Dothan Burger wrote on Today, 03:26:

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 02:25:

DFI also made great boards, at least with the LanParty series. […]
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shevalier wrote on Yesterday, 11:19:

Pf... I hate Asus. The best motherboards for AMD were made by Epox. Let's start with the implementation of the BusDisconnect fun […]
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Pf... I hate Asus.
The best motherboards for AMD were made by Epox.
Let's start with the implementation of the BusDisconnect function for Athlon XP.
And I still prefer Soltek, although I don’t have their motherboards at the moment.

DFI also made great boards, at least with the LanParty series.

I still have my Abit NF7-S 2.0 which has been used in the same PC with the same overclocked XP 1700+ with the same cooler and fan for something like 23 years now. I use it regularly for testing AGP cards still.

I also have an EPoX 9NDA3J, Socket 939 with the Nforce 3 Ultra (AGP) chipset. This was the board that I replaced the NF7-S with when I upgraded back in the day. I originally ran it with an A64 3000+, later used the board in a PC I sold to someone and 10+ years later they asked me for a new PC and gave me this one back, still in 100% working order! Now it has the beta BIOS installed I have it running an X2 4200+.

The board I purchased after the EPoX was a DFI LANParty UT nF4 Ultra-D. Wish I still had that, but it went into another person's system and I'm sure it's long gone. Very likely it ended up with bad caps. So far the Epox and Abit boards are rock solid with no signs of cap issues. 😀

Prior to these boards I had Tyan KX133 (Slot A), ECS K7S5A and a Gigabyte KT333 board. Still have the ECS too, but it needs lots of caps replaced (I did some 12+ years ago, but it needs more now).

Anyway, the EPoX and Abit boards have definitely earned a good name with me. Too bad both companies are no longer around.

Ultra-D and NF7-S are my favorites from back then. The Ultra-D was insane running the memory off the 3volt rail. You'd modify the rail to overvolt to 3.3v with some OCZ PC4000 Gold VX cas 2,2,2,5 1t @ 250mhz ... Good times.

Dothan Burger wrote on Today, 03:35:

Dothan Burger wrote on Today, 03:26:

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 02:25:

DFI also made great boards, at least with the LanParty series. […]
Show full quote

DFI also made great boards, at least with the LanParty series.

I still have my Abit NF7-S 2.0 which has been used in the same PC with the same overclocked XP 1700+ with the same cooler and fan for something like 23 years now. I use it regularly for testing AGP cards still.

I also have an EPoX 9NDA3J, Socket 939 with the Nforce 3 Ultra (AGP) chipset. This was the board that I replaced the NF7-S with when I upgraded back in the day. I originally ran it with an A64 3000+, later used the board in a PC I sold to someone and 10+ years later they asked me for a new PC and gave me this one back, still in 100% working order! Now it has the beta BIOS installed I have it running an X2 4200+.

The board I purchased after the EPoX was a DFI LANParty UT nF4 Ultra-D. Wish I still had that, but it went into another person's system and I'm sure it's long gone. Very likely it ended up with bad caps. So far the Epox and Abit boards are rock solid with no signs of cap issues. 😀

Prior to these boards I had Tyan KX133 (Slot A), ECS K7S5A and a Gigabyte KT333 board. Still have the ECS too, but it needs lots of caps replaced (I did some 12+ years ago, but it needs more now).

Anyway, the EPoX and Abit boards have definitely earned a good name with me. Too bad both companies are no longer around.

Ultra-D and NF7-S are my favorites from back then. The Ultra-D was insane running the memory off the 3volt rail. You'd modify the rail to overvolt to 3.3v with some OCZ PC4000 Gold VX cas 2,2,2,5 1t @ 250mhz ... Good times.

Yep! I was running this kit of 2x1GB OCZ Gold PC-4000 in that board when I had it! I kept the PC4000 RAM when I sold the system (the new user wasn't going to overclock). Funny thing, I sold the RAM for like $100-$150 in ~2012 when I found out it was selling for such crazy prices.

