Again nice reading Archer57.

When socket 939 came out, I began with an MSI K8N Neo2 Diamond Platinum + Athlon64 3500+ with an XFX Geforce 6800LE unlocked to GT. Later I sold the 3500+ and got a much cheaper 3000+ but OC'ed it to 2.6 GHz. A few months later the Asus A8N+SLI Deluxe + Opteron 165 came in.
It was a time when my main machine's internals got exchanged about every year. Fun times.

PD2JK wrote on 2025-08-18, 06:48:

Again nice reading Archer57.

When socket 939 came out, I began with an MSI K8N Neo2 Diamond + Athlon64 3500+ with an XFX Geforce 6800LE unlocked to GT. Later I sold the 3500+ and got a much cheaper 3000+ but OC'ed it to 2.6 GHz. A few months later the Asus A8N+SLI Deluxe + Opteron 165 came in.
It was a time when my main machine's internals got exchanged about every year. Fun times.

Yeah, it definitely was an exciting time with rapid progress. I almost regret i missed out on playing around with it back then, as sensible as it was. Nothing since then has brought as radical changes as switching to pci-e for everything, multi-core CPUs and unified shader architecture for GPUs did.

So, i've finally made some decisions regarding the hardware. I am going to use pci-e board, both because it is more period correct for this CPUs and because i want that 8800GT - it outperforms HD3850/70 significantly, especially in later games, higher resolutions and in terms of consistency/stutters. So here are videocard and soundcard:

From three 8800GT i have i've chosen this one because it has slight factory overclock (+10% core and shaders) and has the most reasonable cooler. After some cleaning and lubrication it works perfectly and is configured properly out of the box - runs at ~800RPM and 45C and idle and reaches up to ~60C with ~2600RPM which are becoming audible but not crazy loud after prolonged 100% load. 60C as target is exactly what i want for bumpgate GPU...

The motherboard... i do not like, but i am stuck with it, for now at least.

Here the included cooler for VRM/chipset can be seen. It works, very poorly. "Motherboard" sensor never shows above ~45-50C, but thermocouple attached to a heat pipe shows up to 70C... which is not going to end well. This is also from chipset, not VRM. Lifting heatsink from VRM changes almost nothing and VRM does not get crazy hot either.

I've been thinking what to do and ultimately the solution i am going with is this:

Yeah, i simply lowered the fan on tower cooler a bit so that it creates some airflow over chipset heatsink:

This lowered the temperature measured at heatpipe to around 50C, which is far from amazing, but i am going to leave it like that - if it dies it dies. The thing is way too hot and i am not going to go out of my way to fix it. I'll likely just replace the board at some point.

For CPU this does not matter, this cooler is an overkill, it never goes above 50C and usually sits below 40 (no fan control...).

I also updated BIOS to the latest beta, but i still can not disable Q-fan - with it disabled windows (or even installer from CD) crashes on boot. Good job asus. I anticipated issues with this though, so i replaced tower fan with fixed 1500RPM one which is not too loud and not going to use CPU_FAN connector at all.

SSD works, but with SATA1 speed, as expected. Good job nvidia. Not critical though, fast enough as is, probably not going to bother. Or may be i'll get an SSD can be switched to SATA2 later...

I can not believe how buggy this hardware is...

At least sound seems to work properly, i've read enough complains about nforce4 PCI issues + soundcards working poorly together, so i kind of expected that. It would have finally been a deal breaker though and in that case i would have switched to AGP board.

Also, about sound. I've ran a few benchmarks just to see how that 10% overclock affects things and noticed something that surprised me. I then retested it with the same card, multiple times, just to be sure. This is how crysis benchmark is affected by having that x-fi card vs integrated realtek:

Which also makes the fact that single 8800GT becomes a bottleneck at 1920x1080 in crysis more noticeable.

Overall things are progressing reasonably well, nothing important died so far. I still want to reinstall windows from scratch, probably XP + Vista, before i assemble everything into the case. Because i am not going to have an optical drive in the case i've chosen and it is by far easier to use a DVD than to mess with thumb drives + XP...

