Need new motherboard for Opty 165

[cmichaelt]

Need help selecting a board for an Opty 165. Also need vdimm to be able to go to 2.8volts because i have OCZ Platinum Ram that need 2.8volts to overclock. I tried to do the vdimm mod on my Asrock Dual Sata and failed miserably tonight. Computer turns on but doesn't post. I think i might have burned something guess my 15 watt soldering iron was too much, worked fine on my wii.

also have a pci-e video card. looking at ebay as probably the place to buy unless you guys know of any online retailers that still sell 939 boards. i notice that there are a lot of asrock boards on ebay. thinking of getting a replacement but that means that i'd still need to do vdimm mod though this time i think i'll go the solderless route if i do. though i'd prefer a board that already has a high enough vdimm.

also have a ninja scythe cooler

plan on building a new system around this coming december/january. so this just need to hold me till the end of the year.

 

[cmichaelt]

I'm thinking of going with something like this board:

http://cgi.ebay.com/DFI-LANPARTY-NF...=39:1|66:3|65:1|240:1318&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14

looked around the forum and this seems to be a fairly like board in its day.

 

[Dolk]

Good choice for a board. That should do what you need to do.

BTW, since you are building a new system come this December, go as cheep as possible. No ocing for a month or so is hard, I know, but sometimes you have to sacrifice things you enjoy.

I believe newegg still sells 1 or 2 boards.

 

[cmichaelt]

thanks for the reaffirmation on board choice. checked newegg and they sell only expensive server boards. yea for the new system i'll probably be going with an intel set-up since they seem to be doing extremely well. not sure if i'll go quad just yet, but if the prices are right i could see myself doing it.

 

[QuietIce]

The ASUS A8N32-SLI is also a quality choice for OC'ing s939 chips. But don't ask me, I have five of them running right now so I'm a little bias ...

 

[Dolk]

I've got one myself.

Just be ready to spend up to $110-$180 on the board. I got mine some where around $150.

 

[cmichaelt]

thanks for the other recommendation. I think i'll just stick to trying to obtain a DFI board since i can get it new for cheaper which is my plan to last me till the end of the year.

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

If you don't need SLI, maybe consider one of the Foxconn NF4UK8AA boards Geeks.com has for $35. I have one and would highly recommend it for a cheap and reliable option. It's a little bit counterintuitive to overclock it, as you have to mess with a couple poorly documented jumper settings, but once I figured it out I had my 165 running at 2.7ghz. (Limit of the chip, not the board, I think.)

Only issue might be the lack of memory voltage options... it only goes up to 2.8V, so it can prolly run your ram but not give you a lot of headroom. The chipset fan is also incredibly annoying and will die after a few months, so get one of the Evercool heatsinks to replace it. I think that's pretty much the norm for Nforce4 boards, though.

 

[cmichaelt]

If you don't need SLI, maybe consider one of the Foxconn NF4UK8AA boards Geeks.com has for $35.

seriously considering this board. the price right and the reviews are fairly mixed on it. replacing the chipset fan seems like a minor nuisance that i can deal with when it arises. Also buying from a retailer is much more comforting to me than ebay. thanks for the recommendation. been looking online for all reviews on the board.

if i can get the dfi board for $10 more than the foxconn board. which would you choose?

 

[QuietIce]

The DFI is the hands down winner. The ASUS A8N32 and the DFI Ultimate boards are the best s939 boards there are. Other DFI boards are very, very good - only slightly less desirable than their big brother ...

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

been looking online for all reviews on the board.

There are a few reviews out there, if you do a bit of searching, but all the ones I've found tested the board with early revisions of the BIOS, and they also didn't apparently know how to switch it out of the 'safe settings' mode to enable higher overclocking. If you want more info, though, go look on the OC Workbench forums, there's a huge thread about it.

With a $10 price difference between it and a DFI... well, for me it would depend on where the DFI would be coming from. If it was $10 more for a new-in-box DFI from a retailer, then I'd go for it... might as well. But, $10 more for a used or refurbished board from eBay or some random obscure Yahoo storefront... absolutely not. Really, the DFI isn't that much better than the Foxconn, unless you need to squeeze every last single mhz out of your chip.

 

[cmichaelt]

Alright i've actually decided to go ahead and order two of the foxconn's. I remembered i have an extra processor and ram i could use. might set up a server for files with it or sell it off as a cheap system or even donate it, who knows.

