Yeah not a bad machine for ~2002 for DX7/8 gaming at all. Either use it for XP for old games, or throw something like Puppy Linux on it and it'll make an okay web browser as long as it doesn't have to do heavy HD video or something.

Thing is, I have a Socket 478 machine that covers that period well... and has nice things like USB 2.0. I'll throw the board in a box, it'll find a home somewhere.

Kinda hard to believe, but I found the site of the company that built this machine, the configuration is close to the "Awesome 3110"
https://web.archive.org/web/20020812050507/ht … es=45&cpubase=2

ABS computers also seems to be a precursor to... newegg! They share the same mailing address.

I can't think of anything that needs the hardware from that era, so any newish system with winxp should run be able to run early winxp compatible software. It is a cool computer from the period tho. 😀

I've been thinking about resurrecting my old socket a system myself, but I don't really have a reason to since all my current machines can run winxp well enough.

Was going to say the 760 chipset was true class, but that's the AMD 761 NB and the VIA 686B SB (not sure if that gave it the same bug that VIA NB / 686B SB suffered)

Heh, one of the many reasons why I despise VIA chip sets. It amazes me the amount of crap they put out over the years and they are still in business. nVidia wasn't much better in the area of Athlon chip sets, but they finally got their act together.

NJRoadfan wrote:

Heh, one of the many reasons why I despise VIA chip sets. It amazes me the amount of crap they put out over the years and they are still in business. nVidia wasn't much better in the area of Athlon chip sets, but they finally got their act together.

What's wrong with nforce?

RacoonRider wrote:

What's wrong with nforce?

The only problems I can think off offhand were the NV SW IDE/SATA driver being trouble with some optical drivers and the unstable firewall software they advertised for nForce 3/4. Best to use the OS IDE driver, and to avoid that firewall.

Yes, the firewall and IDE drivers are what I'm referring to with the nForce. Even the nForce 2 IDE/RAID was a chore to get working on Vista/7, you had to use the XP drivers to get it working, period, as the built in IDE drivers wouldn't detect any drives in setup. That and nVidia got rid of SoundStorm, which was a decent on board DAC solution.

EPIC RANT FOLLOWS

While the Athlon was clearly whipping Netburst left and right in terms of performance, the horrible chipsets kept me well away from it. Its one of the reasons I stuck with my 440BX P3 machine for so long. This machine is actually the first AMD acquisition from this era of hardware (I had a Socket 423 Dell Dim8100 that went to uxwbill which oddly enough I also got from the same friend this Athlon came from).

I had to support these machines when they were new (I was a PC repair tech from mid-1998 to mid-2005). They were nothing but headaches. There would be what we techs called "transient running issues". Basically odd random behavior and crashing that we couldn't reliably reproduce or isolate with hardware swapping. Think of the problems caused by bad RAM, but the RAM tested out fine and known good RAM was swapped in as well! The above Athlon system even played tricks on me last night. It started BSODing on boot. I was going to blame nVidia's fine video drivers (I have stories about nVidia and their XP drivers too), but it then eventually stopped booting with the long-short-short beep code. It just randomly stopped detecting the video card! Re-seating the video card didn't fix the problem, but kicking the machine in a mild rage persuaded it to work again. EDIT, RacoonRider might understand what I'm talking about right now.

While the Netburst P4 machines would cook eggs idling on a Windows desktop and lacked "teh snappy", they were usually stable (outside of the boards that had cap failures, of which there were many). Pretty much everyone used Intel chip sets in their P4 machines, which helped. Any time I see VIA, I have flashbacks of 4-in-1 driver hell. If only the customers knew what we had to do to get their beloved computer to consistently work right!

NJRoadfan wrote:

EDIT, RacoonRider might understand what I'm talking about right now.

You got me 😁 When I started that build I actually wanted to go Netburst, but these machines are everywhere. They keep cooking eggs while idle and they are simply boring, with long pipelines and high megahertz that mean nothing. That's why I love C2D with deep dark passion - they lack everything I hate about Netburst.

That nforce2 board is not as bad as one would think after reading your post. I keep away from RAID and use Audigy for sound (I don't know if I have to, just heard bad things about both); the stability problem might be gone for now. Beleive it or not, I'm fairly happy with this system. I hardly had to tinker with it at all, it's just find the parts - connect them together - voila! 😀

I had socket A platforms from 2000-2007 and had no chipset problems.
First i had a Soltek mb with via kt133 on windows98se,then an Epox with nforce2 windows 98se ,then Abit with nforce 2 ultra 400 and at work i used another Epox with nforce2 with igp both with windows xp and had absolutly no problems.

Nahkri wrote:

I had socket A platforms from 2000-2007 and had no chipset problems.
First i had a Soltek mb with via kt133 on windows98se,then an Epox with nforce2 windows 98se ,then Abit with nforce 2 ultra 400 and at work i used another Epox with nforce2 with igp both with windows xp and had absolutly no problems.

Pretty much same here, and saw many similar configurations over the years too. Socket A isn't really so bad, but it doesn't have the same level of polish that you can expect from 875p with S478 or similar. 😊

On Soundstorm - it's more than just a DAC (or codec). It's got h/w processing too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundStorm). 😀 Shame that they dropped it off after nForce 2 though... 😢

The chipset on my Abit NF7-S v2.0 (nForce 2 Ultra 400) was good enough for me (stable, decent onboard audio), but the board itself caused some problems for me. The board could randomly shut down my computer and start blaring a siren-like sound through the PC speaker. It would do this every time I booted my computer until I reseated the CPU.

I read somewhere that the CPU temperature diode could be the cause, and that the way to fix it was to bend it up a little so it could make contact with the CPU. I never tried the fix because I had already upgraded to a C2D system when I found out about it.

joacim wrote:

The chipset on my Abit NF7-S v2.0 (nForce 2 Ultra 400) was good enough for me (stable, decent onboard audio), but the board itself caused some problems for me. The board could randomly shut down my computer and start blaring a siren-like sound through the PC speaker. It would do this every time I booted my computer until I reseated the CPU.

I read somewhere that the CPU temperature diode could be the cause, and that the way to fix it was to bend it up a little so it could make contact with the CPU. I never tried the fix because I had already upgraded to a C2D system when I found out about it.

My last socket A board was a Abit NF7-S v2.0,ran a Barton 2500+ overclocked to 3200+ and had no stability problems with it,the only problem i had was the nb fan got very noisy,i lubrified it a couple of times but the problem kept coming back,in the end i replaced it with a zalman passive cooler.

I had to do the same with my nb cooler. This board is the reason why I started buying passively cooled motherboards. 😀

also with more ram and dx9 video card or FX5200 it can run windows 7 well enough.