nForce2: The Experience

A little while back, we asked members of the audience to relay their experiences, about a particular product. We rather liked what we got, so now we’re going to expand this a bit.

This time around, we’re going to ask those who have bought a motherboard based on the nForce2 chipset to tell us about their experiences.

Some examples of these boards are:

Abit NF-7
Asus A7N8X
Epox EP-8RDA+
Leadtek K7NCR18D
MSI K7N2L

Still Experimenting

We’d like to make this a regular feature of this website, but we’re still feeling our way through on this (and seeing if this provides real value or is just reinventing the forum wheel), so please comment on what you like or dislike about this.

However, this is not meant to mention or diagnose each and every problem you might run across. This is meant to identify common problems a good number of people are having, not “Solve my particular problem.”

Sorry, we just don’t have the time or resources to do more than that. (I see a lot of these one-of-a-kind problems, and frankly, I’d want the machine in my hands to be able to seriously figure out what’s wrong with it, and I can’t do that.)

What We Would Like To See

What we would like to see in responses are answers to the following questions:

  1. What board did you buy?
  2. Why did you decide to buy this particular board when you did, and what did you expect from it?
  3. What happened when you installed and started using the board?
  4. What if any problems did you have with the board?
  5. Is there any other item of note you think anybody interested in buying the board should know about?
  6. What did you do about those problems?
  7. Were you able to resolve these problems?
  8. How satisfied (or not) you are with your purchase and why?

  9. What if anything have you learned from this experience?

Helpful Hints

It would be very helpful if you included the following in your answer:

  • When you bought the board and from whom you bought it.
  • Your configuration (or at least the CPU and memory you used).
  • Roughly how much time you spent getting the board to do what you wanted it to do.
  • How the amount of time you spent trying to get it working right compared to earlier motherboards you installed.
  • Whether or not you RMAed the board, and your experience with that.

  • Please indicate whether or not you would like your name and/or email address attached to any comments we use.

Please Be Complete

A motherboard is a lot more difficult to judge than a USB thumb drive. One big problem with forums is that people tend to leave out a lot of necessary information. So please address all the question (even if to say “I don’t know/didn’t do that”).

If you’ve found answers to problems in other places, please share links to those solutions.

This isn’t just a questionaire about equipment; it’s also a questionaire about people, their expectations, and their level of patience.

Like it or not, most motherboards when they come out tend to be at least a little raw on the edges, if not more. On the one hand, if someone decides to buy a motherboard the first day it’s available, it’s simply unrealistic these days to expect it to work flawlessly.

On the other hand, at what point does a product go from being almost cooked to not cooked enough? How much effort and patience should pioneers have?

Some might fault those who do two things, then RMA the product (if they can), for lack of patience and/or skill, but consider that in the grand scheme of things, they may be right. Doesn’t that at least send a corrective message through the channels that too raw is no good? In contrast, does fighting and struggling with equipment tell the makers of the equipment is keep doing more of the same?

Results

What we would like to do is present separate comments for each motherboard (at least for those for which we receive enough comment).

Some may say, “Give them a chance to fix it.” Well, people ought to know these boards need some fixing at this point, and what needs to be fixed, so they have more to base their decision on.

We will update the article to mention fixes to the equipment after real people tell us the fix actually fixes, but we’ll leave the earlier comments as an indicator of just how long it took to fix them.

Since the nForce2s really haven’t been around all that long, what we’ll do is ask again in a few weeks, and then get new opinions on the products and write a new article. (In the future, we’ll probably take a first look at a class of product a week or two after introduction, then take a second look about a month later.)

You know where to find me.

Email Ed

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