@Old Thrashbarg yea i don't plan on milking everything out of it and yes the DFI boards were from an ebay power seller who is still fairly new but the price i said was after a rebate.

with that said I'm gonna need another video card. i was thinking since i'm gonna upgrade my system eventually that i'd buy a card that i could use in the future system like a 4850. I'm well aware that my pretty much the entire system will be a bottle neck on performance, but i'm thinking that it'd still be a few steps up from at 7600GT.

Which leaves me to my last question for a little while hopefully: Will either the 4850 work with the foxconn and is there a major advantage to dual slot coolers vs single slot other than lower ambient temps in case?

Also thank you everyone so far for your input!

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

Well, dunno about the dual-slot vs. single-slot thing, but I don't see why a 4850 wouldn't work fine in the system. And also, with a decent overclock, I wouldn't expect there to be much bottlenecking going on either, remember that the 939 dual cores are pretty much even clock-for-clock with the newer AM2 X2's. Not that it would really matter anyway, any bottleneck would only really show up at lower resolutions anyhow. The 4850 is a pretty good deal right now, so may as well go for it.

Now, as for what you need to know about the Foxconn board: Make sure you're running a newer BIOS, anything before version P55 is crap... I think the version is at P66 or something now, I'm still running P61 and it's been working fine. If you have an older version and have to flash update, it's a pain to do, not gonna lie. You have to enable the flashing mode with a jumper near the CMOS battery (a point they leave out in the official instructions), and then flash it the oldschool way from a boot floppy.

After you've done the preliminary setup, look under the bottom PCI slot, there's a jumper labelled "ROM Table select." Set that to user mode, otherwise you'll be limited to about 225mhz HTT. Again, there's no mention of that anywhere in the documentation. With that done, you should be set to go.

My board seems to be capable of about 310-315mhz HTT with a bit of a voltage bump to the chipset... don't do that on the POS stock chipset cooler, though, just take whatever you can get from stock voltage (prolly around 290mhz) or upgrade the cooler.

 

[cmichaelt]

Old Thrashbarg,

Thanks a lot man I appreciate the knowledge before hand on things that need to be setup. The boards arrive today and I should be able to tinker tomorrow night. Will need to get a floppy drive since I don't have one. I'll update with some results come Monday most likely.

 

[White_Pawn]

I loved my DFI-ultra d until i killed it. You can also do a SLI and SATA 2 mod on the ultra-d to let it run 8x/8x sli.

 

[cmichaelt]

Well got the system installed and it's up and running off my previous XP install. Might do a fresh install not sure yet. I checked newegg for the Evercool chipset fan and found only heatsinks for ram. where else can i find something that'll fit the chipset for the board? and with that concern i think i'm limited to something close to stock size when i do get my 4850.

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

I checked newegg for the Evercool chipset fan and found only heatsinks for ram.

Yeah, they've been sold out for months, for whatever reason. SVC still has 'em though. And yeah, it'll be a close fit, but it'll work fine. The Evercools are actually the DFI officially recommended replacements for their boards, FWIW.

There are some other ones which will work too. I had the same problem finding an Evercool, before I ran across 'em on SVC, so I just stuck a cheap 50mm "Titan" branded VGA cooler on mine. It was a tight fit, I had to nip off the end of the locking tab for the graphics card slot and barely cleared the SATA ports on the other side, but it fit underneath my 8600GT with about a mm to spare. Works alright, still a bit noisy but not too bad with the fan at 7V.

 

[cmichaelt]

Just wanted to say thanks for the awesome and cheap recommendation Old Thrashbarg. I am finally able to OC my opty 165 to 2700MHz with stock vcore. loosened up my ram timings to and running it at DDR490 3-3-3-6 @ 2.8V. benchmarked faster than DDR400 with 2-3-2-5. Just need to wait for a paycheck or two now so i can get my 4850 and probably a new power supply.

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

Glad to help, and congrats on the nice clocks.

I'm eventually gonna have to put some better RAM in mine, see exactly what I can get out of it, now that it's been (long since) bumped down out of everyday use. I've just been running it with some crappy value ram, clocks to DDR466 but only at 3-4-3-8 timings and 2.8V. Who knows, maybe I'll even get adventurous and try to work out a Vdimm mod for it... 3.0V would sure be handy.