What nForce4 Ultra Socket-939 mobo has the least problems and is simplest to run?

[yacoub]

I am buying tonight or tomorrow morning so answers are appreciated!

 

[rise]

are you in denial or something no overclocking seriously or are you one of those closet clockers.

anyway, i've had 0 problems with my sli-dr and i am awaiting an ultra-d. at stock i don't think you have much to be concerned about so long as you use the 24 pin native quality psu.

you may want to browse around dfi.street and see but i dunno what to say really, i'd expect any mobo i ordered to run perfectly at stock.

 

[ryanv12]

The DFI is simple? Those DFI motherboards are more complex and weird than your woman.

As it is, I had a DFI Pro 875B and it rejected my valueram.

Anyways, it seems that every nforce4 motherboard has weird quirks. I haven't really heard any negatives about the chaintech model, and it seems to be a very good price. That's the board I would get.

 

[yacoub]

Well I was originally going for the DFI Ultra-D or whatever it's called (the non-SLI model of their three LanParty NF4 Ultra boards) but it seems like it will take a while to configure and setup instead of the simplicity of most other boards.
I just want something easy that will work and do so quietly so I don't have to deal with problems and preferably less fan noise. Although maybe a slow northbridge fan is quiet and not an issue in a case with a GPU that has a fan and heatsink and a case fan or two anyway eh?

 

[ryanv12]

Text

there it is....it even has passive chipset cooling. I'm very much a fan of that.

 

[yacoub]

Yeah I was just looking at that one earlier but some of the reviews kinda scared me off lol. Maybe I should just stick with the DFI and hope the default settings work fine? I dunno. I just want to be able to install the processor and ram and not dick around with it until one day when I'm bored and maybe have the time (a day which may never come - that's why I don't really care about overclocking right now).

 

[rise]

dfi at "optimized defaults" is easy as hell. people make it complicated.

heres my first boot-
power on
delete to enter bios
go to "load optimised settings'- hit yes
go to advanced settings- take off the logo splash screen and set your boot priority.
go to "save sttings and exit"- hit yes

boom, off you go. some bios have memtest on automatically on first boot so you need to disable that if you don't want to run it but you should do a pass anyway.

after loading optimised settings you can go around and disable/change whatever you want but nearly everything is set to auto. all its going to do is read your rams spd and run.

as ryan says, all nf4s have a bit of quirkiness. but at stock its really pretty easy.

 

[BTA]

My vote goes to the Chaintech

btw the new revision has active cooling on the northbridge

 

[indianduddawg47]

my vote goes to chaintech as well. you can get a zalman northbridge cooler anyway.

 

[Devlyn]

Does the Chaintech board allow good overclocking as well? I like the DFI Ultra-D but I ddon't have any need for two video card slots... I just want a mobo that I'll be able to do minimal overclocking on my 3000+ venice chip.

 

[indianduddawg47]

read the anandtech review. i think the fsb wouldn't go farther than 233 mhz because of limitations (although 233 was stable say'eth anandtech).

 

[yacoub]

Does the Zalman northbridge cooler heatsink fit without interfering with either a PCI-E GPU like an X800XL or an XP-120 CPU cooler?

 

[indianduddawg47]

on my msi nforce board, i had to mod the zalman just a bit (a pair of pliers will do the trick, the metal is very soft). I am using a zalman vf700alcu on my gpu.

 

[BTA]

I dont see what the problem is with the current stock northbridge cooler on the chaintech anyway.

As for overclockability of the Chaintech, I'm perfectly stable at 285 right now, i've gotten it up to 300 as well.
This is on a 3000+ venice

 

[GadgetBuilder]

All mobo's are an adventure and a learning experience. The VNF4 was very easy to get going in my simple ( one disk, no raid, one optical drive, one floppy) setup - the hardware just snapped together and ran memtest86 fine. Formatted and partitioned with BootitNG running off floppy. Booted XP CD in the SATA drive (no special drivers needed) and in 20 minutes XP was running. Initially, no BIOS settings needed - it ran fine with defaults.

The nVidia drivers loaded off the included CD without incident. Unfortunately, I ran into some of the driver problems which bedevil NF4 based systems but am able to live with these problems.

The Sonata case is reasonably quiet and the VNF4 has fan speed control based on temperature so the fan noise is audible only under high CPU load or high ambient temperature. BIOS provides fan speed control but I use SpeedFan to keep the temperature lower than the available settings in BIOS.

Bottom line: I like my VNF4 and it sounds as if it would fit your needs, as would any of several mobo's currently available.

Visit the PCPER Chaintech forum for more details on user experiences with this board:
http://forums.pcper.com/forumdisplay.php?f=46

 

[yacoub]

Thanks for that info, Gadg... question - what is BootItNG and why did you do that instead of booting WinXP CDROM and using it to set up your partitions?

