The caps should have flat or slightly concave surfaces.

Even if their appearance is fine, however, they may still be bad. It is probably worth it to replace them anyway.

NF2 chipsets are picky with memory...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070704233459/ht … mpatibility.asp

I believe Crucial ballistix should have micron chips on which may be included above, but the other half of the equation is the motherboard manufacturer managing to wire things up right and give the BIOS the right info, so compatibility and stability with given sets of modules was often improved by later BIOSes over the release version BIOSes.

If you haven't already, be sure to remove the northbridge heatsink and apply fresh thermal paste.

I removed the northbridge heatsink, it was absolutely stuck solid with the old paste (looked more like glue to me it was so dried up!), managed to get it all off eventually using some solvent remover, then reapplied fresh paste

I was hopeful, but the board is still unstable 🙁

I will put the MSI board back in for now, maybe one day I will take another look at this EPOX board ... I have a spare Athlon XP 2200+ CPU for testing and loads of DDR, so once I get another Socket A cooler I can test it on my workbench and maybe try to repair it

I also tried some different RAM in the past, but no improvement, seems this board is just broken ... im almost certain it WAS stable a few years back so it feels to me like something has degraded (caps?)

Like in many motherboards of that time period - caps quality was crap. Epox notoriously loved to put junk just barely above absolute bottom level. I've seen enough of those in half-dead state with lots of bulging caps.

You aren't the only one. I have Epox 8K5a2+, a very good motherboard at its release date but now Windows crashes with 2 memory sticks or 166 FSB CPUs. Stable with 1 stick and 133 FSB CPU though. High end Epox boards were overclocking boards which is not a good thing for retro hardware as they were pushed to limits.

Overclocking wasn't the problem, crap caps were (as The Serpent Rider already commented). Replace all big caps, ideally all electrolytic caps great and small, then re-test. Good chance it will be rock solid then.

Got a bit of time to revisit this on my test bench now it's out of the system

I bought some of the RAM from the compatibility list shared by BitWrangler (as a lot of my DDR is crap 266mhz stuff anyway), a pair of Kingston KVR400X64C25/512 sticks (512mb PC3200 CL2.5)

This appears to have fixed the stability problems! At least with the spare Sempron 2600+ CPU I have .. Doing a bit more stability testing now but it seems to be happy ... I guess NF2 really is very sensitive to RAM!

nF2 had by far the best RAM performance on the SoA platform, so its timings were tight. However it's interesting how some boards were incredibly sensitive (A7N8X-E was a nightmare) where others far less so (GA-7N400L). I'd say the specifications nVidia gave motherboard vendors were probably too loose resulting in too many boards with issues.

Long shot to verify: Are you sure the board gets enough power from the +5v line?

I know there's a P4 connector on your board (and I assume it's connected) but some boards tend to draw a lot from the +5v line still. 25+ Amps I mean. I'm not sure what your PSU can deliver. So for that your one board may still be stable but the other may not, even if you're using the same hardware around it.

Okay, bad caps are a problem as well, so doing a cap job would probably be a good idea as well...

Put my 3000+ back in the board and reinstalled it into my system,

Really surprised by how much faster the NF2 system is over the (low end) VIA board! I know this was always mentioned in reviews of the time but it still really surprised me - ran a short benchmark session and the system is significantly faster

Video card is an ATI 9800 PRO 128mb (stock clocks)

With MSI KM3M-V board, DDR333 CL2.5:
3dmark01:

3dmark03:

UT2003 Demo:

With EPOX EP-8RDA3I board, DDR400 CL2.5 Dual Channel:
3dmark01:

3dmark03:

UT2003 Demo:

Yup, NForce chipset was superior. If EPoX 8RDA3I has bad caps it is definitely worth saving.

It seems ok at the moment. Visually the caps look ok and the system is stable now I changed the RAM to some Kingston ram from the approved list from Nvidia

Is there something else I can do to check the condition of the caps?