Best socket 939 Motherboards

[Tech Tweaker]

What in your opinion are some of the best socket 939 (SLI, Crossfire, single slot) motherboards?

 

[QuietIce]

No doubt the ASUS A8N32 and DFI Ultra. Nothing else really came close to those two for OC'ing. Both would pull well over 300 MHz on the clock and the DFI and original version (not Rev.G) on the A8N32 would pull 350+ MHz. Solid power on both boards as well.

 

[psionic98]

I use the DFI nf4 sli.. solid board.. a shade below the ultra in performance, but like a lot of the good 939 boards, harder to find

 

[aries2110]

Had an A8N-E and an A8N5X back in the day. Both reasonable OCers and solid performers. Also totally agreed on the DFI NF4 Ultra. Was basically the de-facto 939 board of the day all the review sites used it. Wondering though how you plan to get your hands on anything 939 as it's mostly extinct and the good stuff that is left is being used

Really wish I would have kept my Toledo 4400+ that was a good-*** chip

 

[the_cultie]

DFI NF4 Ultra defiantly. Great board to overclock with, shame my cpu needs so much voltage to get anywhere above 2.7GHz. That or I was doing something stupid when I was last overclocking it

 

[QuietIce]

... shame my cpu needs so much voltage to get anywhere above 2.7GHz. That or I was doing something stupid when I was last overclocking it

It's not you. While I had great results with my early '07 Opty 165's, the Opty 180 I used as a main rig got stuck at 2.7 GHz with 1.45 vCore and needed 1.55 vCore to hit 2.8 GHz. If I hadn't been on water I wouldn't have tried it. Even so, I only ran 2.8 GHz one month a year for the SETI races.

 

[the_cultie]

It's not you. While I had great results with my early '07 Opty 165's, the Opty 180 I used as a main rig got stuck at 2.7 GHz with 1.45 vCore and needed 1.55 vCore to hit 2.8 GHz. If I hadn't been on water I wouldn't have tried it. Even so, I only ran 2.8 GHz one month a year for the SETI races.

Maybe it's time I tried to get a better overclocking chip for this board and let it and my water cooling shine

 

[boucher91]

i have an asus a8v that has ran at 2750 with a x24400 for bout 5 years and still working now as we speak...the board will go to about 320 fsb...this board has been folding since day 1...rock solid..bad part is only agp....

 

[QuietIce]

Maybe it's time I tried to get a better overclocking chip for this board and let it and my water cooling shine

Early '07 Opty 165's are excellent 'clockers but there are others scattered throughout '06. We have a fair database on the s939 CPUs, though it's not as big as the one XS has.

 

[Tech Tweaker]

Wondering though how you plan to get your hands on anything 939 as it's mostly extinct and the good stuff that is left is being used

Really wish I would have kept my Toledo 4400+ that was a good-*** chip

eBay of course. You'd be surprised how many of the older good boards are up for sale there on a weekly basis, I've seen a lot of Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe's, Asus A8N-SLI Premium's, DFI Ultra-D's, SLI-DR's and SLI-DR Expert boards (in more limited quantities on the Expert). Unfortunately they're not cheap though, with most of them going for $50-70 for just the board and no accessories, and going for upwards of one-hundred dollars if they come with accessories and/or a CPU.

I've bought two S939 boards off there so far myself, currently awaiting the arrival of an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I'm hoping that one is a working board, as it was an as-is sale and the seller hadn't tested it.

Speaking of the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo, those things are still worth a pretty penny, I've seen a lot sell for $60-80+. The Athlon 64 X2 4800+ chips are even more insane, I've never seen one of them sell for less than a hundred dollars. Kind of surprising considering some AM3 CPU's retail at similar prices.

 

[shadowdr]

I still have an A8N-E that I just upgraded from, really good mobo from a longevity standpoint. My x2 3800+(I think) ran at 274 for 2740 everyday, she would do up to 277 but the memory was borderline at that divider so any more MHZ's would handicap the fast memory to much. The caps still all look good but Asus chipset coolers are best removed and replaced. Exept for the memory bandwidth there isn't a huge noticable difference in this and my new rig, exept two more cores.

 

[aries2110]

Unfortunately they're not cheap though, with most of them going for $50-70 for just the board and no accessories,

LOL that's actually pretty cheap considering the features some of those boards had. I might look into getting a similar system and getting another 4400+. That was my favorite chip by far. 2.7GHz daily on a budget-ish ASUS board with the stock cooler. Also had an A8N32-SLI Deluxe later on. I used it with an X1800XT 512MB, which I still have lol. That was a good card! The rig in my signature is a direct piece-by-piece descendant from that build. Hence the name "Old Betsy" LOL.

 

[netmask]

I use the DFI nf4 sli.. solid board.. a shade below the ultra in performance, but like a lot of the good 939 boards, harder to find

I also use that thing. Actually I'd say it's the best mobo I've ever owned.

 

[apesoccer]

I was just searching to see if anybody had any old memory setups for my dfi expert...i've had a fx55 sitting in it with some old ocz plat stuff, which was oc'd for however many years. Swapped out the ocz for 4gb's of corsair, and the expert didn't like it...never did like new ram...but after putting a solo in the 2nd orange slot, it picked up ok after fiddling with the dram str and the different latencies...and moving it down to 166 sigh. Now i've got them up to 200, but at 2t not 1t. I've got it booting at 1t, but it's not solid. Was hoping to find where someone was using 4gb, but haven't had much luck. Back then we didn't have much call for 4gb, and oc'ing didn't really work with 4 sticks. =(

 

[zPacKRat]

I still run my Abit AN8-SLi with an opty 165 and 4GB of gskill ram as my media center pc and it runs great. It has spent pretty much all of it's life overclocked to 300 on the FSB. I alos have an Abit AN8 running a 3800+ that does not overclock well at all.

 

[Adragontattoo]

Pfsense mkII is about to be loaded on a 9npa Ultra to see if it works. If so, I will be running a OCed x2 3800 (cant remember what at).

Fathers day gift to my father will be a NAS. It will be a 4400 x2 with I dont remember what board.

My Backup/VM box is another 939 dual core. Im fighting a dual Optie board now, I wanted to use that for the Pfsense box instead. Why not run 8gb and 2x Optie 2xx series for a simple firewall?

All the rest of my rigs are Intel though.

 

[apesoccer]

Did you manage to get it to run 1t timings?

btw...
DFI Expert Spreadsheet
**Let me know if that works, i haven't used hotmail this way to link docs before.

 

[Tech Tweaker]

I think the DFI nF4 SLI Infinity is a good board.

Not one you come across everyday though, as in the past year or so I've only seen maybe three of them on eBay, and only one of those was in working order.

Unfortunately it's not the most aesthetically pleasing board, but it can do decent speeds. Mine has done 312.5MHz fsb with the memory at 1:1 and the processor and HTLink at lowered multipliers. Another plus is that you don't have to deal with those annoying jumpers for enabling SLI like on the LanParty boards.

 

[vanibanez]

I have both the DFI Ultra-D and the DFI Infinity. Both are very good. The Ultra-D tends to overclock higher and has many more features then the Infinity. I even smoked a s939 Athlon64 cpu on my Ultra-D and then upgraded to a dual core, it still works great!

 

[WhitehawkEQ]

Well, I can't say what 939 MB is the best as I only have 1 brand of 939 MB.
ABit AV8 with Athlon 64 3000+ cpu at 1.8GHZ.
It's still in use.