Guess he is just nvidia or nForce hater, or had bad luck... I am nVIDIA hater myself, that company is just the biggest scumbag, even Intel looks good compared to them, and that says something... But i never hated the nFroce chipset, "it just works". Sadly after nFroce II, the newer chisets was all hot stoves, and that is not very good, but is not a point to hate them.

Yeah, what EA is to games, is nVidia kinda with hardware. Gotta buy 'em all. 😉

At the same time I had little problems with VIA chipsets as well, I built numerous KT400A systems, mostly Asus A7V8X-X based.

The only pain I remember was getting a stable RAID0 setup on a SiI3112 controller with two Maxtor drives, but that's not the chipsets' fault. The cure for that was a single WD Raptor.

I'm testing VIA 694T. I read about the problems with the south bridge 686 and SB Live. I used SB Live 0220. Everything works fine. No crackling...

Memory bandwidth is impressive...
I haven't experimented with memory bank interleaving yet. Other tests as for Celeron 800 are similar to normal.

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-16, 09:06:

appiah4 wrote on 2022-08-16, 05:08:

Well, nForce2 is certified utter shit so no surprises there..

What kind of shit statement is that ?!?!? Are there better boards then nForce i wonder ? Oyy yeah the SiS ones, and the VIA ones, and i think there was even Uli boards as well....

Errr.... nVidia nForce and nForce2 Chipset used ULi IP cores for the southbridge part(PCI, Storage, Sound (on Ultra versions), and Networking). Also the AGP GART IP core was mostly ULi on the first nForce iterations. Maybe that's the cause why it sometimes doesn't work well, or it being hardware picky.
So far the bad stuff I have experienced personally on nForce comes by its weird and shaddy IDE implementation. It not only needs special drivers to work properly... Sometimes these drivers are bogus, and the mobos themselves aren't compatible with some hard drive models from WDC and IBM/Hitachi (It hangs or corrupts data on them, sometimes even destroying the drive (corrupts data in the Service Area cylinders on the disk) .

hyoenmadan wrote on 2022-08-16, 17:50:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-16, 09:06:

appiah4 wrote on 2022-08-16, 05:08:

Well, nForce2 is certified utter shit so no surprises there..

What kind of shit statement is that ?!?!? Are there better boards then nForce i wonder ? Oyy yeah the SiS ones, and the VIA ones, and i think there was even Uli boards as well....

Errr.... nVidia nForce and nForce2 Chipset used ULi IP cores for the southbridge part(PCI, Storage, Sound (on Ultra versions), and Networking). Also the AGP GART IP core was mostly ULi on the first nForce iterations. Maybe that's the cause why it sometimes doesn't work well, or it being hardware picky.
So far the bad stuff I have experienced personally on nForce comes by its weird and shaddy IDE implementation. It not only needs special drivers to work properly... Sometimes these drivers are bogus, and the mobos themselves aren't compatible with some hard drive models from WDC and IBM/Hitachi (It hangs or corrupts data on them, sometimes even destroying the drive (corrupts data in the Service Area cylinders on the disk) .

That's what i like to know and that statements is unusual.

Cheers,

I used an nForce2 board (epox 8rda+) for years and never had any problems. I'm going to put this opinion in the same bucket as the people on vogons who think the Voodoo 5 is finicky.

I bought a HP Pavillion laptop with a A8-4550m, 750gb HDD and 4gb of ram for $50 to give to a borderline homeless friend to run Windows 10 on. Looks like there is water damage, corrosion and a dying wifi card. Otherwise checks out good so far! Their boyfriend smashed into pieces with a sledgehammer their laptop in a rage and got locked up.

Also other stuff. Apparently meth was involved, yay fun.

Drugs are bad, m'kay?

On-topic: before I went to another state, I attempted to fix the Zenith vertical VCR some more and it needs belts for the load/eject mechanism and the tape loading/unloading mechanism that moves the tape portion to the heads for playback/recording. That and a shit ton of grease, oil, etc.

The one belt will be easy to replace whereas the other one will be a bitch to replace (I cannot find a way to replace the small belt for the tape load/unload mechanism easily).

hyoenmadan wrote on 2022-08-16, 17:50:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-16, 09:06:

appiah4 wrote on 2022-08-16, 05:08:

Well, nForce2 is certified utter shit so no surprises there..

What kind of shit statement is that ?!?!? Are there better boards then nForce i wonder ? Oyy yeah the SiS ones, and the VIA ones, and i think there was even Uli boards as well....