You must be having some kind of driver issues. Sound card cannot cause such major difference in performance.

Why disable Q-fan? With Asus software you should be able to set your own fan curve.

Vista isn't going to be very useful as you don't have enough memory. 8800GT is also too slow for dx10.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-19, 17:38:

You must be having some kind of driver issues. Sound card cannot cause such major difference in performance.

May be, this copy of XP is a mess, but nothing obviously noticeable. It also only happens in crysis from what i've tested. Performance difference is there in all games, as expected, but it is more appropriate <~10% difference.

Also original ~30-40FPS results are consistent with benchmarks on other systems like AM2, based on those results i would not expect S939 to do 50+ FPS at all... perhaps crysis is doing something weird with sound and hardware acceleration really helps that much.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-19, 17:38:

Why disable Q-fan? With Asus software you should be able to set your own fan curve.

Because it works like garbage, among other things - constantly changing speed in large jumps. It also is not configurable through bios and there is no way in hell i'll ever install any software from hardware manufacturers other than drivers.

It really is easier to just use a slow fan, given the cooler is overkill anyway.

Curiously it works better on A8V. Can be disabled with no issues and has basic settings in bios.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-19, 17:38:

Vista isn't going to be very useful as you don't have enough memory. 8800GT is also too slow for dx10.

It'll be 4GB, should be ok. I am testing with 2GB now simply because on XP it does not matter and i still need to find a set of 4 sticks which work well, find settings which work well and test it thoroughly.

May be i'll try to track down 2GB ECC sticks later for 8GB.

As for the card - yeah, i am not going to run later games on this system, CPU is not fast enough anyway. I simply want vista, not sure if i'll use it for games at all 😁

Test Crysis without any soundcard how it goes. From lower resolution results it is clear the system is capable of reaching 35fps in 1920x1080 with a better GPU. It depends on what display you intend to use. If it's CRT then 1280x1024 is enough. On LCD you want to play in native resolution only.

When fine tuning a fan curve, I typically consider 3 scenarios - 1.) casual browsing 2.) gaming 3.) benchmarks with lot of heat output like Sanctuary benchmark, prime95. That way 3 settings are more than enough. With a modern cooler, these old CPUs often do not need more than 2 settings while still being quiet. I use minimal fan speed to maintain about 55'C. Sudden fan speed jumps are not an issue if the trigger temperature is chosen carefully.

If you intend to use 8800GT and already have multiple then it's worth it to have SLI and you can use it just in games that benefit from it. I would not go with ECC due to higher latencies.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-20, 07:11:

Test Crysis without any soundcard how it goes. From lower resolution results it is clear the system is capable of reaching 35fps in 1920x1080 with a better GPU. It depends on what display you intend to use. If it's CRT then 1280x1024 is enough. On LCD you want to play in native resolution only.

I use 24 inch 1920x1080 LCD monitor for all this vintage stuff. It has scaling options including maintaining aspect ratio or just disabling the scaling completely and outputting image 1:1. So no need to use specific resolution. 1280x1024 works fairly well, resulting in screen size very similar to 19 inch 4:3 monitor.

Thing is - i prefer to play games as intended, many old games are designed for 4:3 screens and while they often can be modded to support widescreen the results usually are not great at all.

I also do not mind scaling all that much. It results in softer image, but i can get larger UI elements and fonts this way in older games which do not have proper UI scaling. I know some people hate it, i do not.

So i am basically interested in 2 resolution s for a system like this - 1024x768 (for scaling) and 1280x1024 (for 1:1). Widescreen resolutions... are obviously possible in some games from this time period, but realistically i am not going to play crysis or similar on this system anyway. Not when i can run it just fine on different system with win7, 2080s and 3840x2160 display.

I'll definitely test without sound though.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-20, 07:11:

When fine tuning a fan curve, I typically consider 3 scenarios - 1.) casual browsing 2.) gaming 3.) benchmarks with lot of heat output like Sanctuary benchmark, prime95. That way 3 settings are more than enough. With a modern cooler, these old CPUs often do not need more than 2 settings while still being quiet. I use minimal fan speed to maintain about 55'C. Sudden fan speed jumps are not an issue if the trigger temperature is chosen carefully.

