BD7-II a good board for $25?

I built my friend a P4 system this summer, with a BD7-II. We could overclock to 133Mhz fsb, for a no-sweat 2.13Ghz on his 1.6A, but the board couldn't retain the overclocked settings after a shutdown or restart. We updated the BIOS and still no avail.

We even RMA'd the board and got a new one from NewEgg, and it still had the same problem- so he eventually replaced it with an Asus P4B533, and the BD7-II is in its box right now, only used for a few months. Any way to fix this?

He offered to sell it for $25 just to get rid of it.

I figure- if C1 stepping 1.8A's are more abundant next month, I could pick one up for ~$140, and this board for $25- and along with my 512MB stick of XMS 3500 (getting newest revision after last stick had problems), could hit 3Ghz+ speeds (assuming that I can fix it that is)?

I could double my Mhz for $155

The low voltages on the board are a concern- volt mods available?
And is it capable of doing the 200Mhz mem speeds to utilize the PC-3500?

Yeah, it works. I paid 83.50 for the one I have. The voltage readings are simply innacurate (.5V low on the 12V line on mine). Temps read 5C higher than reality and the board works great. It is stable and will produce high fsb and memory speeds along with leading performance with willing components like you are contemplating. The only really limiting thing about the board is the lowish 1.65V maximum Vcore and 2.65V max memory voltage.

Even so it ran my sister's late B0 2.4b and Kingston Value Ram PC2700 at 162fsb with 3:4 mode enable producing 3006MHz and 432MHz DDR memory spped. It did cas 2-7-3-3 at this speed. This was good for 14.4K 3DMark with my rather poor Ti4400 that tolerates only 300/650MHz. I normally run the system with my old 1.6a at 162fsb for 2592MHz, dropping the 3DMark to 13.8K. With te 1.6a the machine cranks out the SETI benchmark work unit in a RDRAM-matching 2 hours and 38 minutes. Sandra buffered memory banwidth is 3263.

There is a volt mod for the Vdimm limitation that will allow 3.2V or more. The Vcore is overcome by vid-pin modifications. A $25 dollar BD7-II would be an excellent opportunity to try these things out, I will do them to my board when I can afford to replace it if I muck it up.