 

[GadgetBuilder]

Originally posted by: yacoub
Thanks for that info, Gadg... question - what is BootItNG and why did you do that instead of booting WinXP CDROM and using it to set up your partitions?

BootitNG is a stand-alone partitioning utility with other capabilities, the most important of which is imaging of my partitions. I image my working partitions to a separate "Image" partition frequently and copy an image to DVD every couple of months in case the hard drive dies -- call me paranoid, but I lost some info due to problems with earlier versions of Windows; XP has been very solid on my VNF4 other than when I loaded the nVidia drivers. BootitNG allowed me to recover quickly from a number of my failed "experiments" with the nVidia mobo drivers while finding a setup I could live with -- far faster than reloading XP.

Another benefit of BootitNG is the capability of having more than the normal number of partitions, where you can select which partitions will be accessible easily.

No connection to BootitNG, just a happy customer (not a free utility). Similarly, I like SpeedFan but have no connection there either.

 

[the cobbler]

read the anandtech review. i think the fsb wouldn't go farther than 233 mhz because of limitations (although 233 was stable say'eth anandtech).

That is a very old review. This issue was fixed with bios v2.0 a few months ago.

I have had mine at 350HTT and was just plain afraid to go beyond that point. There are a slew of people running the board at 300+HTT right now, see PCPerspective Chaintech forum.

If you want passive cooled, just take off the 40mm fan Chaintech added to the VNF4 in Revision 2 board.

Board is an extremely strong overclocker. My Winnie 3200+ is running 2.48ghz at 1.52v actual and stock cooling. Lots of OC headroom left.

Just be sure when you buy the board to use the v4.0 bios, not the v5.0.

 

[yacoub]

What do you mean v4.0 BIOS? Use an older BIOS than it comes with? Or does it come with even older that "v4.0"?

 

[the cobbler]

I believe even the newest revision comes with the v1.0 or v2.0 bios. I think I have the newest revision, dark brown pcb with active cooling on the NF4 with a chrome Chaintech faceplate on the 40mm fan. came with v1.0.

Don't use the v5.0 (newest) unless you have a Toledo or are doing a fresh build, many people have had problems with Windows after flashing.

 

[yacoub]

It would be a fresh build, so would I want to download the BIOS onto a floppy ahead of time on this old PC, and somehow flash the new mobo before I install Windows then?

 

[GadgetBuilder]

Conventional wisdom on flashing: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" A bad flash, although unlikely, can ruin your whole day.

Use the supplied BIOS for a while (weeks) until you're sure everything is working as you expect. Once you're sure it is stable, visit PCPER and use their WinFlash info to update to v4.0 BIOS. I ran the V1 BIOS for 4 months before updating to V4 and see little difference between the two in my simple (non-oc'ed) setup.

All of the VNF4 BIOS's except v5 work OK; v5 works too but there are some quirks you should look into before trying it.
Edit:
See: http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=392726

 

[yacoub]

Such as? I'm curious what is wrong with v5. Thanks.

 

[MrControversial]

Originally posted by: yacoub
Yeah I was just looking at that one earlier but some of the reviews kinda scared me off lol. Maybe I should just stick with the DFI and hope the default settings work fine? I dunno. I just want to be able to install the processor and ram and not dick around with it until one day when I'm bored and maybe have the time (a day which may never come - that's why I don't really care about overclocking right now).

I have the VNF4 Ultra and with the latest BIOS update I've had ZERO problems with it. The first couple of BIOS' have some weird issues with the onboard audio and the Ethernet, but the latest BIOS fixes that. I even got a decent 500 MHz overclock.

 

[MrControversial]

Originally posted by: the cobbler
I believe even the newest revision comes with the v1.0 or v2.0 bios. I think I have the newest revision, dark brown pcb with active cooling on the NF4 with a chrome Chaintech faceplate on the 40mm fan. came with v1.0.

Don't use the v5.0 (newest) unless you have a Toledo or are doing a fresh build, many people have had problems with Windows after flashing.

I've already flashed to v5.0 and have no problems. The only issue I had was getting past 250HTT. I'm at 250HTT now, but I'm able to run my memory dividers at 5:4 for a slight 16MHz memory overclock which I couldn't do before on the older BIOS. V5.0 also fixes the annoying vcore error where you had to go to 1.6V vcore just to get to 1.5V. If people who don't know the board try to OC with that BIOS they could end up frying their CPU because they'd keep going up just to keep the vcore at 1.5V.

I suggest going to the BIOS and loading default settings, download and flash the new BIOS and overclock again. I think the new BIOS affects the overclock by 50MHz which is negligible since you probably can get a better memory OC which ends up being better. With the new BIOS my 3D Marks are 500 points higher with a 50MHz slower OC.