Yeah, if i could configure it, even in a simple way like setting temperature target and minimal fan speed, like many motherboards allow, i'd do that. This one is not configurable though and constantly changes RPM from min to max during regular use.

And there is still those chipset cooling thing which depends on CPU fan...

I find constant speed reasonably low RPM fan to be a good compromise in many situations, this is one of them. I'd prefer lower RPM at idle, but it is not critical.

Speedfan does work and can override q-fan which can not be disabled, but i find it not worth bothering with in this case.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-20, 07:11:

If you intend to use 8800GT and already have multiple then it's worth it to have SLI and you can use it just in games that benefit from it. I would not go with ECC due to higher latencies.

SLI... perhaps and it indeed can be easily turned on/off, but from what i've seen so far it is beneficial only in very specific cases which do not necessarily fit my use case. For example only at high resolutions like 1920x1080. Even crysis with 16xAF/4xAA 1280x1024 is still mostly CPU limited on one card.

It also creates complications with sound card. In short i'll have to buy something pci-e, which can be quite problematic and expensive. All PCI slots are blocked by SLI. I mean i could use one between the cards, but that creates serious issues with cooling for primary card which is going to be the one used all the time. May be i'll look into getting pci-e sound card eventually, but for now given what i've seen it is not a priority. In a sense it would be way, way cheaper to get a card from 200 series instead if i needed more performance. Like 280/285.

ECC RAM... yeah, would be fun to play around with and see how it affects things. I've been using workstation based builds for my main PC for a long time and honestly never had issues with performance being compromised by higher latency. Inability to have undetected RAM errors is amazing though, makes things so much more predictable...

Hey, just got this board for an upgrade and came across your thread here, so decided to warn you. Your board seems to be loaded with KZG caps, mine is mostly Panasonic with only a couple KZG's but you seem to have hit the KZG jackpot with this one.

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 07:48:

Hey, just got this board for an upgrade and came across your thread here, so decided to warn you. Your board seems to be loaded with KZG caps, mine is mostly Panasonic with only a couple KZG's but you seem to have hit the KZG jackpot with this one.

Yep, and there is whole lot of them. And given the heat...

They look fine so far, board seems to be very lightly used and CPU VRM does use polymer caps on output side... so i am going to just ignore the fact and use it as is. Way, way too much work for the board i do not really like. Who knows - may be the chipset dies first anyway from all the heat.

It'll be curious to see how long this build will last - this is a collection of known defective hardware - bumpgate chipset, bumpgate GPU, a ton of crappy caps... this is one reason i was seriously considering AGP alternative - that one has much better chance of actually lasting...

I'll still keep that hardware though, so if something dies i can always switch...

But thanks for the warning.

Anyway i've now assembled the system:

I know, many people... would not approve using such case. No mesh, no glass, no RGB, no 42 fans... But i absolutely love it. Small, light, minimalist white box. For the amount of heat systems like this generate amount of airflow is more than sufficient and PSU is absolutely overkill...

Also while 5.25/3.5 bays would be period correct... they take space, increase size and i am not going to use them anyway. I have a system in old case with optical drives if i need that, this stuff is new enough to use USB...

Still 2GB RAM for now, no need to use more for XP, i'll upgrade it later if/when i install vista.

Archer57 wrote on 2025-08-21, 09:48:

Yep, and there is whole lot of them. And given the heat... […]
Show full quote

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 07:48:

Hey, just got this board for an upgrade and came across your thread here, so decided to warn you. Your board seems to be loaded with KZG caps, mine is mostly Panasonic with only a couple KZG's but you seem to have hit the KZG jackpot with this one.

Yep, and there is whole lot of them. And given the heat...

They look fine so far, board seems to be very lightly used and CPU VRM does use polymer caps on output side... so i am going to just ignore the fact and use it as is. Way, way too much work for the board i do not really like. Who knows - may be the chipset dies first anyway from all the heat.

