I will try a re-cap of the 1500uF 6.3V OTS caps, so I ordered the parts, they should be here next week.

In the meantime, I also bit the bullet and got me a GA-K8NS nForce3 250 motherboard to replace the ASUS K8V K8T800; I may as well give nForce3 a shot. Also, it has Rubycon caps in the VRM area, so I guess this just goes on to show how SHIT ASUS boards were at the time..

After rebuilding the PC with the K8NS motherboard I still had the same issues so I dug deeper tonight, only to find out that it was the X1950PRO AGP that went bad somehow.

After replacing it with an X800XTPE AGP, the system POSTed with either motherboard.. I will stick the K8NS nForce3 for now though, seems to a much higher quality board overall.

My woes are neverending..

I put the system back together using the nForce3 board and an X800XT PE, and exactly what I feared would happen has happened: Unstable system.

This was exactly my experience with nForce2 boards, supposedly very fast but they are quirky and unstable as all fuck, so when the nForce 3 did the same I was not surprised but very discouraged.

System seems to work fine until I try to run 3DMark2001, it causes VPU recover errors and when I disable VPU recover it hard locks up.

It's almost surely a problem with the nForce3 GART driver and the way it uses the AGP Bus, possibly fast writes or something but I simply have no idea or will to troubleshoot this shit.

So unless anyone has any quick tips to try, I will tear this system down and rebuild it with the ASUS K8V Deluxe (K8T800) motherboard and hope it actually works this time around with the X800XT-PE.

Long live the K8T800, fuck nForce3.

Happy ending.

Congrats!
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