Ok i don’t know where to start here but here goes anyway.
This board has so many problems i cannot understand how it ever got released on the market back in 2005, i have tried THREE different graphics cards, FOUR brands of DDR memory, TWO power supplies, FIVE types of hard drives and THREE different DVD Writers, SEVEN different BIOS revisions and NOTHING i repeat NOTHING is working properly, i have even tried THREE motherboards, all of which are doing the exact same things.
Booting the computer is totally hit or miss, sometimes it does sometimes it doesn’t
It is unstable in more ways i can think of
The voltage and fan speed readings are all wrong, in fact as far as cpu fans go if the fan isn’t at least 2000 Rpm it wont boot at all
Every nForce3 driver is terrible, the sound codec is so bad it freezes the machine completely
Even simple tasks like booting from a USB thumb drive can cause freezes, trying to get EASY2BOOT loaded is hard work, i’ve been working with computers for over 30 years and i can honestly say with my hand on my heart, this is the WORST motherboard i have ever owned in my life, i built a beautiful desktop (under monitor) case and all i want to do is get windows98SE installed with 512MB ram so i can play on my favourite music making software of all time, it’s called MUSIC-2000, however it seems impossible, i can get it installed but it’s only a matter of time before it refuses to boot resulting in the need to reset the bios to defaults, the board is finicky with memory and hard drives to the point it constantly bootloops (with a beep)
I’ve been troubleshooting this horrible board(s) for the best part of 2 weeks and i have come to the conclusion that i would like to warn anyone who is considering buying one for a win98 or xp retro rig to completely stay away from it, i have tried every patch imaginable including R Leows SATA/Memory and LBA48 fixes, i just cannot get the damn thing working right, so i am posting this to ask, is there something i am missing or not doing right? surely no motherboard manufacturer would release a board this bad?
The graphics cards i have tried (all in perfect working order) are the GeForce 7800GS, GeForce 6800GT, ATI All In Wonder 9200 256MB, GeForce 5900 and a Radeon 2600XT
HDD/SSD’s Tested: Patriot Burst 120GB SSD, Seagate Barracuda 120GB HDD, Western Digital Black 500GB even an old Quantum fireball Hard Disk.
Memory Tested: 256MB DDR 400 (Hynix) 2x512MB Corsair DDR400, Some unbranded DDR333 and some Mushkin PC 2700
PSU’s Tested are a 400W Fractal Design, and a 450W Antec
I have even tried THREE different processors, dual core and single core.
All these parts tested are in 100% working order, and they all work bloody fantastic in my ASUS socket 754 motherboards, so, what’s the crack here? are nForce3 chipsets really THAT bad? i have never ever had any problems like this with SiS chipset boards (which i consider the best in this era) could this possibly be a BIOS issue in some way? Im stuck on this one and cannot get to the bottom of these issues. If anyone could shed some light on this i would be very grateful indeed, it’s bloody annoying!
Thanks guys.