It'll be curious to see how long this build will last - this is a collection of known defective hardware - bumpgate chipset, bumpgate GPU, a ton of crappy caps... this is one reason i was seriously considering AGP alternative - that one has much better chance of actually lasting...

I'll still keep that hardware though, so if something dies i can always switch...

But thanks for the warning.

No don't let it die 🤣, this motherboard is one of the greatest 939 boards there is. 8 phase power design, nforce4 SLI x16 chipset for 32 total PCIe lanes and a nice heatpipe design no shitty fans. If there is one board that deserves some poly's it's this one, and you could put in a full 4x PCIe NVMe drive or two if your not using SLI, put those PCIe lanes to work, beats any sata2 drive out there. I'm certainly planning to do that with mine. A8N SLI deluxe I currently use only has 3 lanes free, 1x NVMe is still faster than SATA 2 though.

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 10:49:

No don't let it die 🤣, this motherboard is one of the greatest 939 boards there is.

Hmm, interesting. Everybody has different priorities, but even just comparing 2 boards i have - A8V and this one i am pretty sure that i would have chosen A8V if it was not AGP.

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 10:49:

nforce4 SLI x16 chipset for 32 total PCIe lanes

This has downsides. Making a board with 2 northbridges means a lot of heat. Which is not good, especially given they are defective and whole 32 lines are not going to be used without SLI anyway.

I am also not sure what interconnects are used between the chips and how fast those are. Something tells me that full 8GB/s x2 is not going to happen, let alone those extra lanes for x4 connector. What's HyperTransport throughput for this CPUs?

There likely are no benefits compared to x8+x8 at all.

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 10:49:

and a nice heatpipe design no shitty fans.

Absolutely horrible "heatpipe design". Yeah, they used a heatpipe, but there is not enough heatsink surface area to properly cool everything connected by those heatpipe. It get scorching hot and i am not sure how to properly cool it without generating hairdryer sounds...

That's why i am pretty sure chipset will not last very long, given bumpgate...

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 10:49:

and you could put in a full 4x PCIe NVMe drive or two if your not using SLI, put those PCIe lanes to work, beats any sata2 drive out there. I'm certainly planning to do that with mine. A8N SLI deluxe I currently use only has 3 lanes free, 1x NVMe is still faster than SATA 2 though.

Why though? Can not boot from NVME without "workarounds" and SATA2 SSD is overkill enough for this systems. Will not gain anything but inconvenience using NVME. By the way 1x pci-e 1.0 is slower than SATA2 - it is 250MB/s one direction, SATA2 is 300MB/s.

Archer57 wrote on 2025-08-21, 11:27:

Hmm, interesting. Everybody has different priorities, but even just comparing 2 boards i have - A8V and this one i am pretty sur […]
Show full quote

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 10:49:

No don't let it die 🤣, this motherboard is one of the greatest 939 boards there is.

Hmm, interesting. Everybody has different priorities, but even just comparing 2 boards i have - A8V and this one i am pretty sure that i would have chosen A8V if it was not AGP.

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 10:49:

nforce4 SLI x16 chipset for 32 total PCIe lanes

This has downsides. Making a board with 2 northbridges means a lot of heat. Which is not good, especially given they are defective and whole 32 lines are not going to be used without SLI anyway.

I am also not sure what interconnects are used between the chips and how fast those are. Something tells me that full 8GB/s x2 is not going to happen, let alone those extra lanes for x4 connector. What's HyperTransport throughput for this CPUs?

There likely are no benefits compared to x8+x8 at all.

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 10:49:

and a nice heatpipe design no shitty fans.

Absolutely horrible "heatpipe design". Yeah, they used a heatpipe, but there is not enough heatsink surface area to properly cool everything connected by those heatpipe. It get scorching hot and i am not sure how to properly cool it without generating hairdryer sounds...

That's why i am pretty sure chipset will not last very long, given bumpgate...

