kithylin wrote:

Yes it existed. The one I have now (754 SLI) is this board for some more information and pictures for you: http://www.newegg.com […]
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Ozzuneoj wrote:

Wow, I didn't even know such a thing existed. I own an Abit Nforce 4 SLI board for socket 939, but I honestly thought it was a typo when you said yours was 754.

Those must have made for some really unbalanced systems back then. 754 didn't leave much CPU head room compared to 939. Lower speed per clock, lower clocks and no dual cores. Really unusual setup though. I'd wager that there aren't many of those left. 😀

Yes it existed. The one I have now (754 SLI) is this board for some more information and pictures for you: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16813123257

As you said, unbalanced system as I'm coming to find out. Even with a +26% overclock on the CPU up to 2640 mhz and running 1.5 GB of DDR @ 528 mhz, it's still pretty darn shitty performance with my pair of 6800 ultra's in it. Or any game really. So I decided to go browsing ebay last night for a replacement.... I already own an amd socket 939 nforce4-SLI system for 939 but it's proving to be extremely flakey and won't come on half the time and a chat with someone else confirmed his 3 nforce4 939 SLI systems also do this.. 3 different boards from 3 different vendors. So 939 is just troublesome and not reliable and flakey in general.

So I was looking for something better cheap when I stumbled upon this:

Seller's ebay photo.

Asus Crosshair, AMD Socket AM2+ & nvidia 590-SLI Dual-16x-SLI system for $39.95 free shipping.

Should be quite the step up from this 754 system. I already own an AMD 3-core cpu to get started with, and I have a set of kingston DDR2-1066 overclocking ram, and this is a big designed-to-be-overclocked board.
Seller said it was tested and fully working so hope it works out well for me. This will also officially be the fastest / sexiest AMD setup I've ever owned in my life. It supports up to Phenom x4 unlocked quad cores to play with, and all of the AM2 / AM2+ dual cores. So kind of excited to get to play with a nicer AMD system for the first time ever. Previously the best AMD system I'd ever owned as 939 systems.

That should be interesting to mess around with, for sure!

Honestly, I can confirm, a reliable Nforce 4 SLI board seems to be a rare thing. The one I have is Abit's top end AN8 32x model. My brother paid out the nose for this thing back in the day. It ended up with bad, leaking caps after several years of light use (not much gaming, running a 4200+ and a single GPU). I replaced them and got it working again, and it only worked right for maybe a year before it started getting flaky again. Last I tried, it didn't turn on at all.

On the other hand, I've never had any problems with my EPox 9NDA3J Nforce 3 Ultra S939 board... its older, was used in some pretty awful conditions for many years after I sold it to someone, and when I got it back it still worked perfectly. I plan on upgrading the BIOS in that to the final beta version that supported dual core CPUs, then trying the 4200+ from the Abit board in it. Along with an AGP BFG 6800 GT OC, it should make for a pretty awesome 98SE+early XP rig whenever I get around to putting that together. I do wonder if my DFI Lanparty Nforce 4 Ultra board is still kicking somewhere though. That was my first PCI-E board and it was fantastic (even the box was awesome, I still use it to hold motherboards and it hasn't collapsed). The only thing that tempted me away from that (and away from AMD for good) was the phenomenal performance\value of Intel's Core 2 Duo E6750 on the P35 chipset.

The bottom line here is it seems to be a complete "Grab Bag" and nearly 50/50 chance for anyone to find a working 939 board. Some of you reported you have working ones that work great. That's good and great, good luck to ya and enjoy em while they're in good shape. But me and Ozzuneoj and my other friend have had bad luck.

It's all "hit or miss" and some of you get lucky while the rest of us aren't so lucky.

But just this general "it might work or it might not work" is enough for me, personally, to steer clear of the entire 939 line and just move on to either something older or something newer like AM2.

Again that's just me, and my feelings of it. I need to move on to something that's going to be reliable all the time every time I turn it on not just some of the time when it decides to work.

