Oem Sempron 3100+ & ECS Nforce3 combo for $79 + S/H (no rebates)

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when I installed the latest nforce3 drivers I also got bsod, ones on cd work fine though for me.
 
I installed the latest (5.11) from nvidia's site and everything works fine for me. Make sure not to install the IDE driver or the special 10/100 drivers that include the nvidia firewall.

I wonder if I should downgrade my drivers though, whenever I overclock past 2.4 all my BSODs are on nv4_mini.dll or a similar nvidia dll
 
everyone that had problems did you clean out all the old drivers and registrys.

I didn't even have to reformat or anything except reactivate my XP pro...

swapping out the mobos was a breeze for me, actually too easy, I had more trouble changing out a Chaintech 7njs to 7njs ultra, than this...
 
jpmkm said:
Which motherboard are you talking about? The latest BIOS on the ECS site for the nforce3-a is 1.0f.
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Sorry for the confusion. There probably should have been a separate thread now that the deal includes an Nforce4 mobo. I don't think there is an update for the Nforce3 board that supports any further OCing. My bust...

edit: now I see there IS a thread on the new deal... :(
 
The Other said:
everyone that had problems did you clean out all the old drivers and registrys.

I didn't even have to reformat or anything except reactivate my XP pro...

swapping out the mobos was a breeze for me, actually too easy, I had more trouble changing out a Chaintech 7njs to 7njs ultra, than this...
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Mine was a fresh install on the motherboard, just two weeks ago. (I was one of the early buyers of this combo).
 
Talonz said:
I installed the latest (5.11) from nvidia's site and everything works fine for me. Make sure not to install the IDE driver or the special 10/100 drivers that include the nvidia firewall.

I wonder if I should downgrade my drivers though, whenever I overclock past 2.4 all my BSODs are on nv4_mini.dll or a similar nvidia dll
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The IDE drivers, don't they do the NVRaid? I'm not YET using that, but will be soon (if I can the data off the drives tonight, I'll be using it tonight! I've got a RAID setup that used a Promise FASTRACK Lite from my old motherboard; I need to get the data off those drives, then put them back into the system.

So, that's not a (good) option for me... I need those drives. Is that where the NV4_mini.dll or the NVMAM.dll drivers are coming from?
 
nv4_mini.dll is an nvidia driver, I assume NVMAM is also an nvidia driver. I don't know if your errors come from the IDE drivers, but people have reported that they are pretty buggy.

Here are 2 links that I found regarding NVRAID:

http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=292
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=51140

Maybe it'll behave better when doing it during the XP install?

On the other hand, maybe you could use XP dynamic disks for software RAID instead of nvidia's solution.
 
I'm running a Raid 0 setup on mine as the primary HDD. I loaded the two NVIDIA drivers at OS setup (downloaded to floppy first) and everything was OK except I couldn't load the 5.11 LAN drivers. Had to use 5.10, but works just fine.
 
Fenris_Ulf said:
I'm running a Raid 0 setup on mine as the primary HDD. I loaded the two NVIDIA drivers at OS setup (downloaded to floppy first) and everything was OK except I couldn't load the 5.11 LAN drivers. Had to use 5.10, but works just fine.
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I can use all of the drivers on the NForce3 except the 5.11 LAN drivers; those are the ones that barf on the driver install, you have to use the 5.10 LAN drivers off the CD (and of course, the Sound). The others are 5.11 on my machine, though I've gone both ways with it. Haven't tried the WDM drivers again tonight, too busy trying to get the data off my old Promise RAID based drives on my wife's old K7V Dragon+.
 
Can someone tell me about RAID on this board? The documentation just sucks. I'm building this weekend hopefully. :)

Is it just SATA or can you do PATA RAID as well?

Is is real hardware RAID? Ie you can build an array on empty disks(RAID 1 or 0) and then when you install, XP will see the drives as a single disk and then install as normal?

I currently have 2 PATA drives and would love to do RAID 0 for the entire OS.
 
mesostinky said:
Can someone tell me about RAID on this board? The documentation just sucks. I'm building this weekend hopefully. :)

Is it just SATA or can you do PATA RAID as well?

Is is real hardware RAID? Ie you can build an array on empty disks(RAID 1 or 0) and then when you install, XP will see the drives as a single disk and then install as normal?

