EPoX "EP-9NPA+Ultra" NVIDIA nForce4 ULTRA Chipset Motherboard

[warbean]

Ok here's an interesting question about this board, as my recent upgrade now runs Windows well, but frequently crashes whenever I play a 3d game.

Is this board compatible with an Athlon FX 53? On the box, it only says Socket 939 Athlon FX supported so I thought it was ok, but when I go to the AMD compatibility checkers for my processor, it only recommends the epox nforce 3 series.

Anyone else having problems with this board and my processor??

 

[Mem]

Did you install the Nvidia nforce 4 chipset drivers,what BIOS you using?

 

[warbean]

I am using latest nforce and latest bios revision. (april 2006)

Anyway the processor guide on the epox website does not include the fx 53 on the list of compatible processors, neither does the official AMD website. Does anyone else have a 53 with this processor and find it working??

 

[Mem]

You could send Epox an email to confirm compatibility.

 

[keeleysam]

The FX-53 is a Socket 940 chip. It will not work in this board.

 

[sgtdic]

oh really? quote from AMD:

Q: Why is the AMD Athlon? 64 FX-53 processor offered in a 939-pin package?

A: AMD believes in bringing to market customer-centric technology that benefits partners and end users. By offering the AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 processor in a 939-pin package, AMD is enabling performance enhancements and next-generation platform innovations with the use of a cost-effective four-layer circuit board and higher performing unbuffered DDR memory (compared to registered DDR memory in the 940-pin part).


Q: Do you still plan to offer the AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 processor 940-pin part? If not, why not?

A: Yes. As a customer-centric company, we plan to support the 940-pin package parts as long as our customers need them

 

[warbean]

Yes, I have the 939 version.

Epox SUPPORT says it should be compatible, but IT'S OWN processor roadmap says it is not, nor does AMD's site. What is going on??

 

[Davegod]

maybe it's only fully compatible through a bios update?

fwiw i'd have thought if it wasnt properly compatible it'd either not work at all, run it at the wrong speed, or at worst maybe the wrong voltage.


I was having crashes only during gaming and it turned out to be the ballistix ram. swapped in some mushkin and all is sweet. try running prime95 and memtest86 ultimate boot cd makes it easy

 

[dahuang1]

I've got the latest nforce drivers and ran the 3hr tuning, and it seemed to work ok - with some various increases, particularly in the AGP/PCIE bus. However, when I reboot - the POST screen shows an alert that the clock values have been changed to the default values. Is there a way to prevent this and to make the ntune values 'sticky'?

 

[MadScientist]

Originally posted by: dahuang1
I've got the latest nforce drivers and ran the 3hr tuning, and it seemed to work ok - with some various increases, particularly in the AGP/PCIE bus. However, when I reboot - the POST screen shows an alert that the clock values have been changed to the default values. Is there a way to prevent this and to make the ntune values 'sticky'?

Yeah, uninstall ntune and overclock manually. Follow the Quick and Dirty A64 Overclocking Guide here.
Link

Keep the PCI-E bus at 100 mhz. Overclocking the PCI-E bus can lead to system instability, data corruption, and, according to this website, Link, does not increase system performance.

 

[dahuang1]

Quick question - Is the HTT the same as the CPU frequency and LDT the same as HT multiplier in the epox bios? I read that the HTTxLDT was suppose to be less than 1000, but HTT and LDT aren't in the bios that I can see..
Thanks
Geoff

EDIT:

OK - I read more... and guessed and think I figured it out ok. I settled on 265 (HTT / CPU Hz) x 9 (cpu multiplier) with the HT multiple (HTTlink?) @ 3 to get 2.385 GHz, fsb @ 795, and 2 x corsair value 512 @ 2.5-3-3-8 (thought that was at 7), @ pc150 to run at 199mhz (no boot @ 166). Auto Vcore @ 1.58, 31'C (I changed one of the bios fan settings... but this doesn't seem right, it was @ 44'C before).

So, I'm running the winchester a64 3000+ at 2.4 after a year of running it at 1.8... damn, I'm so blonde sometimes.

I haven't seen much mention about oc'ing the PCIE clock though - any benefit to doing that? I also had one instance where waking the cpu defaulted the cpu hz back to 200mhz - any reason that might be happening? Finally - after comparing this to some of the results on Tom's hardware interactive charts, it doesn't look like anything up to $500 will be much of an improvement over this older processor, assuming you can compare the oc'd 3000 to a 3500.

 

[dahuang1]

Actually - after I posted that above - for this mobo, how much faster of a cpu can you get?

