Reply 40 of 41, by Archer57
Yeah, may be i just do not like buying lootboxes, or may be local options are less good, i do not know. I'd totally buy a board like that though - already pulled out of some box, cleaned to a degree, with known model/specs and in known state. Replacing capacitors is a matter of hour or two, no issue at all. To a degree i'd prefer that over already repaired because there is no way to know how well the repair was done. For me this is a much better way to get something i want for cheap, instead of hunting for it in lootboxes.
I absolutely hate gigabyte stuff at this point too. I mean i try to avoid whole love/hate thing towards brands as much as i can, but so far not a single thing from gigabyte has worked out for me. Not back then, not now. They are always garbage. Those GA-7N400S-L i initially intended for this build is one more example of that and i think it finally made me intentionally avoid their boards. On paper it is a great board - 12V VRM, MCP2-R is used instead of older MCP2 on epox boards which provides 2 extra USB ports and 2 SATA ports which actually work great (no compatibility issues with new drives). It is also in great shape, seemingly was not used a lot (i wonder why...) or has been cleaned very well. BIOS + general nforce2 issues absolutely kill it though. It does not set memory voltage consistently as it should, does not give an option to change or even see it. It hangs for a minute on HDD detection unless something is connected to IDE or controllers are completely disabled. The same for SATA. It does not set CPU voltage correctly either (simply 1.65V always, even for 1.5/1.6V CPUs) and does not show it. This are just critical issues - the fact that BIOS is lacking many useful option on seemingly high-end (nf2ultra400+mcp2-r) board is just an icing on the cake.
I'll probably stick a 2500+ barton + a couple of 166Mhz 1GB sticks and sell i to some unfortunate guy as a kit. It'll absolutely work like this with 166FSB and memory and going higher... would not be my problem at that point...