I overclocked my old X2 4200+ a bit (cooled by a Thermalright XP-90, which is back on a 4200+ on my EPox board now.. 🤣), but never got a lot out of it, even with the fancy RAM. As much as I liked my AMD rigs up to that point, switching to a Core 2 Duo E6750 on a P35 board and overclocking the snot out of it provided a surprisingly huge performance boost in CPU intensive titles.

Hard to believe how quickly CPU performance changed from Socket A-754-939-AM2 to the Core 2 era.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 02:25:

DFI also made great boards, at least with the LanParty series. […]
Show full quote

shevalier wrote on Yesterday, 11:19:

Pf... I hate Asus. The best motherboards for AMD were made by Epox. Let's start with the implementation of the BusDisconnect fun […]
Show full quote

nd22 wrote on Yesterday, 11:04:

1. Unlike Asus, Abit was a small company focused on enthousiasts with no/very limited OEM presence and did not manufactured boards with every single chipset.

Pf... I hate Asus.
The best motherboards for AMD were made by Epox.
Let's start with the implementation of the BusDisconnect function for Athlon XP.
And I still prefer Soltek, although I don’t have their motherboards at the moment.

DFI also made great boards, at least with the LanParty series.

I still have my Abit NF7-S 2.0 which has been used in the same PC with the same overclocked XP 1700+ with the same cooler and fan for something like 23 years now. I use it regularly for testing AGP cards still.

I also have an EPoX 9NDA3J, Socket 939 with the Nforce 3 Ultra (AGP) chipset. This was the board that I replaced the NF7-S with when I upgraded back in the day. I originally ran it with an A64 3000+, later used the board in a PC I sold to someone and 10+ years later they asked me for a new PC and gave me this one back, still in 100% working order! Now it has the beta BIOS installed I have it running an X2 4200+.

The board I purchased after the EPoX was a DFI LANParty UT nF4 Ultra-D. Wish I still had that, but it went into another person's system and I'm sure it's long gone. Very likely it ended up with bad caps. So far the Epox and Abit boards are rock solid with no signs of cap issues. 😀

Prior to these boards I had Tyan KX133 (Slot A), ECS K7S5A and a Gigabyte KT333 board. Still have the ECS too, but it needs lots of caps replaced (I did some 12+ years ago, but it needs more now).

Anyway, the EPoX and Abit boards have definitely earned a good name with me. Too bad both companies are no longer around.

I got my 2 NF7-S 2.0 in storage. My permanently assembled retro system features an Athlon xp 3200 on an abit AN7.
Epox was Abit main competitor in the late 90's - early 2000's. My best friend got quite a few Epox boards and while the performance is good they all got bad capacitors, absolutely all.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-09, 16:36:

shevalier wrote on 2025-10-01, 14:24:

by the way A weird and rare mut from Asrock K8A780LM AMD760/710 + socket754 […]
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by the way
A weird and rare mut from Asrock
K8A780LM
AMD760/710 + socket754

That board is such a weird thing. The chipset is from the AM2 era (some boards still used it for AM3+, but the chipset itself is from 2009), so the IGP is unusually strong compared to the speed of the CPUs it supports. Of course, DDR memory will severely limit the performance compared to later 760G boards that used DDR2 or DDR3. I built an HTPC back in ~2009 with an Athlon X2 5050e on an AMD 780G chipset board (Radeon HD3200) and just as an experiment I was able to run Crysis on it at low resolution (640x480 or 800x600 I think, 🤣) and it was totally playable. At the time this was crazy, since IGPs tended to be totally useless for the latest games. The HD3000 is noticeably slower, but it's still probably sufficient for running games from 2000-2004.

I wouldn't expect great performance, because iGPU will starve of memory bandwidth.
There is no DDR3 SidePort, s754 offers just single channel DDR1 memory and HT is just either 800 or 1000 MHz.
HD3200/HD3300 are pretty okay, but you need a fast SidePort memory, DDR3 and HT 2000 MHz+ to make them, ekhmmm, fly.

nd22 wrote on Today, 09:14:

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 02:25:

DFI also made great boards, at least with the LanParty series. […]
Show full quote

shevalier wrote on Yesterday, 11:19:

Pf... I hate Asus. The best motherboards for AMD were made by Epox. Let's start with the implementation of the BusDisconnect fun […]
Show full quote

Pf... I hate Asus.
The best motherboards for AMD were made by Epox.
Let's start with the implementation of the BusDisconnect function for Athlon XP.
And I still prefer Soltek, although I don’t have their motherboards at the moment.