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 10:49:

and you could put in a full 4x PCIe NVMe drive or two if your not using SLI, put those PCIe lanes to work, beats any sata2 drive out there. I'm certainly planning to do that with mine. A8N SLI deluxe I currently use only has 3 lanes free, 1x NVMe is still faster than SATA 2 though.

Why though? Can not boot from NVME without "workarounds" and SATA2 SSD is overkill enough for this systems. Will not gain anything but inconvenience using NVME. By the way 1x pci-e 1.0 is slower than SATA2 - it is 250MB/s one direction, SATA2 is 300MB/s.

The A8V is a budget board and is worse in pretty much every way, it's got a glitchy VIA K8T800/VT8237 chipset with the SATA bug, so you'll be locked to SATA 1, it's USB2 functionality is also spotty. Like any high-end hardware nForce 4 gets hot sure, it's worse with a chipset fan like the one on the A8N SLI deluxe, aftermarket heatsinks obstruct double slot videocards and still needs some form of airflow. The A8N32 is just as stable and great is the preceding A8N's and it's completely not affected by bumpgate in any way, precedes it by a year even.

As for NVMe even at 1.0/1x, it's faster than an SATA2 ssd due to its random performance and latency and thus better as a data drive especially if you have unpopulated 4x PCIe slots. WinXP boots fast enough to use a HDD as boot drive anyway.

You risk motherboard deterioration due to temperature. Bumpgate era hardware deserves better cooling.

I only use cases with 4-5 fans for anything newer than Pentium III. They run at low speed and don't hurt anything.

Gigabyte GA-K8NE I use for Athlon 64 has only one 3 pin header for system fan. I haven't used it yet but I plan attaching two top fans to it to have them thermally regulated. The rest of case fans will run at constant speed.

Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 v2.0 I will use for AM2+ has 2 system fan headers, 3 pin and 4 pin (not sure if PWM). I plan attaching 2 fans to each header so that I can have 4 fans with thermal regulation. 2 top fans and 2 intake fans will be attached.

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 12:26:

The A8V is a budget board and is worse in pretty much every way, it's got a glitchy VIA K8T800/VT8237 chipset with the SATA bug, so you'll be locked to SATA 1, it's USB2 functionality is also spotty. Like any high-end hardware nForce 4 gets hot sure...

Sata is highly annoying, yes. Otherwise... performance is pretty much the same, +/-10% due to pci-e vs AGP. I've tested that. USB works absolutely fine, never had any issues.
Advantages? No heat, at all. SB has no heatsink and does not get even slightly warm. NB has small heatsink and is completely cold. VRM is absolutely cold, no heatsink. I like that, it'll help the board last.
So... what benefits does that "high end" chipset provide if performance is the same? Apart from generating heat, that is...

By the way "deluxe" version of this board has promise sata/ide controller soldered, a shame it is hard to find, that'd be great.

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 12:26:

it's worse with a chipset fan like the one on the A8N SLI deluxe, aftermarket heatsinks obstruct double slot videocards and still needs some form of airflow. The A8N32 is just as stable and great is the preceding A8N's and it's completely not affected by bumpgate in any way, precedes it by a year even.

That's why i dislike hot chipsets, yes. Also AFAIK all NF4 are defective, but i may be wrong - there is no definitive information on what's defective and what is not.

Raldsen wrote on 2025-08-21, 12:26:

As for NVMe even at 1.0/1x, it's faster than an SATA2 ssd due to its random performance and latency and thus better as a data drive especially if you have unpopulated 4x PCIe slots. WinXP boots fast enough to use a HDD as boot drive anyway.

Yes, on modern hardware, not sure/have not tested how it'll work on this old stuff given CPU and other parts of the system do play a role here. It is also completely irrelevant for a storage drive.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-21, 12:41:

You risk motherboard deterioration due to temperature. Bumpgate era hardware deserves better cooling. […]
Show full quote

You risk motherboard deterioration due to temperature. Bumpgate era hardware deserves better cooling.

I only use cases with 4-5 fans for anything newer than Pentium III. They run at low speed and don't hurt anything.

