- Joined
- Apr 20, 2003
I just recently took the plunge to socket 754 with a Chaintech VNF3-250 value motherboard and a A64 3000+. Everything seems to be running fine with a few caveats.
1. The CPU temp sensor is way off. It reads 10C when I boot and then just kind of wanders all over the place during use. Anyone know if there is a resolution to this issue, or do I have to wait for a bios update like the ZNF3-250 folks did?
2. Are there any known issues with this board and certain PCI devices? I ask because I had problems with corrupted audio with my Audigy2 ZS and my generic 56K modem was having random disconnects under Windows 2000. Upgrading to XP seems to have solved the problems....but I'm still worried that it could be a deeper problem.
Now some impressions:
The board costed $75. For that money I would say it looks to be a great board. I also got a Retail A643000+ for $150, the only model that I could guarantee would be a CG stepping from Newegg at the time I ordered.
It does not give access to the CPU multiplier but does let you fiddle with FSB, HT, and voltage for the CPU, vdd, chipset, and agp bus. It seems to overvolt approximately +.5 volts (assuming that reading is accurate, I have no way of testing) So far with the stock retail heatsink and AS Ceramique I've been able to run it at 250x10 for ~2500mhz with no troubles with cpu voltage set to 1.55 in the bios (1.61 reported) - it passes Prime95 testing and I played Doom3 for about an hour. I'm a little wary of running at those speeds though until I can get some more accurate temp readings so I've dropped it back to stock for the moment. The heatsink was getting quite hot.
If you're looking for a cheap way to jump into the 64-bit world then I would recommend this board so far - it isn't feature rich but so has yielded good overclocks and performance. It games much faster than my old Barton 2500+@ 2.4Ghz and I was very impressed that it scaled up to 2.5 so easily.
1. The CPU temp sensor is way off. It reads 10C when I boot and then just kind of wanders all over the place during use. Anyone know if there is a resolution to this issue, or do I have to wait for a bios update like the ZNF3-250 folks did?
2. Are there any known issues with this board and certain PCI devices? I ask because I had problems with corrupted audio with my Audigy2 ZS and my generic 56K modem was having random disconnects under Windows 2000. Upgrading to XP seems to have solved the problems....but I'm still worried that it could be a deeper problem.
Now some impressions:
The board costed $75. For that money I would say it looks to be a great board. I also got a Retail A643000+ for $150, the only model that I could guarantee would be a CG stepping from Newegg at the time I ordered.
It does not give access to the CPU multiplier but does let you fiddle with FSB, HT, and voltage for the CPU, vdd, chipset, and agp bus. It seems to overvolt approximately +.5 volts (assuming that reading is accurate, I have no way of testing) So far with the stock retail heatsink and AS Ceramique I've been able to run it at 250x10 for ~2500mhz with no troubles with cpu voltage set to 1.55 in the bios (1.61 reported) - it passes Prime95 testing and I played Doom3 for about an hour. I'm a little wary of running at those speeds though until I can get some more accurate temp readings so I've dropped it back to stock for the moment. The heatsink was getting quite hot.
If you're looking for a cheap way to jump into the 64-bit world then I would recommend this board so far - it isn't feature rich but so has yielded good overclocks and performance. It games much faster than my old Barton 2500+@ 2.4Ghz and I was very impressed that it scaled up to 2.5 so easily.