Errr.... nVidia nForce and nForce2 Chipset used ULi IP cores for the southbridge part(PCI, Storage, Sound (on Ultra versions), and Networking). Also the AGP GART IP core was mostly ULi on the first nForce iterations. Maybe that's the cause why it sometimes doesn't work well, or it being hardware picky.
So far the bad stuff I have experienced personally on nForce comes by its weird and shaddy IDE implementation. It not only needs special drivers to work properly... Sometimes these drivers are bogus, and the mobos themselves aren't compatible with some hard drive models from WDC and IBM/Hitachi (It hangs or corrupts data on them, sometimes even destroying the drive (corrupts data in the Service Area cylinders on the disk) .

Well if i have to be fair, Uli and Ali chipsets both comes from Acer division, same goes for AOpen and they are great motherboards, hard to kill, and very well build. If i remember correctly for socket 7 everyone is looking for Aladdin based boards, as these chipsets did work the best way specially for AMD K6-III+ series.. Also Uli chipset is the only one supporting AGP and PCI on the same motherboard... I may not like the Uli chipset, but the Ali was very good as far as i remember... So if nVIDIA did use stuff from the Acer Uli chipset, it should make them even better, when thinking about it, after all many ppl are looking for the best AGP mobo ASSrock 939Dual-VSTA, since it have good compability, and full AGP 8x and full PCI x16 or whatever it was... I also never had any problems with corrupted data, or anything like that on my NF2 system, even when i did try to run 240-250 FSB on x2 1GB sticks memory, and that when to hell in only 40 minutes of use, started having program errors, then the system did hard crash with message it will shutdown in a minute cuz of major system failure. But that is problem is from having higher FSB then 200 when using 1GB modules, it is just too much for the mem controller or the chipset as well.. I am using mostly Seagate drives, 80GB, 320GB and now 500GB Ultra ATA, never had any data corruption problems with NF2...

I think some of the ppl that got NF2 problems may be die to bad luck of the mobo, or the PSU was some garbage, or even if not, dry caps, made some errors into the memory prob and that did corrupt the HDD, or if the voltages of the PSU was bad cuz of the dry caps, did even kill the HDD...

smtkr wrote on 2022-08-16, 23:57:

I used an nForce2 board (epox 8rda+) for years and never had any problems. I'm going to put this opinion in the same bucket as the people on vogons who think the Voodoo 5 is finicky.

Same here, but i did use also some shitty ASUS NF2 Deluxe, that did die, and now the ABIT NF7 V2 that is flawless... I saw that many say Voodoo V 5.5k is picky, but i had no problems with mine, on Universal AGP slot on dual Tualatin AOpen mobo with VIA chipset... I think some of the ppl that have problems is die to crap memory, crap PSU, or if their PSU is good, crap dry out caps, or just bad luck...

Had to turn over a corner of the basement yesterday in search of plumbing supplies and found some stuff I had forgotten. ASUS VL/ISA-486SV2 didn't catch version yet, had the blue overdrive ready socket on it RAM, maybe 4x4MB, and a CPU, which looks like intel with a solid fin (Not crosscut) black heatsink affixed to it. I got the immediate thought of DX2 in my head, but no supporting info. I don't know if the sink is OEM or intel, thought there were some with this type in 92 or 93 but can't seem to dig it up.

Also lurking along with that are a couple of possibly NOS quantum fireballs of 420MB... I bought a batch of 10 of them in early oughts, but dunno which are which now. Either way they've probably got very low hours on. Then there were some 5.25s in the bottom of that box, maybe 2 floppy.

Hoping to get it all out for thorough eyeballing in the next week or so, but plumbing duties had me all yesterday, car and sundry chores today, tomorrow and friday busy, weekend booked up, so I dunno.