And as I say this I'm buying a used am2 motherboard that may end up not working either when I get it, I know the irony in my statements. But in general I'm probably "Done" with 939. And once I get a good working am2 board, I'll never touch 939 ever again for any system.

Mind you also I love 939, I used it myself way back when for about 4-5 years before upgrading to 775 quad cores, I wanted to use it again like I used years ago.... unfortunately I'm doomed to not getting to relive that part of my past. 😢 😒

To be completely honest, my experience has shown that AMD platforms in general are far more likely to have dead boards or CPUs. The exceptions would be Dell and Emachines (usually ECS) Intel boards from 2001-2006 that always ended up with bad caps.

There are plenty of excellent boards out there for any platform though. Personally, I'd be surprised if a DFI Lanparty 939 board had suffered the same fate as others. They seemed to use very high quality components at the time when most of the big brand names were cheaping out and making stuff that ended up being junk after a few years.

kithylin wrote:

The bottom line here is it seems to be a complete "Grab Bag" and nearly 50/50 chance for anyone to find a working 939 board. Som […]
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The bottom line here is it seems to be a complete "Grab Bag" and nearly 50/50 chance for anyone to find a working 939 board. Some of you reported you have working ones that work great. That's good and great, good luck to ya and enjoy em while they're in good shape. But me and Ozzuneoj and my other friend have had bad luck.

It's all "hit or miss" and some of you get lucky while the rest of us aren't so lucky.

But just this general "it might work or it might not work" is enough for me, personally, to steer clear of the entire 939 line and just move on to either something older or something newer like AM2.

Again that's just me, and my feelings of it. I need to move on to something that's going to be reliable all the time every time I turn it on not just some of the time when it decides to work.

And as I say this I'm buying a used am2 motherboard that may end up not working either when I get it, I know the irony in my statements. But in general I'm probably "Done" with 939. And once I get a good working am2 board, I'll never touch 939 ever again for any system.

Mind you also I love 939, I used it myself way back when for about 4-5 years before upgrading to 775 quad cores, I wanted to use it again like I used years ago.... unfortunately I'm doomed to not getting to relive that part of my past. 😢 😒

SLI boards are absolute nightmares to keep running. I had my 680i up for less than a week before it got the green "- -' meaning it's powering up but refusing to start the post cycle. I tried changing out literally every single part on the board and atleast 50 different configurations. No result. Either the board is dead or i don't know what I'm doing. My guess is the first. A 9800GX2, 4GB of RAM, and a E8400 shouldnt burn out a board in a weak of light gaming. It did the - - once before but reseatting all the components and removing the 9800GX2 (which suspiciously decided to start overheating after just 2 minutes in BIOs even though it was fine the day before and the PC hadnt been touched since then) did the trick. The next day without touching the PC though, poof! Back to the same old issue.

I think these things were over engineered

Also the poster above me is correct based on my experiences, out of 4 boards I've had fail me, 2 were AMD (ASUS nForce 430 boards) and the other (aside from the 680) was an ECS eMachines board (which hasn't completely failed, it just won't post with anything connected to IDE or load anything aside from UNIX) from 2005.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

SLI boards are absolute nightmares to keep running. I had my 680i up for less than a week before it got the green "- -' meaning […]
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kithylin wrote:

The bottom line here is it seems to be a complete "Grab Bag" and nearly 50/50 chance for anyone to find a working 939 board. Som […]
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The bottom line here is it seems to be a complete "Grab Bag" and nearly 50/50 chance for anyone to find a working 939 board. Some of you reported you have working ones that work great. That's good and great, good luck to ya and enjoy em while they're in good shape. But me and Ozzuneoj and my other friend have had bad luck.

It's all "hit or miss" and some of you get lucky while the rest of us aren't so lucky.

But just this general "it might work or it might not work" is enough for me, personally, to steer clear of the entire 939 line and just move on to either something older or something newer like AM2.

Again that's just me, and my feelings of it. I need to move on to something that's going to be reliable all the time every time I turn it on not just some of the time when it decides to work.

And as I say this I'm buying a used am2 motherboard that may end up not working either when I get it, I know the irony in my statements. But in general I'm probably "Done" with 939. And once I get a good working am2 board, I'll never touch 939 ever again for any system.

