro recently. I'm focusing on the 2001 experience with it.
Athlon XP 1800+
Thermalright SLK-800 with vintage rheostat-equipped YSTech fan. All purchased from a old store called 2CoolTek. 😉
1GB RAM (Corsair XMS 2x512)
Radeon 8500 128MB
160GB HDD
DVDROM
XP
Observations...
Flashed to the latest BIOS. Earlier BIOSs lack USB keyboard emulation, and have bugs like poor PCI write performance (poor HDD writes) and memory quirks.
Radeon 8500 apparently dislikes nForce1 and the driver will set AGP to 1x. I forced it to 4x in ATI's SmartGART without issue though. I've put in a good bit of game time without issue. GeForce cards run 4X AGP speed by default though.
I'm running SPDIF out to my main PC's X-FI Ti HD card because naturally the motherboard's analog output leaves something to be desired. I couldn't get any sound on digital though. I discovered that the board is automatically enabling Dolby Digital encoding and there's seemingly no way to change to plain PCM with the latest drivers. I got nForce chipset driver package 3.13 (nForce_3.13_WinXP2K_WHQL_english) and that has a checkbox as shown. Later drivers have a different control panel called NVMixer which is shall we say designed for ease of use (fewer scary checkboxes).
Has anyone used any of the other nForce 1 boards?