Dothan Burger wrote on 2025-10-11, 03:26:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-11, 02:25:

DFI also made great boards, at least with the LanParty series. […]
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shevalier wrote on 2025-10-10, 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 2025-10-11, 03:35:

Dothan Burger wrote on 2025-10-11, 03:26:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-11, 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 2025-10-11, 02:25:

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

shevalier wrote on 2025-10-10, 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 2025-10-10, 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 2025-10-11, 09:14:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-11, 02:25:

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

shevalier wrote on 2025-10-10, 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 had 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 2025-10-11, 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.

NFORCE4 system details: as you can see I used Clawhammer CG revision so the command rate at 1T is nothing extraordinary here. Again I had to use Corsair memory because anything else is a no go! Timings set by the BIOS at 3-3-3-8. Unlike NF8 PRO using cool and quiet will drop the cpu frequency to only 1000 MHz - unlike the nforce3 board that drops to 800 MHz! Using a Kingston SSD with a WD raptor as slave and a SATA optical drive you still got 1 SATA connector free!

shevalier wrote on 2025-10-10, 06:13:

That would be great. I wonder how smoothly it would work with Windows 98. Of course, with something like the X600/800 or PCX5700 […]
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Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-10, 05:54:

If I ever find one I'll surely tinker with it and post my results though! 😀

That would be great.
I wonder how smoothly it would work with Windows 98.
Of course, with something like the X600/800 or PCX5700.
If everything works well, it's the ultimate solution.
The Socket 754 multiplier increases the frequency from 800 to 2.4 GHz, or three times. (And this is without even changing the frequency of Hypertransport.)
256/512 MB DDR1 modules are also quite affordable.
It still amazes me that all retro gamers want the K6-3/P3S and not the S754.

With GF 7600GS TOP (factory oced with clock like GT version) and X700SE (really crippled version not only on shaders and ROPs, but even memory bus too) are results on AMD 760G (aka 780) and SB710:

Ydee wrote on 2025-10-12, 15:48:

shevalier wrote on 2025-10-10, 06:13:

That would be great. I wonder how smoothly it would work with Windows 98. Of course, with something like the X600/800 or PCX5700 […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-10, 05:54:

If I ever find one I'll surely tinker with it and post my results though! 😀

That would be great.
I wonder how smoothly it would work with Windows 98.
Of course, with something like the X600/800 or PCX5700.
If everything works well, it's the ultimate solution.
The Socket 754 multiplier increases the frequency from 800 to 2.4 GHz, or three times. (And this is without even changing the frequency of Hypertransport.)
256/512 MB DDR1 modules are also quite affordable.
It still amazes me that all retro gamers want the K6-3/P3S and not the S754.

With GF 7600GS TOP (factory oced with clock like GT version) and X700SE (really crippled version not only on shaders and ROPs, but even memory bus too) are results on AMD 760G (aka 780) and SB710:

Can you run this benchmark on Sempron?
2GHz Sempron Palermo can post the results in Linpack.
Same conditions: Hypertransport - as close to 800MHz as possible, RAM - 200MHz, 3-3-3-8 CR2.
Re: Battle of the platforms: socket 754!
Re: Battle of the platforms: socket 754!

Ydee wrote on 2025-10-12, 15:48:

shevalier wrote on 2025-10-10, 06:13:

That would be great. I wonder how smoothly it would work with Windows 98. Of course, with something like the X600/800 or PCX5700 […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-10, 05:54:

If I ever find one I'll surely tinker with it and post my results though! 😀

That would be great.
I wonder how smoothly it would work with Windows 98.
Of course, with something like the X600/800 or PCX5700.
If everything works well, it's the ultimate solution.
The Socket 754 multiplier increases the frequency from 800 to 2.4 GHz, or three times. (And this is without even changing the frequency of Hypertransport.)
256/512 MB DDR1 modules are also quite affordable.
It still amazes me that all retro gamers want the K6-3/P3S and not the S754.

With GF 7600GS TOP (factory oced with clock like GT version) and X700SE (really crippled version not only on shaders and ROPs, but even memory bus too) are results on AMD 760G (aka 780) and SB710:

Nice! Can you run the same test on the HD3000 IGP? It'd need to be run under XP, since there are no 9x drivers for it, but I'd be really interested to see the results if you have time. Also maybe running the GPUs again in XP would be good too for a more like-for-like comparison to the IGP.