 

[sgtdic]

as fast an AMD as you want. it supports 64, FX, and X2s.

i oc'd my 3000 venice the other day to 2.4GHz. my voltage is between 1.43-1.47. i plugged in some numbers into gogar's and this is what i used: 300 cpu freq, 8x cpu multi, DDR266 memory divider, and HTT multi 3x. with a full load and warm in the room, i never saw it go above 43C on stock cooling. with a lot of internet explorers, wmp, and messengers going it stays at my smartfan temp of 35C.

 

[dahuang1]

That's interesting...I'll have to check out the gogar thing. I have it at 265 x 9, you have 300 x 8. I have the voltage on auto and it hovers around 1.57 ish. But, I have to divide to 150, maybe I would get better performance with your setup. I actually didn't have the smart fan enabled for some reason and it was around 44'c before oc'ing. I enabled the fan after, but don't quite remember the setting, and it seemed to stay below 40'c until doing some 3d gaming, where it would get up to 50'.

Have you seen any info about pci clock oc'ing? I tried doing a search but didn't come up with much. I remember running ntune that it started with overclocking the pci first, iirc.

 

[sgtdic]

your voltage and temps seem way too high. best thing to do like i did is turn off auto vcore. it doesnt need near that much and is probably hurting the life of your cpu. the smartfan has temps settings in increments of 5, with 35 being the lowest so thats where i set mine.

i havent seen any info on pci clock ocing. i'm curious about it myself, but as someone stated earlier, it messes with stability. until i hear or read otherwise im not going to mess with it. also, ntune has sucked for me. it would always freeze my system and not sure if thats what its supposed to do or not, so i just uninstalled it.

 

[IBuyUFO]

Are these motherboards starting to get discontinued? I bought the EP-9NPA+ SLi version of the board and mine came with missing stuff and I check mwave where I bought it from and they're out of stock. Everyone is pretty much out of stock. What gives?

 

[dahuang1]

Ewww... just tried reducing the voltage. Not good - 34 min left on the xp recovery! I tried to reduce voltage by .1, and then windows got fried. I'll just have to see how it goes with voltage at auto.

 

[sgtdic]

i dont see how your xp got fried. could you get back into the bios? try raising voltage a bit? try a hard boot on your pc? i had to with mine a couple times. did you try reset cmos jumper? i bet if you wouldve done some of these that you would not have to do a xp recovery. i'm sure it just couldn't boot with what you had set. maybe should've tried voltage drops in increments? when mine wouldnt boot it would say enter setup and reset cpu freq most of the time, but only a couple i had to hard reset.

 

[dahuang1]

Tried even reflashing BIOS. When you would go into the BIOS screen, there were some options missing - I figure that's not a good sign! So I was sure BIOS was hosed. I got it to POST, but then when it switched to boot XP, it died and then wouldn't get past the 'windows did not load on a previous attempt' screen, and when trying to safe mode, it would get hung on the ..../Mup.sys file, so I figured it was corrupted when it crashed on boot. I wonder when SP3 will come out. I will just do a clean install when that happens.

 

[IBuyUFO]

I'm running an opteron 165 with corsair xms pc3200 ram and my motherboard is an epox ep-9npa+sli. The problem is that everytime I try to overclock it works but when I shut off the computer and restart it back again it returns to the normal clock speed of 1800 ghz. When this happens I go to bios and I see that all the settings that were used to overclock are still there. Anyone know what's going on?

 

[techfuzz]

Originally posted by: IBuyUFO
I'm running an opteron 165 with corsair xms pc3200 ram and my motherboard is an epox ep-9npa+sli. The problem is that everytime I try to overclock it works but when I shut off the computer and restart it back again it returns to the normal clock speed of 1800 ghz. When this happens I go to bios and I see that all the settings that were used to overclock are still there. Anyone know what's going on?

Check the clear CMOS jumper and make sure you didn't forget to unshort it at some point. Otherwise it could be that your overclock is too high and that upon reboot it is returning to a stable config.

techfuzz

 

[IBuyUFO]

I don't think it's too high. it booted up into windows vista just fine. I think I had it at 2160 ghz (240 mhz *9 multiplier). The ddr ram was at 166 I believe. HT was set to 5X. I'll check the jumpers later when I get home.

 

[sgtdic]

240 x5 = 1200. way too high. HTT should = 1000 or less. try x4, bet that'll work for ya.

 

[IBuyUFO]

Thanks! I'll have to try that later

 

[IBuyUFO]

Originally posted by: sgtdic
240 x5 = 1200. way too high. HTT should = 1000 or less. try x4, bet that'll work for ya.

For some reason that didn't stick either. I brought down HT to 4X with frequency at 240 and multiplier of 9. The memory was set to 166.
I'm reading the manual to see if I missed anything the first time around. Hopefully I'll find something. It's puzzling why it doesn't want to stay.