See some refs saying that board does 66Mhz, so think "yay fast" then others saying chipset does 386 and think "boo slow". However, on superficial searching, there's not really an authoritive list of all CPU supported on it. Got the overdrive ready socket, which might mean diddly squat due to that infamous Intel messup. Be nice if that POD83 I thought I had would put in an appearance. Might be a good board for it. Mind you I'm tallying up to 2 or 3 boards that would like rocketship VLB vid, several that would like fast, and half a dozen indifferent, when I think I've only got 2 rocketship, 2 fast and 2 boring. .... maybe I shouldn't have thrown all those ISA TVGA8900s like ninja stars at unwanted door canvassers. (Just kidding, they're probably still around, though I know one I might have harvested parts from)

edit: Oh yah, there were 3 CRTs lurking behind a box wall that I had forgotten. Still blocked in though. One of them might be an IBM trinitron P70 that I knew I had but was foggy on location, another looks like it might be a mono/herc though I thought at one point I had an EGA so maybe it will turn out to be that if I wish hard enough. The other looked like another large-ish 17" VGA... which I am kinda vague about, did I have another 17"? Didn't think so, might be a tweener size 15.5" or something though that's in my head as a 15.

editII: Deranged jottings of 15+ year ago BitWrangler are driving me nuts again, found more notebooks/scribbles.. according to those I had/have two P5F76 around somewhere, don't think I found one yet. Though I found a very similar config shuttle board and thought maybe I'd mis IDed... but now I've got them in two other lists. Also a MSI MS-5156 I have not seen, should be memorable due to having 5 PCI on an AT (Like 2 v2, one 2D, one Power VR, one NIC kinda memorable). Then something I only listed as ATX 430HX... in different places, not remembering that either... at the time it was probably a PITA board because I had more AT than ATX, now that's flipped and ATX are easier to home. Then confirmation of a Matrox 220, which is ghosting me, and other mentions of Voodoos I haven't found. The scribblings by the mystery "MVP3" board though confirm my suspicion that that did actually get built into something which was given away. Oh wow, got another Winchip listed too.

What's the infamous Intel messup that could cause problems with OverDrive sockets?
That sounds like quite a collection, ISA VGA is always handy even if it's a Trident 😀

Since I got that IBM 20x stereo CD-ROM drive the other day - learning in the process that no, sound doesn't work in DOS / DOS games with PCMCIA sound cards - I've been trying to get PCMCIA working on some of my laptop collection.
There was one laptop, the NEC Versa S/33 (VGA DSTN, 486 SX33, no soundcard, no floppy drive but is pleasant to use), which I've thought for the longest time that PCMCIA was just broken on it. It turned out that getting CardSoft / Cardwiz running in DOS isn't the simplest thing but is doable. So now in DOS or Win 3.11, I can get files onto the Versa using PCMCIA flash.
Since the floppy drive is unobtainable and the hard drive is doublespaced and CHS rather than LBA, getting files onto and off of it was really difficult til now.

But CardSoft uses a ton of conventional memory, so I've been setting up boot menus and getting familiar with DEVICEHIGH /L:2 and using "mem/d/p" lots to figure out the best fit. Memmaker would've been nice but it's tough to use with menus. That now gives me CF storage as well as a nice PCMCIA CD-ROM drive and I'm cloning that setup onto some more of the laptops. The memory map on the NEC laptop was tough to figure out.

In the process I got the Socket Services working for some of my Toshiba laptops and have the Socket Services like SSTOPIC.EXE to use with the T2130CS / Portege 610CT / Satellite 430CDT. Gotta try that out on the Libretto 100CT next, that one's cardbus so it's a bit trickier but this page here describes the config.sys settings to use for the PCI based & Cardbus Toshibas: https://support.dynabook.com/support/viewCont … ontentId=107688

appiah4 wrote on 2022-08-16, 09:14:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-16, 09:06:

appiah4 wrote on 2022-08-16, 05:08:

Well, nForce2 is certified utter shit so no surprises there..

What kind of shit statement is that ?!?!? Are there better boards then nForce i wonder ? Oyy yeah the SiS ones, and the VIA ones, and i think there was even Uli boards as well.... Nothing comes even close to how stbale and good working nFroce II specially was, if u want to tell me SiS and VIA are better, then the joke in on you...

Every single iteration of VIA Socket A chipsets that I used from KT266 onwards was way more stable than nF2. Fuck nF2. It's an utter garbage chipset that has so many compatibility issues with so much hardware that the only people on the internet who advocate it are the about a dozen people who happen to own a miraculously stable nF2 system that probably also requires voodoo magic and baby sacrifices to work reliably. Unsurprisingly these are the same people who advocate ABIT/Epox boards, which were also invariably unstable pieces of shit made using the cheapest components wherever possible and only sold due to ticking more checkboxes for fanboy enthusiast overclockers who never knew whether their last system reset or data corruption was due to an overambitious overclock or just a piece of shit motherboard.