Ydee wrote on 2025-10-12, 15:48:

With GF 7600GS TOP (factory oced with clock like GT version) and X700SE (really crippled version not only on shaders and ROPs, but even memory bus too) are results on AMD 760G (aka 780) and SB710:

I can confirm the results look good. My Athlon 64 3400+ achieved 18569 in 1024x768x32bit with GeForce 7600 GT in 3D Mark 2001 in Windows XP. The driver used was most likely 45. There was no tuning or OCing. With GeForce 9800GT the score rose to 27622. You should be able to buy 3400+ CPU cheap locally. We also need to consider 3D Mark 2003 for early XP era games.

Next system is the outsider: ABIT KU8/ULI M1689.
A very rare board with a chipset implemented by few manufacturers, M1689 is an oddity amidst the boards with VIA and nvidia chipsets.
ULI, formely known as ALI with the the Magic 1 chipset inthe early socket A era, produced the M1687 as a launch chipset for Athlon 64. Lacking SATA and PCI/AGP lock it was poorly received with only one manufacturer producing one model: SOYO K8USA. It was followed by M1689 which got a warmer reception but still only a handful of companies manufactured motherboards with it. Among them Abit with the KU8 as the one and only model.

There is no review on the net about this board so I will try my best to summarize the strong and the weak points of the board.
All the capabilities of the motherboard come from the chipset; there are no extra controllers so everything that you are going to get is what ULI M1689 offers.

The layout is pretty unconventional, as you can see the DIMM are located above the CPU socket. There are only 2 DIMMs for a total of 2 GB of RAM, more than enough for any game up to 2004!
The board has a24 pin main ATX connector just like any modern board. A major faux pas is the location of the power connectors: both are located between the back panel and the processor socket! Goodbye cable management!

The winbond monitoring chip is present again - all socket 754 & 939 Abit boards have it:

The lan controller is an obscure version from IC+ with very difficult to find drivers; you can also see the clock generator from ICS:

The chipset is located near on the right near the bottom of the board; it is passively cooled which is more than enough as it does not heat up, being barely warm.
The are only 3 fan headers on the board: CPU fan, system fan and auxiliary fan. You really don't need more as the whole system barely heats up.
You got only 2 SATA connectors; a major advantage of M1689 is the ability to work with both SSD - any manufacturer - and SATA optical drive! So if you need a second SATA drive you are going to have to use one of the 2 IDE connectors; another good thing is they are both angled at 90 degrees.
The standard AC97 codec is from Realtek: ALC658 present on all the boards! So Nvidia no longer has the advantage of the sound storm.

Another major difficulty is compatibility with the RAM: both of my KU8 work only and only with the Corsair kit shown in the picture: revision 3.1. I tried over 25 different modules before finding these! The only other board I ever worked with that exhibits this horrific memory compatibility is the Abit NV7-133raid with nforce1.
Let me be clear; I used the same Clawhammer 3400 revision CO that you saw in the pictures with NF8 PRO.
And here you can see the system with both SSD and SATA DVD drive. Because I tested all the boards with WD raptors I used a IDE DVD drive during testing.

nd22 wrote on Yesterday, 06:47:

The layout is pretty unconventional, as you can see the DIMM are located above the CPU socket. There are only 2 DIMMs for a total of 2 GB of RAM, more than enough for any game up to 2004!

Has anyone run more than 2GB on Socket754?
If this is at all possible, the frequency will be 100-133 MHz for three strips.

nd22 wrote on Yesterday, 07:18:

Another major difficulty is compatibility with the RAM

I don't believe it. Either you desperately need CR1, or you're just incredibly unlucky with your RAM.

That is correct; on my KV8-max3 I did used 3 1 GB Dimms and the memory was running at DDR-333. No matter what kind of modules I used I could not get 3 modules to run at DDR-400. Because running the memory out of sync will lead to a performance penalty you have to use 2 modules. I believe that 2 GB is more than enough!

nd22 wrote on Yesterday, 07:22:

That is correct; on my KV8-max3 I did used 3 1 GB Dimms and the memory was running at DDR-333. No matter what kind of modules I used I could not get 3 modules to run at DDR-400. Because running the memory out of sync will lead to a performance penalty you have to use 2 modules. I believe that 2 GB is more than enough!

If you're truly bored, you can try FB-DIMM.
If it works (which I highly doubt), you'll get 3*2GB at 200 MHz.