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Nforce 2,anyone know much about this chipset?

S

skipsneeky2

Diamond Member
Building up something of a retro box,i got these parts for free and instead of tossing or wasting them i figured for fun i would build this box maybe for some UT99 or Q3A.

Parts consist of a FIC Nforce 2 motherboard,1.5gb of ddr 400mhz which is filling the 2 slots.Even have a 64mb MSI MX4000 which looks like new with its shiny MSI letter shaped heatsink.

I collected what little info i could from google,like dual channel 400mhz memory support,built in Geforce MX4 chipset and 3gb of ram with a 3 ram slot motherboard.

The older Athlons didn't utilize the dual channel memory much cause of the slower bus,but it was handy for the IGP?I collected the support of a 3200+xp Barton which has a 400mhz bus.That should certainly utilize dual channel all the way?

Think it supports AGP 8X?Maybe you older builders could enlighten me on this build and mobo.🙂Share some stories or something,i just find this build kind of fascinating.:biggrin:
 
Dual channel was, in those days (as today) primarily a concern if you have 1) an IGP, or 2) a specific application that required gobs of memory bandwidth. I wouldn't worry about it if you have a separate GPU, but I wouldn't leave performance on the table either - it's not like this'll be an expensive rig.

I never had an nForce - I stuck with VIA chipsets in my Athlon days. Fanboy disease.
 
Decent Chipset AGP 8x should be supported, but I don't think it ever was much better than 4x anyway. Perhaps with later cards there was an advantage, but for those games it shouldn't matter.
 
Depending on what version of nForce 2 that is it may have the SoundStorm APU onboard which was (back then) a fancy onboard sound solution that allowed hardware acceleration and Dolby Digital Live (AC-3 5.1 transcoding).

Dual channel support is irrelevant because the EV-6 bus that the K-7 CPUs use is a 64-bit bus much like GTL+ bus used by LGA 775 CPUs.

Another notable nForce 2 feature was a lockable PCI/AGP bus which was a BIG deal for overclockers back then. It allowed the PCI and AGP bus clock to not be tied to the FSB clock.

nForce 2 was a good chipset back then but so was VIA KT400. I love nVIDIA chipsets but for socket A VIA KT880 is my favorite.

Also consider grabbing an Athlon XP-M because they run at a lower voltage (1.5v I think) and overclock really well (~2.5GHz pretty easy).
 
I remember how much people loved the chipset for its clear audio as well.

The IGP is only DX7 so I wouldn't use it for anything other than light browsing... even Youtube prefers better video these days.

(Boy I remember how excited I was to have it though... couldn't afford a video card so the IGP was a very big deal at the time!)
 
This one was housed in a Emachines,overclocking certainly is out of the question .This one must be the budget end Nforce 2 cause of the Realtek alc655 and the 2 ram slots.

About the dual channel,yeah it was something i read up on but wasn't exactly certain about.I think with certain AMD chipsets you could have 2 different sticks and still run dual channel if the speeds matched?I know with Intel you pretty much had to have 2 identical sticks for it to work.

Maybe mod the bios or something to unlock overclocking?Drop in a 3200+ maybe?I know it has a XP chip in there that someone upgraded but not sure on the model till i boot it back up.
 
I always found that running the memory at the same speed as the fsb gave me better performance than if I set the memory to a higher speed.

This was to do with the way NF2 boards synchronised with the memory. Out of sync negated the extra performance they were capable of.
 
skipsneeky2 said:
I think with certain AMD chipsets you could have 2 different sticks and still run dual channel if the speeds matched?I know with Intel you pretty much had to have 2 identical sticks for it to work.
Click to expand...

Intel's come a long way then... Since the late skt-775 days, they didn't even have to be the same GB amount to use a hybrid dual channel mode.

Either one should run DDR at whatever the lowest speed module is. You can probably lock the RAM speed to that lower speed in the unlikely event of any trouble.
 
