Well, if you look at the stock cooler you will see it uses a clip mechanism that connects to the retention bracket. The TX3 also uses a mechanism like this. The 754/939 and AM2/AM3/AM3+ platforms have exactly the same retention bracket, even though they don't look the same.

It works, trust me. I've even attached my stock FX8350 cooler to it.

Ok I didnt know the TX3 used the clip method, i thought it went through the bracket mounting holes

Now you know. I think the 754/939 platforms are much better alternatives to building a late Socket 462/478 system since you can easily find a new quiet heatsink, they are 12V orientated, you have SSE2 and the boards are cheaper and don't have as many bad capacitors.

Agreed!

754 is awesome, as pretty much all multi-socket modern coolers fit on it. The issue with the 12V is very valid. Quite hard to find decent, new, PSUs that are 5V beefy. Another plus are better chipsets with better SATA compatibility. VIA's KT600 boards, only took SATA 1 drives when I tested it. SATA II drives didn't even show up.

S478 coolers are mayor PITA. For this reason alone I want to get a S775 P4 board.

One problem, specifically with Socket 754, is that most of the affordable motherboards are VIA KT880 or K8M800 powered ones. For the most part they're decent, but they come with VIA's useless SATA controller which is so bad that it can't support modern SATA drives because of its inability to auto-negotiate the speed. You can set SATA II drives to run at SATA 1 speed using a jumper, which somewhat fixes the problem, but for some reason you can't do the same for SATA III drives. The only solution is to buy a Silicon Image SATA controller card off of eBay or to use those SATA<>IDE adapters.

I've had good experiences with the nForce 4 chipset boards. Asrock made a ton of them, all uATX and very cheap. I used it in my Athlon 64 build I did a while ago.

They also had 939 boards, but I couldn't find one when I was looking.

well avoid VIA if you want to use SATA, Nforce3, Nforce4, and that ATI chipset support SATA1, 2 and 3 drives without problem, even if they can't do the full speed 🤣. Also Nforce4 supports NCQ don't forget

I'm quite happy with the board I actually bought in 2006, despite it not being the fastest. It was one of the last chipsets made under the ATi name, it was during a very transitionary stage in my life (final year of high school and moving out to go and study at university) and I also started losing interest in games (although, I also had my first girlfriend during that time so there were more interesting games to play with her). It'll be interesting to see where this ultimately ends up. I've been too sidetracked with my builds and never really finishing them. I suppose you could say I fear answering the question: what's next?

Evert wrote:

what's next?

There is always something else to build 😀

Seriously, I could take a few years off from work and still be busy working on my projects 🤣

Well, it will take me long to finish everything. But eventually I will get there and when I do, I think I will stop. I'd like to start collecting SEGA consoles or maybe train for those marathons I've been threatening to run all these years.