Cahintech 7KDD experiences, good or bad?

Chaintech 7KDD experiences, good or bad?

Hey guys, I just got one of these from Newegg's refurb section for $119. I got it in yesterday and it was still NIB and the sticker on the antistatic bag wasn't even broken. It came with all the goodies and disks too, unlike the last 2 refurb duallies I bought from them.

Anyways, I was wondering what kind of success or problems anyone has had with this mobo. This is the first Chaintech board of any kind I've bought and don't know what kind of reliability or reputation they have.

Thanks in advance for the input.

I cant say I've ever heard of the Chaintech dually board - but then I havent really seen that many Chaintech boards at all for about the past couple years.

Do you know if it allows FSB, Vcore and Multi adjustments? Let us know how you get on .

Only bad thing I've read is about its raid controller being a bit slow and about it causing audio stutter when used. I think that's common for the chipset though, when onboard raid and sound are both used.

I'm pretty sure that board's bios overclocks with vcore and FSB, just not multpliyer. I think the FSB goes well above the 150 of the MSI K7D though actaully being stable at say 160FSB is probably not very common.

I know that the board doesn't have multiplier control. The only dual AMD board with working multiplier control is the MSI K7D Master. Of course, if you're willing to do the pin-mod, then you don't need multiplier control, anyway. I have it, but I'm running dual Bartons at 15X. The only want to set multipliers over 12.5X, is to do the pin-mod, or mod the chips. With the high speed of chips, we have nowadays, the multiplier control of the K7D is getting to be less and less used.

Well, here's my experience with it so far.

The board has a decent layout and does have the 4 holes around the sockets for mounting a wb or hsf's that use those holes for mounting. Clearance around the sockets isn't bad either; I have a Swiftech MCX462+ on cpu1 and a SLK900 on cpu2. My 2 80mm Delta fans do touch together but they do fit. This board would probably have no problems at all with 2-SLK800's or SLK900's, don't know if 2 MCX462+ heatsinks would fit. Dropped in 2 Tbred B's that I had previously modded to a 16 multi, just enabled SMP via the L5 bridge mod. I also hard modded the L11 bridges to max vcore to 1.85v.

Booted up, no problems, went into bios and watched temps for a while. This board doesn't use the on-die temp diode of the proc; it uses socket thermistors that look like the ones used in the old Iwill KK266 boards. They have some decent memory timing adjustments in bios, but no vdimm adjustments. The fsb speed can be adjusted up to 166, for the adventurous among us. Also, there is no vcore adjustments either in bios or by jumper on the mobo; you have to hard code the vcore via the proc or pin modding.

Installed a single hard drive on the raid ide and installed WinXP pro with no problems. The board seems to be very stable; as least as stable as my K7D and A7M266-D boards.

I'm presently running at 138 X 16 with no problems and totally stable. One good oddity I've noticed is that this board has seemed to stabilize the SSE execution of one of the XP's I stuck in it. It is an early stepping XP2400 I had running in a KG7-R board and it would hard lock while folding Gromacs when using SSE extentions. It would fold for weeks on end when using 3DNow! but would hard lock within 24 hours when using SSE. It has now been folding for 2 days without any lockup problems and it's in the same rig the KG7 came out of, with all the other components staying the same.

BTW, the manual (such as it is ) states that you must use registered dimms in this board; I bet it would run with unbuffered dimms like my other 2 duallies but I already had the reg from the KG7 to install on it.

All in all, it was a real good bargain for $119. We'll see how it holds up long term now.

Anyone who is looking for a dual board to build and doesn't mind doing a little pin modding or hard coding of the procs, this would be a decent choice to get. Especially since newegg is no longer carrying the K7D boards any more.

I bought this board a while ago and I has worked fine. I have two AMD MP 1.2's oc to 1.45 each. I have four hard drives on the RAID totaling 260gig and I have had no problems. The space around the processors is fine, cause I have two swifty 5002 waterblocks. The only oc ability in the BIOS is the FSB. I think it goes up to about 164 give or take a few. Over I ahve been exetremely pleased with this board considering the price.