I currently have 2 PATA drives and would love to do RAID 0 for the entire OS.
Click to expand...

I've only tried SATA RAID on this board (Thanks ClubIT for the great SATA deals!). Don't know if PATA RAID is available. Worked really easliy, the SATA BIOS was fairly straightforward. Like most onboard RAID, this is software. You couldn't touch hardware RAID at this price. I had to download the NVidia SATA and RAID drivers and put them on a floppy (just copy the whole IDE drivers directory to a floppy) so that I could point Windows intallation to them. Load both after pressing F6 during install, and BAM!, done.
It is fast - using a pair of 160GB WD hard drives, Sandra reports over 100MB/s, faster than a two disk 36 GB Raptor RAID array.
 
silentnswift said:
Since this is my first time buying an OEM Processor I'm not quite sure what to get. I'm buying this HSF http://shop4.outpost.com/product/4446386 off of the same website. Do HSF's normally include thermal paste to attach it to my Processor? If not, should I buy some of this ceramic Arctic Silver Ceramic Thermal Paste or this silver material Arctic Silver Silver Thermal Paste ? Thanks
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Personally I'd go for a better heatsink, but that one should work just fine. Sometimes the stock AMD heatpipe heatsinks for X2 and Opterons show up on eBay, and are usually a good deal. Most heatsinks come with some generic white paste. Either of those two should be slightly better.
 
THANK YOU OUTPOST!!! 1 per household, hopefully that wards off some resellers!
 
QuimZ said:
THANK YOU OUTPOST!!! 1 per household, hopefully that wards off some resellers!
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Why? They've had this deal almost constantly for over a month now....
 
Fenris_Ulf said:
I've only tried SATA RAID on this board (Thanks ClubIT for the great SATA deals!). Don't know if PATA RAID is available. Worked really easliy, the SATA BIOS was fairly straightforward. Like most onboard RAID, this is software. You couldn't touch hardware RAID at this price. I had to download the NVidia SATA and RAID drivers and put them on a floppy (just copy the whole IDE drivers directory to a floppy) so that I could point Windows intallation to them. Load both after pressing F6 during install, and BAM!, done.
It is fast - using a pair of 160GB WD hard drives, Sandra reports over 100MB/s, faster than a two disk 36 GB Raptor RAID array.
Click to expand...


Thanks Fenris_Ulf. If anyone else knows about PATA being RAID I'd appreciate hearing about it. Thanks!
 
Check out the specs for the NF3 chipset. If it supports PATA RAID, it should be supported onboard. It's the NF3 250 (non-Gb).
 
Nice deal, I bit, time to replace the athlon xp 2000+ back up system. Whats the deal with the messed up Nvidia drivers? Should I not use them?

Thanks
-Matt
 
ScreamingBroccoli said:
Nice deal, I bit, time to replace the athlon xp 2000+ back up system. Whats the deal with the messed up Nvidia drivers? Should I not use them?

Thanks
-Matt
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different stroke different folks... I had not one problem with them from the nvidia 5.11... maybe because I didn't install the lan or the sound drivers since I have a pci for both.
 
mesostinky said:
Can someone tell me about RAID on this board? The documentation just sucks. I'm building this weekend hopefully. :)

Is it just SATA or can you do PATA RAID as well?

Is is real hardware RAID? Ie you can build an array on empty disks(RAID 1 or 0) and then when you install, XP will see the drives as a single disk and then install as normal?

I currently have 2 PATA drives and would love to do RAID 0 for the entire OS.
Click to expand...

First off, I'm telling you this is what the board and the BIOS >SAY< they can do... I'll explain in a moment.

The board supports both PATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD, SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD, and SATA+PATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD. That means you can raid in any combination you want on any of the six available drive spots off the motherboard (4 PATA and 2 SATA), mixing and matching to your hearts content.

Setting up RAID is simple; go into the BIOS, go to Advanced Chipset Functions, enable select the IDE Devices submenu (I may be getting the exact terms wrong in here, but it's intuitive enough when you've been told what to look for) enable RAID, then select the actual devices points that will be allocated to the RAID controller. In my case, that would be PATA Primary Slave and PATA Secondary Slave; from the sound of it, you want PATA Primary Master and PATA Secondary Master, and should have your Optical drive on PATA Primary Slave; there are some minor performance hits for this, though, since any time you access the optical drive, it will use the same channel as one of your RAID drives; that means you may end up disappointed at the RAID speed up, only ~50%, vice ~100%, more performance. You want the drives in a RAID 0 on different Chains, though, since otherwise you get NO speed up. At any rate, just enable RAID on them in that menu, then do the standard ESC, F10.