Mind you also I love 939, I used it myself way back when for about 4-5 years before upgrading to 775 quad cores, I wanted to use it again like I used years ago.... unfortunately I'm doomed to not getting to relive that part of my past. 😢 😒

SLI boards are absolute nightmares to keep running. I had my 680i up for less than a week before it got the green "- -' meaning it's powering up but refusing to start the post cycle. I tried changing out literally every single part on the board and atleast 50 different configurations. No result. Either the board is dead or i don't know what I'm doing. My guess is the first. A 9800GX2, 4GB of RAM, and a E8400 shouldnt burn out a board in a weak of light gaming. It did the - - once before but reseatting all the components and removing the 9800GX2 (which suspiciously decided to start overheating after just 2 minutes in BIOs even though it was fine the day before and the PC hadnt been touched since then) did the trick. The next day without touching the PC though, poof! Back to the same old issue.

I think these things were over engineered

Also the poster above me is correct based on my experiences, out of 4 boards I've had fail me, 2 were AMD (ASUS nForce 430 boards) and the other (aside from the 680) was an ECS eMachines board (which hasn't completely failed, it just won't post with anything connected to IDE or load anything aside from UNIX) from 2005.

Havn't had a bug like that with my M2N32-SLI Deluxe but It's always a pain to deal with trying to get DDR2 working by having to reinsert it multiple times and that's always happened to me with DDR2.

Also happens to me with my Gig EP45-UD3P.

kithylin wrote:

That's mine too, A8n32-sli deluxe, and it just randomly "shuts off" when gaming and it's not the power supply, it's done this wi […]
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kanecvr wrote:

kithylin wrote:

someone else confirmed his 3 nforce4 939 SLI systems also do this.. 3 different boards from 3 different vendors. So 939 is just troublesome and not reliable and flakey in general.

No. You and this someone are looking at defective boards. I have quite a few 939 boards, including a couple of NF4 boards and none do this. The only one of my boards displaying this behaviour is an Asus A8N SLI, and I know what's causing it - one of the mosfets around the CPU socket has gone bad.

That's mine too, A8n32-sli deluxe, and it just randomly "shuts off" when gaming and it's not the power supply, it's done this with 3 different power supplies, and same psu's don't do it with any other computers. And when it does do it, it just sits there dark and won't even try to turn on from the ATX power button connection. I have to remove cmos battery and let it sit for 48 hours to get it to ever come on again.

I dunno what to ever do with it but I can't have this kind of instability with a computer I want to play with daily. Need something reliable that at least turns on when I press the button.

I won't mention who to avoid starting arguments here, but the other person I spoke with has three amd 939 motherboards.. an asus, an epox and something else. And he's told me the same situation, either unstable as heck when running or random power off's and won't come on again from all of em. Multiple different power supplies and chips all do it. Our general consensus together is 939 is shite and mostly junk today.

If you have one that does work you're very lucky with that.. enjoy it, it'll probably end up like our boards with time.

Asus dropped the ball in component quality back in that period... it started with the A7V600, then the P4P800, and then the NF3 and NF4 754/939 series. Their LGA775 boards are decent enough, I guess they started to pick up the slack there.

My nicer socket 939 SLi board is an Abit KN8 SLi - it's a great board. If you can find one, grab it. Not only are they rock solid, but they have awesome OC features. The other is a Gigabyte K8N-SLI. The gigabyte is also nice and stable, but not as fast as the Abit and it doesn't have the same OC ability. DFI Lanparty boards are great too - that period was DFI's time to shine. If you can find one, grab it - you won't be sorry. Same for the Abit.

kanecvr wrote:

Asus dropped the ball in component quality back in that period... it started with the A7V600,

Funnily enough I had one of those too, and it was a great board. Only replaced it after a few years because it had reached the limit of its upgradeability, and I felt constrained by the socket 462 platform. I donated it to a friend, and AFAIK it's still in service today.

