Since there wasn't much information available on this particular board and I recently managed to get my hands on it, I decided to make a dedicated thread and write a review. Grab some popcorn, because it's pretty long.

The board originally cost around €50 (source: https://www.ocinside.de/review/mainboard_asro … _am2nf3_vsta/3/) and I paid roughly $20 for it including shipping. Given the original price tag, you shouldn't expect premium quality.

With the latest BIOS, this board officially supports up to Phenom X4 970, but the X4 980 will work too according to reports from the web. Phenom X6 will NOT work.
I paired it with an Athlon II X2 270 clocked at 3.4 GHz. At $5.99 with shipping from Aliexpress, this is probably the best price/performance you can get right now.

Supposedly, the biggest problem this board has is incompatibility of the nForce3 chipset with newer operating systems (Vista/7) when using dual/quad core CPUs because nVidia never released a proper GART driver. This is quite funny because it has VSTA in the name and Asrock claims it to be "Worldwide the only nForce3 MB with Windows® Vista™ Premium Logo".

As for compatibility, Asrock states this:

Under Windows® Vista™ 32-bit / Vista™ 64-bit OS, this motherboard does not support ATi™ AGP card because NVIDIA® does not provide nForce3 250 relevant driver for Windows® Vista™ OS.

Of course, there was quite an outrage back in 2007 and on the GeForce forums you can find a few interesting responses from nVidia employees:

The nForce 3 chipset is not officially supported under Windows 7. The nForce3 chipset was never designed to support dual core processors. This leads to installation issues of AGP graphics cards with Windows Vista and Windows 7 if a dual core processor is used. The same problem occurs under Windows XP however the Windows XP operating system has a fall back that allows the AGP graphics card to essentially work in PCI mode which Windows Vista and Windows 7 do not have.

We are sorry for the inconvenience. The nForce3 chipset does not fully work with AMD Athlon 64 dual core processors. Under Windows XP display driver model, the display drivers were capable to downgrade to PCI mode to avoid this issue however under Windows Vista display driver model, this is not possible and that is why you get this error message. Our engineers have looked for a possible workaround for a very long time and unfortunately there was no workaround possible for this issue.

I haven't tested Windows 7 compatibility yet, but there are several lies in there.
First of all, I can confirm the board will definitely work in AGP 8X mode with Windows XP SP3 32-bit with a dual core CPU. However, you have to install a "special" nVidia All-In-One driver from Asrock's site. It's basically the latest nForce 3 driver (5.11) with a slightly older GART driver version.

Secondly, I can also confirm ATI GPUs work normally under Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS 64-bit (using the agpgart-amd64 driver). This means the chipset can indeed work with multi-core CPUs and AGP 8X using a 64-bit OS. I can't believe nVidia couldn't release a working driver, yet open source engineers were able to do it without access to full documentation. See it with your own eyes (running with the HD 3450):

The board only has 2 SATA ports and they are SATA I. However, the system is still very fast with an SSD (the Windows XP loading "snake" will only go about half a bar before it's done).

Finally, onto the performance.

You can see the full gallery here: https://imgur.com/a/MDhjcgb

Here are a few observations:
- 3DMark 2000 is CPU limited to 28k-29k; in comparison, my Pentium 3.0 GHz Prescott is limited to around 11.8k, which would indicate a roughly 2.5x increase in performance
- 3DMark 2001 result is kind of bad with HD 3850, I expected above 40k given the relatively high CPU clock speed (it's barely faster than X1950 Pro)
- 3DMark03 and 06 results are very good in my opinion, they could probably go 10% higher with a faster CPU (Phenom) or faster RAM
- the HD4650 is a 1 GB DDR2 version and it sucks due to memory bandwidth (it's about on par with X800 XT)

For testing, I used 2 GB of Kingmax DDR2-800 with 6-6-6-18 timings (because I'm short on DDR2, I even had to steal this from another PC).
The memory defaults to 533 MHz for some reason, but manually setting it to 800 MHz works perfectly and uses timings from SPD. The board supposedly works even with DDR2-1066, but I don't have any such modules.
The only other setting I changed is setting the AGP aperture size to 256 MB (default is 128 MB) because I read about issues with too low AGP aperture on similar nForce 3 boards.
I had an interesting issue with the board - after turning it off, it wouldn't turn back on without cycling the PSU power switch. I presume this is some kind of ACPI issue, but I didn't bother investigating further.

No nVidia cards were benchmarked because the fastest AGP one I have is a 6600GT.

Unfortunately, there was a casualty during testing. After finishing all the benchmarks, I fired up Crysis on the X1950 Pro. I first started the game at 1024x768 to check CPU performance and everything was working fine. A few seconds after switching to 1080p it crapped out.

I'm not sure if it's a core or memory issue (looks like core because triangles were flying all over the screen, but it might be VRAM because of the familiar pattern). These situations make me seriously reconsider the hobby of collecting old crap that has the potential to die any minute. It was the nice 512 MB Sapphire version too...

That's it for now. I will probably be trying out Windows 7 SP1 in the future just to confirm the GART driver issue. If that fails, I'll try Windows 8.1, and finally Windows 10 version 1511 (last one with AGP support).