After it reboots, right after the BIOS it'll start the RAID BIOS; you'll need to hit F8 (I believe) to enter the RAID BIOS. Create an array with both drives.

Using a different machine, create a driver diskette with your RAID drivers on it; as someone else mentioned, you'd best include both the SATA and PATA RAID drivers. When you start the OS install, and it asks "Hit F6 to add SCSI or RAID drivers", you need to hit F6.... from there Windows will walk you through the process, you'll need to supply the driver diskette when it asks, etc.

Now, why is this what the BIOS and motherboard "say"? Because,. even though I was trying to get PATA RAID working on the board just last night, I am having difficulty. I have an existing installation on a non RAID drive (PATA Primary Master), a DVDRW on PATA Secondary Master, and am adding two drives that have long been RAIDed in my previous motherboard. (I also have a Promise TX2100 controller with two other optical drives attached, but that's not germaine, I don't believe). I can put the drives in, and everything is fine in BIOS; I can create the RAID set in the RAID bios... I've already got a fully working OS (I'm typing this on the machine we're talking about). But when I add the two PATA drives at ALL, the system can't find the boot sector on my Boot drive. I had (briefly) a PPM, PSM, PSS setup working, but can't get the board to boot with PPM, PPS, PSM, PSS at all; I can't even get it working with RAID turned off just to see the board boot with the extra harddrives. Now, I have experience doing RAID; this is the sixth machine (and third NVIDIA RAID controller) I've setup using built in RAID on motherboards (I won't talk about RAID 5 arrays at work :D ). It's dead simple to do... but it should have still booted the OS disk. When I disconnect those drives, OS disk booted again.

I'll be working on it some more; it HAS to work, or more folks than I would be screaming bloody murder. It's not an OS issue, though... this is after POST, when the board starts the boot process, after the summary screen. I haven't played with it to see if I could have booted off floppy or CD, though.
 
The Other said:
different stroke different folks... I had not one problem with them from the nvidia 5.11... maybe because I didn't install the lan or the sound drivers since I have a pci for both.
Click to expand...

Don't install LAN or Audio from the 5.11; install the 5.10 LAN (from the driver CD). Otherwise, the 5.11s at NVIDIA are ok.
 
Thanks, I just ordered it last night, so I don't have to worry about it when the time comes, so the LAN and the Audio are the ones that would cause problems. I can't wait to get this :)
 
The only problem I had was with the onboard LAN--not on installation CD. Simply use Nvidia nforce3 platform drivers downloaded from Nvidia site.

Overclock results--default voltage

CPU: HT4, 230MHz (9x), temp goes to 40C under P95--no errors after 8hrs.
MEM: 1T, 230MHz, 2.5-3-3-11

Changing the memory settings to 2.5-3-3-8 produces errors under P95 unless CPU/MEM fsb is lowered to 225. Using single stick of Corsair Value Select (1GB).
 
Would this be a better setup then my old athlon 1000? It's gettin tired and been havin problems lately. Would it be worth buying a amd64? Only web surfing most of time no gaming? Any comments would be appreciated.
 
dondude said:
Would this be a better setup then my old athlon 1000? It's gettin tired and been havin problems lately. Would it be worth buying a amd64? Only web surfing most of time no gaming? Any comments would be appreciated.
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This would be a perfect buy for you if you are willing to overclock. Your final performance will be between stock A64 3000+ to 3500+ depending on your overclock. I run it in my gaming machine and it's faster then my P4 2.8C @ 3.2 was.
 
Well finally took the plunge after reading this thread for weeks almost bought it when it was 99 bucks. Now it's time to find some good memory for cheap. Reading this thread I think I might also need a new power supply. Mine doesn't have the additonal square 4 power connector.
 
Fenris_Ulf said:
Personally I'd go for a better heatsink, but that one should work just fine. Sometimes the stock AMD heatpipe heatsinks for X2 and Opterons show up on eBay, and are usually a good deal. Most heatsinks come with some generic white paste. Either of those two should be slightly better.
Click to expand...

