I bought this board as it was cheap, only £75 sterling, i wanted the X850 card but needed a PCE mainboard so i though id give VIA another go!.
Well it has a 20 pin ATX, so no converter needed since its designed for 20 pin, seems to have low power requirments my entire rig runs on my default 300 watt smartpower psu.
UGURU is very nice, very tweakable board u can change voltages for almost everything
cpu, mem, northbrige,hypertransport etc. My mem runs at 2.95, but u can select 3.2.
I will post all the options in their at some point.
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=683831
thats the score i got with it, but my 24/7 score is about 600 lower.
With my 3500+ winny , im using 11X242, rock solid, however 10X266 is not, my mem is OCZ PC4400 so it should cope, it did on the NF3 this replaced.
10X266 worked most of the time and i could game for hours, so sometimes it would reboot, this might well be my PSU however but its rails are quite steady though.
The only rail thats out of spec if SBVDD, this is at 2.16, anyone know what this does?
I found that 11X242 and 10X266 gave me almost identical scores, so in my case this was no problem, just used tigher mem timings.
It has proper working PCI locks.
The sata raid is fast, windows XP feels very fast, things like opening display properties and mangagement console are instand from cold. I find that im usally the first person in CS source thats loaded the map, and sometimes i can run about for 20 seconds waiting for the others to join. The joys of a fast system
It dosn't have dual gigabit, i dont need it so not a problem to me.
It only has 4 satas, but it does have 3 X ide's (6 drives) strange but usefull.
I like the placement of the IDE's & ATX well tidy.
You can choose the voltages you want to give to the system and cpu fans, along with
the temp threshold to increase it.
Also you can save your cmos settings in a little menu and have up to 6 stored, i found this feature killer! Now if have to clear my cmos i can reload all the details, instead of having to re-set them all each and every time a total pain. I don't know other boards have this but my msi nf3 and msi nf4 i tested don't have this.
I found my temps to be reported higher about 10oC when compared to the msi Nf3,
now it hots 57oC under load instead of 47-50. I have no stability problems though.
Case temp is 33 at idle, but i meased this and it was more like 23.
I have a coolermaster hyper6 cooler/artic silver5 dual 80mm sunon fans at 7 volts.
dual 120mm antec fans in cheap antec case again 7 volts.
voltage tweaks
--------------------
cpu core 1.4-1.75
mem 2.5-3.2
nb 1.5-1.65
sb 2.5-2.65
ht 1.2-1.4
Bus tweaks
-------------------
PCI 33/37/44
PCI-E 90-130
FSB 200-400
DRAM 200,266,333,400, every timing seems to their.
Update!!
Ok stable at 294FSB X 9 HT-3 when memory set to 333 instead of 400, so a 3000+ winny will get some nice legroom.
boots at into windows 339 FSB X 8, no tests done but this board seems to like high fsb.
Well it has a 20 pin ATX, so no converter needed since its designed for 20 pin, seems to have low power requirments my entire rig runs on my default 300 watt smartpower psu.
UGURU is very nice, very tweakable board u can change voltages for almost everything
cpu, mem, northbrige,hypertransport etc. My mem runs at 2.95, but u can select 3.2.
I will post all the options in their at some point.
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=683831
thats the score i got with it, but my 24/7 score is about 600 lower.
With my 3500+ winny , im using 11X242, rock solid, however 10X266 is not, my mem is OCZ PC4400 so it should cope, it did on the NF3 this replaced.
10X266 worked most of the time and i could game for hours, so sometimes it would reboot, this might well be my PSU however but its rails are quite steady though.
The only rail thats out of spec if SBVDD, this is at 2.16, anyone know what this does?
I found that 11X242 and 10X266 gave me almost identical scores, so in my case this was no problem, just used tigher mem timings.
It has proper working PCI locks.
The sata raid is fast, windows XP feels very fast, things like opening display properties and mangagement console are instand from cold. I find that im usally the first person in CS source thats loaded the map, and sometimes i can run about for 20 seconds waiting for the others to join. The joys of a fast system
It dosn't have dual gigabit, i dont need it so not a problem to me.
It only has 4 satas, but it does have 3 X ide's (6 drives) strange but usefull.
I like the placement of the IDE's & ATX well tidy.
You can choose the voltages you want to give to the system and cpu fans, along with
the temp threshold to increase it.
Also you can save your cmos settings in a little menu and have up to 6 stored, i found this feature killer! Now if have to clear my cmos i can reload all the details, instead of having to re-set them all each and every time a total pain. I don't know other boards have this but my msi nf3 and msi nf4 i tested don't have this.
I found my temps to be reported higher about 10oC when compared to the msi Nf3,
now it hots 57oC under load instead of 47-50. I have no stability problems though.
Case temp is 33 at idle, but i meased this and it was more like 23.
I have a coolermaster hyper6 cooler/artic silver5 dual 80mm sunon fans at 7 volts.
dual 120mm antec fans in cheap antec case again 7 volts.
voltage tweaks
--------------------
cpu core 1.4-1.75
mem 2.5-3.2
nb 1.5-1.65
sb 2.5-2.65
ht 1.2-1.4
Bus tweaks
-------------------
PCI 33/37/44
PCI-E 90-130
FSB 200-400
DRAM 200,266,333,400, every timing seems to their.
Update!!
Ok stable at 294FSB X 9 HT-3 when memory set to 333 instead of 400, so a 3000+ winny will get some nice legroom.
boots at into windows 339 FSB X 8, no tests done but this board seems to like high fsb.
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