The nforce 2 board I had claimed support for 3GB and DDR400 RAM, but IIRC could only handle a max of 2GB RAM at DDR400 speed, and would clock down to DDR333 for 3GB RAM.
 
I never knew that n-7s SoundStorm sound chip was a APU till now and one of the better onboard sound I had so thanks for the info Hi-Fi Man.
Not that I cant hear good after so much early music I once stood in front of TEN YEARS AFTER amps and it took hours to hear again.
Now the only pc I kept over the years was a abit n-7s with a xtpe and a ocz voltage gizmo that you stuck the memory in for higher volts.
I wonder if a small ssd would work on the Silicon Image chip.
 
Pulled this from inside of Windows for the cpu using cpu-z 1.58...

Its labeled as a Athlon MP with these specs...

1.2ghz
x12 multi
barton core
1.58v voltage
100bus
200 rated fsb
512mb l2 cache


Now the motherboard does allow bus,fsb and memory speeds and has defaulted it to 100 bus which i am guessing isn't correct cause of the multi.No chips i can see support that multi and that low of a clockspeed.

Athlon Mp so i googled is a server cpu?I hear there is mods to make a xp into a MP?Quite interesting attempting to google this thing.🙂
 
Have a look here: https://www.bios-mods.com/ for any potential mods. I would also check the motherboard for busted caps and find out the max FSB clock the board can run at before you upgrade the CPU. You might also want to grab a PCI Silicon Image SATA card. Many of the nicer motherboards for socket A had SI SATA controllers onboard including my Asus A7V880.
 
skipsneeky2 said:
Pulled this from inside of Windows for the cpu using cpu-z 1.58...

Its labeled as a Athlon MP with these specs...

1.2ghz
x12 multi
barton core
1.58v voltage
100bus
200 rated fsb
512mb l2 cache


Now the motherboard does allow bus,fsb and memory speeds and has defaulted it to 100 bus which i am guessing isn't correct cause of the multi.No chips i can see support that multi and that low of a clockspeed.

Athlon Mp so i googled is a server cpu?I hear there is mods to make a xp into a MP?Quite interesting attempting to google this thing.🙂
Click to expand...

An Athlon MP is the multi socket version. Many socket A motherboards default to the lowest multi after battery failure or some other failure. Try loading BIOS defaults then see what it says.
 
Hi-Fi Man said:
An Athlon MP is the multi socket version. Many socket A motherboards default to the lowest multi after battery failure or some other failure. Try loading BIOS defaults then see what it says.
Click to expand...

Tossed up the bus to 166 from the bios defaulted 100 and now cpu-z reads it as a Sempron 3000+ @2Ghz.🙂

Doesn't boot with the 200 bus option,booting to 100 or 133 cpu-z reads it as a Athlon Mp lol.
 
Damn that reminds me I still have like four Socket A/462 motherboards here, never used. VIA KT600, KT333CE, and NVIDIA NF2. A couple Socket 754, too.
 
I would remove the heatsink and see what this thing really is. When I overclocked my Athlon XP 2800+ the rating would change according to clock speed (from 2800+ to 3500+).
 
Hi-Fi Man said:
I would remove the heatsink and see what this thing really is. When I overclocked my Athlon XP 2800+ the rating would change according to clock speed (from 2800+ to 3500+).
Click to expand...

Yeah i will be doing that a bit later,played a bit of Q3A at 640x480 and it ran pretty damn well on the MX4000.Chokes a bit at 800x600 and its no fun at 1024x768.😛

Can't tell if there is even any difference between the Sempron 3000+ or the older Athlons like the 2700+ which cpu-world compares it to.It has the same amount of cache,same bus but slightly slower clockspeed.

I got another setup with a 754 socket mobo with a sis 964 chipset,a Sempron 3000+ is in there too but it has 128kb l2 versus the 512kb on the Socket a version which i find funny.
 