TBF aside from the issue with the X1600XT this system is working fine atm, even with a mild overclock.

You want to talk about garbage? LGA775 nForce SLI boards. 3 680i SLIs and a P7n Diamond (780i), all dead for no obvious reason. They were working, then they weren't working. The infamous - - issue

I remember ppl talking about EVGA nForce 680 boards being garbage, and they did all die, then these baboons at EVGA did fix something but still.. ASUS is the brand that i will just refuse to buy and use, unless is some retro classic, and if anymore of my ASUS boards die, i wont store any of their shit in my collection, as i am pissed enough from the many ASUS boards i saw over my years working on computers, parts and stuff, the amount of dead ASUS boards is no comment, is more then the MSI and GIGAbyte count... Not to mention they just die for no reason, most of the ASUS boards just die, and then they dont even spin fans, no matter if is Slot 1, nForce 2 462, 478, 775, AM2 or whatever, pure garbage brand...

I never considered EVGA as quality brand too, many seems to think they are, cuz their custommer support is OUTstanding. Still does not make them quality tho... Last EVGA PSU i had 850W P2 that crap PSU started having fucking coil whine just after year of use, then i got to have USB problems, i did not even know it was from the shitty PSU, since I thought it was from USB driver since windows 10 is crap os, or maybe the mobo gone bad on USB side, and did disconnect devices all the time on USB.. Then my system started hard shut down on year 4 🤣 what a piece of garbage.. When tested that shitty PSU on my backUP system x58 that garbage was unable to boot even into windows 7, since it did hard shut down on welcome screen LMAO... Now with Corsair HX 1000W is million times better F EVGA... I heard that there was burn EVGA nvidia cards too.. All i think about EVGA is, that their name/ brand are presented as premium, but they are garbage. It is similar with Corsair, but only their PSUs are actually good, since they have Jony Gury working for corsair, and he is expert at PSUs... But memory, cases, fans and other Corsair is just garbage, from my experience, so far Corsair Vengeance DDR3 brand new, did have fucking errors 🤣, or a friend of mine, he had x2 sticks also Venageance ram, and after like 4 months one of the sticks did die 🤣... Or DDR400 Corsair memory that does not work properly in about 80% of DDR400 system what kind of shit is that... Or my Corsair 600T case that have one of the worst non-existent air flow, sure the case looks nice, but it have much plastic, also the HDD cages are cheap garbage too, the mounting for the fans did blow my mind, so shit, is not like on normal cases to bolt the fans on the case, they use some real garbage rubber, without the rubber the hole is too big, so u cant mount fans, and guess what the rubber is so low quality and shit, it starts to fall apart 🤣 jesus...

Really hate garbage brands, that make them look premium, but they are shit, like ASUS and Corsair........

Don't get the hate, every fab has had shit boards, every fab has had great boards it is what it is and the hate makes zero sense. I have a number of ASUS boards and have never had any issues with them but have had a number of shitty Gigabyte boards and equally shitty MSI boards. Even the shit boards are not as shit as people make them out to be, though them early nVidia 6XXi/7XXi boards were pretty garbage and were known to have the wonderful overheating silicon issue that nVidia tried to deny was killing boards.

It happens, I also have great Gigabyte boards too got a P45t board with USB3 that is downright a fucking amazing board to use.

The solution is simple . .dont buy the known shitty boards and expect anything different than what others have experienced, this is the very definition of insanity.

As for EVGA boards ..I have two EVGA 790i SLI Ultra boards that are rock fucking solid, the Digital PWM 790i is one of the greatest Overclocking boards of its time alongside the ASUS X48 Rampage Extreme they are great boards, even nVidia can occasionally make a good chipset and ASUS make a great board.

Like I said, by now the shitty boards are well known and easily researched with google so if you go ahead and buy one then the hate and complaints dont make any sense, you knew they were shit . .why did you buy it ? if you bought it and knew ..why hate ?

The answer is simple .. do your research and DONT BUY SHIT BOARDS. (Unless you are like me and dont have an issue with cranky boards and their eccentricities)

@ Abandonwareguy - this post was not directed at you, there is another who loves to uhh vomit hate but them boards likely died because the early nforce 775 boards didn't have enough cooling for the northbridge, nVidia tried to deny this for quite a long time but quietly beefed up the cooling in later revisions but the 780i boards still had issues with it due to the horrible cooling setup EVGA used. The solution was to rip the stock northbridge cooler off, repaste it and throw a bigger cooler on it with a stronger fan, this fixed the problem 99% of the time.

