939 Motherboard Question

[阿搜]

I am interested in buying a 939 motherboard now. Not interested in SLI currently though.

I have the following candidates:
ASUS A8N-E
ASUS A8N-SLI premium
ASUS A32N-SLI deluxe

The reason for the 2nd/3rd, I like the quiet pipe for heat sink.
I want to know the performace difference between Nforce ultra and Nforce SLI, Nforce SLIx16.


thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[lushan]

Nforce ultra 只有一条pcie 16X
Nforce SLI 提供2条pcie 在你插上两条卡的时候 会自动平衡为 8x+8x
Nforce SLIx16. 会自动平衡为 16x+168x

 

[starinthesky]

楼主说得第一款主板早就停产N年了，除了2手，新的肯定买不到。其余的2楼说得很详细了了，如果你不想组SLi就干脆上NF4Utra吧。建议你先到电脑电看看目前还有哪些是可以买到的。最近新平台狂出，939已经面临淘汰，估计939得主板货不会很全，选择余地不大。

 

[阿搜]

thanks, starinthesky.

1. NF4Ultra is A8NE.
2. 939 's performance is almost same as AM2. Now it's the best time to buy 939, because the price is better than AM2. I am not doing upgrade every year, chasing the best performance is not wise.

 

[Videocard]

NFu的价格基本上和SLI差不多

还是sli的吧 毕竟将来还是有可能升级的

最好还是ati的主板 不仅可以crossfire 还可以物理计算

 

[阿搜]

NF ultra 's price is way lower than SLI.

I asked myself, I will never buy two video card, playing video game.
So there's no point of SLI.

I trust Nforce 's chipset, I am still using amd 2500+ and asus a8n7 deluxe, that nforce chipset is very good.

 

[阿搜]

The reason i am comparing these is, it's not only the difference on SLI.
Asus aims different motherboard for different market.
NF ultra looks cheap, lacks of other connectors and features.
The premium version really attract me by the heat sink pipe.

 

[Stitch]

Hi,阿搜, there is something you might want to pay attention if you decide to go with nForce4: the chipset doesn't quite like SATAII,especially the ones from Maxtor. This is from both my personal experience and their official support. Look at here and here

Although they declared this issue has been resolved and should not happen on newer product, but as far as I know, it was still there and the solution appeartly is not good enough. At first I thought this is a MB issue so I updated the MB BIOS, no help at all! After 2 days research I figured out it was a day-one problem and neither Nvidia nor Maxtor can do much about it. Maxtor tried its best, but appearently, it didn't help much. So if you do decide to go with NF4U, don't buy Maxtor sataII at least. What you can buy? For one thing I know that Dell is using Hitachi sataII HD in their high end game computer. So I would assume that this is a good start point because I don't think Dell would risk its product line without test it first.

I really hope this issue has been fixed by the time I post this message so you can save some time and $$$ :glowface:

 

[阿搜]

damn, I have Maxtor 300G sata 2.

 

[阿搜]

stitch, I found this topic:

http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t14623.html

 

[Stitch]

Are you thinking what I was thinking?

Yes, RAID is a pretty smart choice for improving the whole system performence; the problem is, it is pretty fragile especially for the product in home/home office market. But, but, once you get it up and running successfully, it should be OK for a while. I am using different RAID configuration in my home computers

I took a look at the post following the link you gave me. The guy is pretty screwed up just like I was (actually it was not my computer but my friend's) No, my situation was even worse. I didn't use RAID although it was in the plan for future......I was using SINGLE disk only and it gave me so much headache: corrupted data,boot up HD detection problem,etc.,etc. And yes I tried to solve it by calling Maxtor support for a newer firmware. The answer from them after 30 minutes waiting on the phone, "your product is running newer firmware version and unfortunately, due to the nature of the product, blah,blah,blah......"I insisted I need a firmware copy just in case......"Flash firmware is very dangeours, we don't recommend customers to do it by themselves, plus, you are running......" :flaming: Hang up!

I ended up disabling NCQ in Windows and it works much better but still got boot up detection problem from time to time, which is pretty anonying but not severe. I think the boot up problem is somehow related to one of the SATA 3Gb features called "Staggered spin-up". Obviously Maxtor didn't do a good job on it. The answer for this siutation on the Internet, either not use it as boot up drive or, siwtch to another brand name like the Hitachi.

 

[阿搜]

oh, no....

I hate spending time troubleshooting mission impossible.
I don't have plan for RAID, I have 300G sata 2 and 160G ide which are way more than enough for me.
I just need to upgrade my cpu and motherboard to a faster one, of course no choice, I have to upgrade my video card along with motherboard.

If sata2's problem is for real, why nforce4 is so popular and I believe a lot of people are using maxtor 's sata2.

I guess I have to do more research on that.

 

[Stitch]

Yeah, you are absolutely right, the NF4 is pretty popular since it declares it has all advanced features that you want and you won't find the problem until you are in the same boat. Once you bought the products, you are kind of screwed up because you won't figure this out until you tried many ways of possiblity, and by that time, it is probably already too late to return them. Plus, you can't return a physically "good" product. And yes, the features are pretty advanced, if you can find a good combination of products that implemented the features proplerly. For me, the problem is more like a Maxtor problem because you can find plenty of users using same MB but different HDs happily, or maybe only Hitachi users

There are plenty of ways to work this around, the most popular ways to get rid of the compatibilty problem are:
1)Disable NCQ in Windows
2)Force the HD running in Sata 150Gb mode by adjust the jumper at the back
3)Don't use the HD as boot up disk
4)Try twist the driver from different versions,different manufactures
5)Get a different brand HD
etc. etc......try each of them or varies of combination

Yeah, you probalby need more time to do the research, maybe it is fixed already. I just don't want to see people suffering the same problem I experienced. At that time, the best solution I found is to switch to Hitachi Hope it works for you

 

[阿搜]

Hitachi is loud. And I prefer to use same brand if I need another 300G.

 

[Stitch]

I understand.Different brands mixing usually means trouble. Same here.Just keep it in mind when you do your shopping and as I said, maybe it is already fixed Anyways, I wish you best luck!

By the way, could you please share your experience when you finally done your upgrade and make it work?