Gigabyte GA-K8NE I use for Athlon 64 has only one 3 pin header for system fan. I haven't used it yet but I plan attaching two top fans to it to have them thermally regulated. The rest of case fans will run at constant speed.

Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 v2.0 I will use for AM2+ has 2 system fan headers, 3 pin and 4 pin (not sure if PWM). I plan attaching 2 fans to each header so that I can have 4 fans with thermal regulation. 2 top fans and 2 intake fans will be attached.

Well, i'll test what the temperatures are on specific system. So far from what i've seen in this case airflow is good enough for things to not become too hot as long as no 500W GPUs are used.

Also number of fans + meshes does not equal good cooling. Often the opposite. The airflow has to work in a sensible way, like front intake back exhaust. It does in this case. When cases are made of mesh almost entirely with stupid number of fans - there is no directional airflow at all - just a bunch of fans blowing in random directions.

This board will deteriorate though, nothing i can do about that. It gets too hot to hold just laying around on a table...

I'll probably find something different eventually. Perhaps something based on K8T890. I prefer simpler boards anyway and this one is more suitable for a bench, fooling around with SLI and everything, than for a permanent build.

I use 1-2 front intake fans, 1 bottom intake next to PSU, 1 fan next to IO panel and 2 at the top. That way we take in cold air from the bottom and blow hot air out from the top. Especially GPU can use fresh cold air.

High performance 200+W GPUs (GeForce 2xx and newer) produce a lot of heat + 110W from CPU. 8800 GT produces 125W which is not negligible.

Hardware from 2003 would produce about 40W from GPU and 60W from CPU. That would be appropriate for that case.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-21, 13:55:

I use 1-2 front intake fans, 1 bottom intake next to PSU, 1 fan next to IO panel and 2 at the top. That way we take in cold air from the bottom and blow hot air out from the top. Especially GPU can use fresh cold air.

High performance 200+W GPUs (GeForce 2xx and newer) produce a lot of heat + 110W from CPU. 8800 GT produces 125W which is not negligible.

Hardware from 2003 would produce about 40W from GPU and 60W from CPU. That would be appropriate for that case.

I have a modern system with ARC750+i5-12600 in slightly different case, with one fan in (front) one fan out (rear) + PSU on the bottom of the case. Top mesh is also covered by stacking another computer on top. It is doing just fine.

No, 6 fans are not needed or useful. If i see elevated temperatures i may replace exhaust fan with faster one. This one is 1200RPM, i also have 1500RPM and 1800RPM ones. And yes, i often do that - buy and use different fixed RPM fans instead of using fan control.

So far i've ran 3dmark a few times and all i am seeing are 2-3C higher temperatures than i had while it was laying on the table. That's normal. HDD inside is showing 35C, that's probably the most reliable indication of ambient.

I also still need to install that AMD cool&quiet software to allow CPU to throttle down. Sadly this board with all its fanciness has extremely limited voltage control and no undervolting is possible. One more reason to eventually replace it. Even more funny - "cheap" A8V does have much wider set of options including ability to reduce voltage... asus is weird.

What the hell, asus are trolls. I've had to find and read the manual for the first time in 20 years to make power LED work:

And it is incorrectly marked on the board itself, so i thought the LED is dead or something, connecting it as usual to the 2 pins next to each other. Good thing the connector is split into separate pins in this case...

AMD cool&quiet requires being enabled in BIOS, special driver in Windows XP and power saving mode called "minimal power saving". I ended up not using it as it causes slightly worse performance and the CPU is cooled by a full copper Thermaltake Max Orb running at low rpm so cool&quiet isn't needed.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-21, 15:19:

AMD cool&quiet requires being enabled in BIOS, special driver in Windows XP and power saving mode called "minimal power saving". I ended up not using it as it causes slightly worse performance and the CPU is cooled by a full copper Thermaltake Max Orb running at low rpm so cool&quiet isn't needed.

I'll have to play around with it and see what the performance impact is. I am not worried about CPU cooler, it is seriously overkill. More worried about reducing idle temperature for the board itself, surely not running CPU at constant 100W would help a bit...