Another thing to note was that EVGA and XFX both used the reference design for these boards so its hard to blame them directly for the issues as well .. its a nVidia design, the only ones to not use reference were ASUS who changed things up with their nForce 775 boards, one of the best was the Striker II Extreme which was and still is a beast of a board.

IIRC nVidia had this heating issue with MAC Books too, may have even been around the same time.

Every brand (probably) randomly chooses to dump on a random customer but gives someone else trouble-free operation over their lifetime.

I've never had any issues with Asus. My first board was an Asus P2B and I just bought a P2B-F about a week or so ago. In between '98 and now, I've had many Asus cards, boards, and etc. I've never had a single issue - not even one; even the one's with Via chipsets, though quirky, ultimately work fine.

As for "Razer," I've had plenty of problems with. Razer has been the worst. Failed mice, failed laptops (also with ridiculously loud fans), failed keyboards, and bloated software. The price has not justified the quality. It could be when I bought a bunch of their stuff around 2019, I got a bad batch, but it's soured me enough to where I won't be buying any of their crap again.

From working in a shop back in the mid 90's through early 2000's, I actually agree with Asus, at that time, being very poor quality. We constantly saw issues with their motherboards. Whether it was instability or straight up dying. We never really carried them anyway but had bought some slot 1 boards due to customer demand. Most of that lot ended up being sent back to the supplier after coming back a few months later dead. A handful lived, or at least weren't returned to us. The rest of the Asus issues we saw come in from customer built systems. Same thing, instability, dead for no reason, etc.

We actually carried mostly DFI boards for a long time as our standard. Very stable, well priced. Very low return rates. The KT133A and Slot 1 boards were especially good.

We also carried a ton of PC Chips and ECS products. (all of our low end PC's were built with them). The early days of all-in-one motherboards with VGA/Sound/Lan onboard. Being an enthusiast I hated the onboard trend at the time. I'll be honest though, they worked fine if you used a decent PSU. Cheap garbage PSU and these were a nightmare. We had surprisingly good return rates with those boards.

Speaking of brand names that sucked back in the day, Crucial memory was constantly a problem. Customers bought it all the time as they were a big deal in the direct purchase world. Stability issues would be fixed instantly with a memory swap out (we typically carried generic brand Samsung chip memory in bulk, or hell even Nanya and the like). I love their stuff now but back then they were definitely problematic.

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-18, 08:52:

garbaged refuse garbage fucking garbage shitty garbage garbage garbage fucking worst garbage shit garbage garbage shit […]
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garbaged
refuse
garbage
fucking
garbage
shitty
garbage
garbage
garbage
fucking
worst
garbage
shit
garbage
garbage
shit

Almost every post you make is like that. I even noticed something similar about the builds of other forum members. Shit, shit, shit, shit on shit...
You look aggressive. Bruce, maybe the problem is not in your environment, but in you...

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-18, 08:52:

I never considered EVGA as quality brand too, many seems to think they are, cuz their custommer support is OUTstanding.

I have a friend who swears by EVGA. According to him, whenever there's a problem they replace it. Which, ok, that's good. But he doesn't seem to realize he's had to return 90% of the EVGA products he has purchased 🤣. I'd rather just not have to RMA everything I buy.

effy wrote on 2022-08-18, 14:00:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-08-18, 08:52:

I never considered EVGA as quality brand too, many seems to think they are, cuz their custommer support is OUTstanding.

I have a friend who swears by EVGA. According to him, whenever there's a problem they replace it. Which, ok, that's good. But he doesn't seem to realize he's had to return 90% of the EVGA products he has purchased 🤣. I'd rather just not have to RMA everything I buy.

I've never had any issues with eVGA, either.

I've used their video cards for my main machine regularly for years including the GTX 680, 780 Ti Classified (in SLI), 980 Ti, GTX 1080, 2080 Super (in SLI), and the 2080 Ti FTW3 (which is where I typed this message from).

I try to use EVGA as much as I can and I have since 05 I've had zero issues with any of their parts. Not a single return or rma required. I've had pretty good luck with MSI over the years. I only use Razor mice my original Copperhead I bought back in 07 failed just this past April the left button went bad I replaced it with a Deathadder V2 and it's a awesome mouse. Hell I'm still using the original Logitech G15 keyboard and that thing is still an amazing gaming keyboard.