You guys are unbelievable.
Let's take a look at the summary so far:

"in fact it's one of the most stable boards I've used. I use it with an Athlon64
3200+ (Venice), 1GB of DDR and an MSI GF7900GS"

Thank you, MobRules.

"I do wonder if my DFI Lanparty Nforce 4 Ultra board is still kicking somewhere though.
That was my first PCI-E board and it was fantastic (even the box was awesome)"

Where is the bad luck here ? Even an usual thing like a box was that great.

Using the likes of scam "gamer" 400W offering only 300W in the 12volts line ? You're so gullible.
Ancient PSU on modern configuration ?
And a 9800GX2 - more known as "air conditioner", a waste of space, a ridiculous thing so to speak (and I want somebody to prove me wrong) - as a parameter to disqualify SLI boards is totally inappropriate.

That's the reason why all the doors are closed.
You should know better than anyone PSU is Corsair/Seasonic/CWT.
Really. Make no mistake and go for it, man. There is still a chance for you. 😜

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

The next day without touching the PC though, poof! Back to the same old issue.

Am I the only ONE that finds that odd ? Joint solder anyone ?
Find someone having a 9800GX2 working 100% and I call my 939 a murderer bitch.

Does anyone have any experience with SiS chipsets for socket 754? How does it compare to Nforce and VIA?

Nforce seems to be the go-to platform, however those seem to fetch a higher price.

Around that time I was working at a big IT outlet and the A7V600 was one of the chosen boards for socket A PCs. They had a habbit of blowing up. I noticed that while running, in certain configurations (cpu / vga - can't remember exactly what it was but it was load related) the ATX connector would get HOT. Some boards came back with a melted connector, most of the time running 😜 - others came with a charred trace - one witch leads from the ATX connector to one of the mosfets near the ram slots. On others said mosfet would pop. It's a bad board. It's obviously designed to be used with an entry level barton and a mediocre GPU. If you put some muscle in there, bad things might happen.

Munx wrote:

Does anyone have any experience with SiS chipsets for socket 754? How does it compare to Nforce and VIA?

Nforce seems to be the go-to platform, however those seem to fetch a higher price.

Nope, only VIA and Nvidia. I've used both quite a bit recently, benchmarking 754 and 939, AGP as well as PCIe, and haven't had any issues whatsoever. On some VIA boards the SATA controller needs a bit of work to get going, but otherwise no issues.

Frasco wrote:

You guys are unbelievable. Let's take a look at the summary so far: […]
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You guys are unbelievable.
Let's take a look at the summary so far:

"in fact it's one of the most stable boards I've used. I use it with an Athlon64
3200+ (Venice), 1GB of DDR and an MSI GF7900GS"

Thank you, MobRules.

"I do wonder if my DFI Lanparty Nforce 4 Ultra board is still kicking somewhere though.
That was my first PCI-E board and it was fantastic (even the box was awesome)"

Where is the bad luck here ? Even an usual thing like a box was that great.

Using the likes of scam "gamer" 400W offering only 300W in the 12volts line ? You're so gullible.
Ancient PSU on modern configuration ?
And a 9800GX2 - more known as "air conditioner", a waste of space, a ridiculous thing so to speak (and I want somebody to prove me wrong) - as a parameter to disqualify SLI boards is totally inappropriate.

That's the reason why all the doors are closed.
You should know better than anyone PSU is Corsair/Seasonic/CWT.
Really. Make no mistake and go for it, man. There is still a chance for you. 😜

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

The next day without touching the PC though, poof! Back to the same old issue.

Am I the only ONE that finds that odd ? Joint solder anyone ?
Find someone having a 9800GX2 working 100% and I call my 939 a murderer bitch.

Just wanted to add, my Asus A8N-SLI Premium is a lovely board and it still kicks hard as my secondary PC/XP box (Opteron 180, 4GB RAM, GTS250). Probably even more reliable than my main rig.

On the other hand, my 9800GX2 (that I purchased for the PC above, but not using on it due to heat and jet engine like noise problems) works reliably only if it wants to.

tayyare wrote:

Just wanted to add, my Asus A8N-SLI Premium is a lovely board and it still kicks hard as my secondary PC/XP box (Opteron 180, 4GB RAM, GTS250). Probably even more reliable than my main rig.