DFI also made great boards, at least with the LanParty series.

I still have my Abit NF7-S 2.0 which has been used in the same PC with the same overclocked XP 1700+ with the same cooler and fan for something like 23 years now. I use it regularly for testing AGP cards still.

I also have an EPoX 9NDA3J, Socket 939 with the Nforce 3 Ultra (AGP) chipset. This was the board that I replaced the NF7-S with when I upgraded back in the day. I originally ran it with an A64 3000+, later used the board in a PC I sold to someone and 10+ years later they asked me for a new PC and gave me this one back, still in 100% working order! Now it has the beta BIOS installed I have it running an X2 4200+.

The board I purchased after the EPoX was a DFI LANParty UT nF4 Ultra-D. Wish I still had that, but it went into another person's system and I'm sure it's long gone. Very likely it ended up with bad caps. So far the Epox and Abit boards are rock solid with no signs of cap issues. 😀

Prior to these boards I had Tyan KX133 (Slot A), ECS K7S5A and a Gigabyte KT333 board. Still have the ECS too, but it needs lots of caps replaced (I did some 12+ years ago, but it needs more now).

Anyway, the EPoX and Abit boards have definitely earned a good name with me. Too bad both companies are no longer around.

I got my 2 NF7-S 2.0 in storage. My permanently assembled retro system features an Athlon xp 3200 on an abit AN7.
Epox was Abit main competitor in the late 90's - early 2000's. My best friend got quite a few Epox boards and while the performance is good they all got bad capacitors, absolutely all.

Weird. I haven't seen bad caps on any of the epox boards I've come across personally, where as I've seen bad caps on all of the Abit boards I've had, other than my NF7-S. The worst was the AN8 32x. Tons of bad caps on that poor thing. I tried replacing them a few different times but the microscopic solder pads, lead free solder and the high quality multi-layer PCB that absorbed tons of heat made it impossible to fix with the tools (and skills) I had at the time. I ended up selling it for parts (it has been my brother's since new).

I also have an Abit IS-7 which looks a lot like the NF7-S (it is, effectively, the Intel equivalent in my mind) that mostly looks good but it has a couple of swollen caps near a voltage regulator, despite the whole board being populated with high quality brand name caps.

The cap plague was a terrible and unpredictable time, for sure.

luk1999 wrote on Today, 18:12:

I wouldn't expect great performance, because iGPU will starve of memory bandwidth. There is no DDR3 SidePort, s754 offers just […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-09, 16:36:

shevalier wrote on 2025-10-01, 14:24:

by the way A weird and rare mut from Asrock K8A780LM AMD760/710 + socket754 […]
Show full quote

by the way
A weird and rare mut from Asrock
K8A780LM
AMD760/710 + socket754

That board is such a weird thing. The chipset is from the AM2 era (some boards still used it for AM3+, but the chipset itself is from 2009), so the IGP is unusually strong compared to the speed of the CPUs it supports. Of course, DDR memory will severely limit the performance compared to later 760G boards that used DDR2 or DDR3. I built an HTPC back in ~2009 with an Athlon X2 5050e on an AMD 780G chipset board (Radeon HD3200) and just as an experiment I was able to run Crysis on it at low resolution (640x480 or 800x600 I think, 🤣) and it was totally playable. At the time this was crazy, since IGPs tended to be totally useless for the latest games. The HD3000 is noticeably slower, but it's still probably sufficient for running games from 2000-2004.

I wouldn't expect great performance, because iGPU will starve of memory bandwidth.
There is no DDR3 SidePort, s754 offers just single channel DDR1 memory and HT is just either 800 or 1000 MHz.
HD3200/HD3300 are pretty okay, but you need a fast SidePort memory, DDR3 and HT 2000 MHz+ to make them, ekhmmm, fly.

Yeah, I'm sure it's severely bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. The 780G board I used back in the day just had 2x2GB DDR2-800 and it did pretty well, but that is, what, 4 times the bandwidth vs single channel DDR-400? Ouch.