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The additional 256KiB of L2 on the Bartons didn't help that much. On the other hand, K8 loves additional L2 cache and scales well with more.

A 6600 GT would be a good match for that build.
 
I still have a Socket A (462) NF2 nVidia ChipSet MB in operation running Win7 32-Bit Ultimate - The Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 (rev. 2) that loves the Single Core AMD BartonXP. No issues running a 1.833 processor at 2200Mhz or the legendary AMD Barton 3200XP at 2500Mhz 24/7 with DDR1 OCZ Platinum sticks running at CAS 2-3-2-5-1T at around 1.6 v's and 418 Mhz's.

Another Great NF2 MB was the EpoX 8RDA+. Not saying your FIC is bad but the BIOS may be creepy.

They are AGP (Radeon 9800 and 2900XT Video Cards rock on this platform with a 120Hz CRT) with IDE HDD controller with a secondary SATA1 interface that can be rather flaky. Don't think the Bios is capable of Booting Sata. 80GB 7200 rpm IDE Maxtor Diamonds HDD's where and still are unbreakable (Maxtor SATA's Died - Too Hot).

I still run a GA-KN8 SLI with a PCIe nVidia GTX280 and 3 sticks of 1 GB OCZ Platinum at 2600Mhz's - You can load either Win7 32-Bit or 64-Bit on this MB as they are socket 939 and support the AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core AMD Barton CPU and a DDR2 nForce Platform is best for a 64-Bit OS as you can go beyond a 4GB volume of ram were a 32-Bit OS doesn't.

Another fun MB was the old ASUS VIA ChipSet P3V4X Slot 1 loaded with either 95B or WinSE which could run a 1.3Mhz Flip Chip PPGA Intel Celron Taulitan at 1600 to 1800 Mhz clock between 128 to around 138 Mhz's using a vidded MSI CPU converter card with either a Radeon 9800 or 2600XT AGP with VX 150Mhz SD Ram. Eat your heart out Abit 440BX - LOL.

Them were the days when nVidia ChipSet MB's with AMD CPU's and ATI Video Cards ruled Intel and nVidia Video Cards plus DDR1 OCZ Ram was the best. Quite the recipe to keep the NF2 under 2.0v's and under control with a 1LB Copper Heat Sink and extremely noisy Tornado Fan sitting on that Barton XP - What Not - I swear my tower was a more powerful vacuum cleaner then my "W"ife's Filter Queen ;o)

Win7 supports both the nVidia NF2 (7N400) and NF4 (KN8) MB's without you having to supply ChipSet Drivers.

Build the Platform, frame it and hang it on your wall.

PS: I believe there were some nVidia KN8 MB's that supported DDR2 - Hence more ram volume for 64-Bit Systems. I think MSI built a nVidia NF4 KN8 939 Socket MB with a Red PCB that was DDR2 with SATA1 Controllers - Specifically designed for the MS 64-Bit WinXP OS. Much faster then an Intel P4 platform.
 
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Definitely check caps as well.

nForce2 is when I started building my own. Fond memories.

Sent off a monster ASUS A7N8X Deluxe rev2 to some family a few years back. Had SATA, dual NIC, Firewire, Soundstorm. Not sure which CPU I threw on (probably around the XP 2400 range) but it had the big honkin Swiftech MCX462-V on, the corresponding Northbridge HSF, and IIRC, a Radeon 9700 Pro with a big Zalman passive cooler (ZM80D-HP?). Think they still use it as a server.

Yes, I want it back. 😛
 
Definitely check caps as well.
Click to expand...
At least I'm artistic with caps - LOL. I use caps to "EMPHAZISE" what I'm trying to get across.

Glad we both agree that the nVidia ChipSet MB"s were GREAT in their time and now belong framed on a wall ;o)
 
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No problems going from winXP to win7, even without any modified drivers. No go with win7 to win10 though. This is with modified drivers.
 
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