On the other hand, my 9800GX2 (that I purchased for the PC above, but not using on it due to heat and jet engine like noise problems) works reliably only if it wants to.

It is genuinely a good board - when it runs. Good overclocker, great performance.

here's mine - I'll fix her up this weekend. I'll have to measure the output current from each VRM under heavy load to see witch one is going. After that it's just a matter of replacing the bad fet and she's good to go.

I have a X2 4400+ and 2GB of DDR400 in there. I'm planning on using these with it - 2x XFX 7950GT 512MB:

I still need a proper PSU - I'm thinking 500 or 550w 80+ - and a case. I'd love to find a Thermaltake Soprano - the version with the acrylic side panel - if not I'll stick them in my Thermaltake Shark and be done with it - when I have some spare cash for a PSU that is.

Altought a bit flaky, I prefer using this board over my Abit due to the PCI-E slot spacing.

kanecvr wrote:

Around that time I was working at a big IT outlet and the A7V600 was one of the chosen boards for socket A PCs. They had a habbit of blowing up. I noticed that while running, in certain configurations (cpu / vga - can't remember exactly what it was but it was load related) the ATX connector would get HOT. Some boards came back with a melted connector, most of the time running 😜 - others came with a charred trace - one witch leads from the ATX connector to one of the mosfets near the ram slots. On others said mosfet would pop. It's a bad board. It's obviously designed to be used with an entry level barton and a mediocre GPU. If you put some muscle in there, bad things might happen.

Interesting. I used my A7V600 with various s462 CPUs all the way up to a Thorton 3100+ without any problems. Perhaps QC was different for boards in different markets.

I thought I was responding to "bought these retro hardware" thread.. how did this get in it's own thread and me auto subscribed to it? I'm terribly confused.

Anyway............ I found out why my 939 board was so flakey. Some bug of some kind crawled in to the 24-pin ATX power plug on the board.. specifically the exact pin where they green "ATX POWER ON" wire connects.. and had died inside and had a lot of "dead bug crud" in there and it was making for a shitty connection. I dug it out and blew it out with canned air and guess what? It works flawlessly now X.X Guess 939's great.

I spent all night last night overclocking and running my 939 board and my new pair of 6800 ultra 512 MB cards with it and playing with it. Still plan to spend half of today working on it.

So I take back all my earlier comments.. 939 seems to be fantastic and running solid now. My board's actually not bad.

And I took a try at some sub-zero cooling experiment last night: Took 3 cans of air duster upside down, unplugged cpu fan and sprayed directly at the base of my aftermarket air cooler for my 939 board and got it down to -20c to -25c range. Then I decided to go nuts and threw it to maximum board voltage of about 1.75v and threw the multiplier up and got this dual core 2 x 512KB chip to POST and boot to windows and complete everest ultimate cpu benchmarks @ 3.44 ghz. But to do that I had to constantly keep spraying the stuff on it and I ran out of air duster near the end of the test and it "warmed up" to -10c and crashed before I could get it saved.. damit. Maybe buy more air duster later and try again. Or actually figure out how to rig up a proper ln2 pot and try to collect the duster liquid in there.

Just a random experiment.

Also I found out taking arctic silver 5 to sub-zero kind of makes it "not work" any more. After letting it "Thaw" to room temps it sort of solidified and stopped transferring heat.. letting it idle in bios at stock speeds and it idled like 84c. And when I took the heatsink off.. it sort of popped the cpu out of the socket stuck to the heatsink still. Had to get a butter knife and hammer and very lightly tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap the side of the IHS and slowly coax it to slide off.. then had to use "electrical contact cleaner" to dissolve it in the bathroom to get both surfaces clean.

New thermal paste applied and idles at 28c in bios on stock again everything's fine. Experiment didn't hurt anything.

Back to "normal" 2.75 ghz overclock for air cooling.