Well do you think the heatsink I mentioned above could handle some slight overclocking? I'm trying to get everything off the same site, but if it can't handle some overclocking then I guess I'll try get the stuff on ebay.
 
RGMBill said:
First off, I'm telling you this is what the board and the BIOS >SAY< they can do... I'll explain in a moment.

The board supports both PATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 ....Snip
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Wow, thanks RGMBill. Appreciate the thorough answer. I've actually done RAID before myself, but only on real servers with SCSI drives and real proper RAID controllers. I asked because you just never know with cheap consumer hardware what kind of weird things you might run into. Glad to hear it should be possible.

Now, the only problem is my ghetto case. It's embarassing putting that beautiful AMD heat-pipe HSF into such a craptastic environment. Even the $29 case I saw at compusa it worlds better.
 
Fenris_Ulf said:
Chenbro Gamer case is well built and only $20 at SVC

http://www.svc.com/cs-pc61166s.html

And I got an Ultra 500w PSU at epowerhousepc for $50. Great combos to go with this mobo/cpu
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Tha'ts actually a very nice case for $19. It just annoys me to have to pay more for shipping $20.42, then the actual case. I've already bought mobo/cpu/mem/psu. I think I may be spent out and just have to suck it up and deal with my ugly cramped case. Sigh.
 
mesostinky said:
Wow, thanks RGMBill. Appreciate the thorough answer. I've actually done RAID before myself, but only on real servers with SCSI drives and real proper RAID controllers. I asked because you just never know with cheap consumer hardware what kind of weird things you might run into. Glad to hear it should be possible.

Now, the only problem is my ghetto case. It's embarassing putting that beautiful AMD heat-pipe HSF into such a craptastic environment. Even the $29 case I saw at compusa it worlds better.
Click to expand...

Hey, not so fast... remember, I said that's what the board >SAYS< it supports...
In my case, I can't get the machine to boot with the 1.0f BIos with a drive on both PPM and PPS :( ; doesn't matter if it's RAID or not. I've exhausted all but two of the possibile combinations: the first would be to run with HDDs only on the onboard controllers (moving the DVDRW from PSM to AS, AM, or BS (and if I move it to AM, move AM to BM and BM to BS; the drive at AM now is a CDRW that can copy just about any CD, so I want it in my machine; the BM machie is just a DVD ROM). I'd have my Boot drive at PPM, and the RAID drives at PSM and PSS. :confused:

The second thing I haven't tried would be to yank the Promise Controller (and those drives) and see if it somehow is interfering with the NVIDIA controller during the bootstrap process. BTW, in the PPM->PPS->PSM->PSS configuration (DVD RW on PSM, Boot on PPM) I CAN boot from the CD or floppy if I have them in the boot list (Floppy, HDD, CDROM, Disabled). That means that it's ignoring the valid boot disk at PPM (it takes a LONG time for the drives to time out!) before it boots from CD. However, with the Windows XP Install CD (figured I could try just rebuilding the boot image on the boot drive!) it spontaneously reboots when it tries to identify the drives. So PATA RAID on this machine seems to be a no-go with Non-RAIDed drives on the chains as well.

So, while the board SAYS it supports that, it may need a BIOS revision to actually do it; however, the boards are RUNNING the latest BIOS. My understanding is that SATA RAID works well on NVIDIA controllers, but PATA RAID has always been problematic... sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and the SATA+PATA RAID Spanning has been a bugaboo for many of the NForce4 boards. The software RAID I've done on NVIDIA systems has always been SATA RAID... simple and easy. The PATA RAID has always been on VIA boards with Promise Controllers (FastTrack Lites). I'm starting to see why folks curse the PATA RAID of NFORCE machines.... it just doesn't work right. :mad:

Although I've heard that if you go all RAID, it's easier..... :rolleyes: So plan on trying it with NO non-RAIDED drives on the system, using your RAID for boot. That may work better.
.
 
which one is the cpu temp?

speedfan.JPG
 
I think it's temp 3 since that's the one that fluctuated the most when I threw a prime95 load on the CPU ;).
 
if you read the manual section about memory, it says you can only use 3 banks of memory at full 200MHz. If you use 4 banks of memory, max rated speed is 166 MHz. I'd like to put 2Gb in this board, but would rather go with the rated speed. Is this possible? Probably dropping the memory speed wouldn't affect my performance a whole lot.
 
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