EDIT: I found out where the thread came from. It's Phil's doing. Sneaky sneaky! 😎

Wish I had some 6800 PCI-E cards but finding a pair in romania is not easy. The 7950GT's might be a bit much for the machine but I plan to OC - at least 11x233.

kanecvr wrote:

Wish I had some 6800 PCI-E cards but finding a pair in romania is not easy. The 7950GT's might be a bit much for the machine but I plan to OC - at least 11x233.

It's taken me almost 6 years to find a pair of em in USA at reasonable prices. Everyone all this time thought they had gold bricks when selling these and every time I found a 6800 PCIE card (either ram size) for sale would end up being like $300+ even in 2015 last summer. And even then I only saw like maybe 2 or 5 of em for an entire year. But then again I was only looking on ebay.

I don't know what happened.. I found a 6800U-PCIE 512MB and 256MB both listed on auction by different sellers within days of each other.. I think I paid $75 with shipping for the 512, and $48 with shipping for the 256.

Then last week I found this guy with a second 512MB listed on ebay for $40 + $16 shipping and pounced on it and grabbed it within an hour of him listing it.

I use an ebay search monitoring website that emails me when I get something that matches my custom ebay searches so I can pounce on things. It's helped me score a lot of stuff.

If folks want I can post benchmarks later.

I do have this though.

AMD Socket 754 CPU in nforce4 SLI motherboard. 512KB CPU @ 2640 Mhz & DDR-533 ram. Used both of my 6800 Ultra 512's together in SLI:

I did some experimenting and tried a pair of 9800 GT's in the 754 system and found that the 754 platform with the overclock I had could go up to 33.8k in 3dmark 2003. And did gain +59% in 2003 from a second 6800U-512 vs a single one.

Single here:

So nforce4 SLI in 754 -does- scale. And it even gained performance from a second 9800GT vs a single one.. but I didn't save the results from that test.

I'm focusing on my 939 system today after I got it working. I'll do some more benchmarks with it, consider reporting em to hwbot. And then probably some game testing, then clone the drive in to a slower one and take this hard drive over to my x58 i7 and my big 3770k system. Try and get XP-32 on both with these two 6800U's and try to steal some world records.

I might post some benchmark results in this thread from the 6800U-512 pair today on the 939 system.

Why even bother with 939 for SLI retro building, go AM2, boards are more common, and honestly X2 3800 939 vs X2 AM2 isn't that diffrent, and you can make it excat by just using DDR2 667 instead of 800 🤣

candle_86 wrote:

Why even bother with 939 for SLI retro building, go AM2, boards are more common, and honestly X2 3800 939 vs X2 AM2 isn't that diffrent, and you can make it excat by just using DDR2 667 instead of 800 🤣

I -DO- have a AM2 SLI board ordered and on it's way.

But for me it's personal. I owned socket 939 SLI system way back when, years ago when it was "the latest and greatest thing" but at the time due to cost I was forced to use the very cheap low end cpu's, and slow cheap ram of small capacity. I wasn't able to afford the exotic high end stuff at the time. So for me to play with it now is to sort of re-visit back then what I couldn't have and play with the top end for a while.

Granted.. I'm probably going to replace the whole system here in just a week or less. But still, due to how I used it for nearly 4 years originally... I miss 939 and it was one of my favorite AMD sockets.

Also the last / fastest AMD system I ever owned in all my history. I switched to Intel after that and never got to experience anything else from AMD.

swaaye wrote:

I have a variety of old PCIe cards that I like to use with the 939 board though. ...... 2900XT, 4890, 6850....

I freaking love the 2900XT. Here's mine:

I had a pair of these back in the day - traded my 8800GTX and a little $$ for them - people hated them that much. They doubled as a room heater when gaming, but I remember playing stalker and crysis in these and they were SMOOTH. I also loved how these would gain performance with every driver update. Still looking for a pair for the one I have, but they're relatively rare.

And here's the 8800GTS 640:

And finally my 8800GTX:

Now on the SLi topic - here's how the pair of 7950GT cards I posted above score on a Q6600 / Nforce 780i: