I read this earlier today and found it kind of interesting. The board that I had that died had this happen. It's a thread about an Epox but all brands have the same problem.

http://www.aoaforums.com/forum/showthread....&threadid=15471

There has also been a lot of talk at OCAU regarding this problem, as well as Epox's c1 and c3 errors. I am yet to come across any of these problems myself but hope like hell that I don't.

I just hope it doesn't happen to me again. If it does though, I'm just gonna do the hot swap cause I don't feel like waiting around for another RMA (although Newegg did let me do it cross-shipped).

I've noticed it hanging when you save and exit quite a few times, but I never really had any idea what was causing it. I've also noticed how it only seems to "hang" when you change certain settings.

damn.. maybe i better get a kt400 =/

:cough: :gag:

Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against Via at all. My last 3 boards were KT266A's and my dads still running his KR7A RAID and loves it. I'd recommend to anyone that hasn't tried one yet to get an nForce2.

that was planed for my summer upgrade.. but after this i have 2nd 3rd 4th and 5th thoughts...

Yep, don't let a small prob like this turn you away. i know I was using VIA up till now as there wasn't really much else available with the o/clock options. IMHO, compared to NF2, VIA sucks ass

Interesting reading, to be sure. Near the bottom of the thread they appear to have narrowed it down to the Award/Phoenix BIOS and the FSB setting. I haven't seen a board use anything other than Award/Phoenix in quite some time.

The other manufacturer mentioned in the thread is Abit, in case you didn't figure it out for yourself. Asus would have been a good guess, but the ***-*, v*.* motherboard name gives it away. :wink:

my 5th though was "who cares what fxr thinks"

i'm probly still getting the nforce 2 unlees i see the cheap kt400

the KT400A has mucjh promise... I just hope you don't need latency "patches" with this one

I bet you will.

I think this
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bubo/index.html
gives a pretty good indication of why the Epox board (and probably others) are having so many problems.

Nice link, but I don't see what it's got to do with bios corruption.

Just posted this as news too. It's nice to know exactly what the problem is. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8250

I just thought of something else too. The NF7-S v1.2 has a jumper near the cpu socket that there's no documentation of in the manual (at least not that I could find). Someone asked a question about it on another forum and the answer they got about it was that is has something to do with the keyboard I noticed when I put these in that it does say keyboard near it but it's unclear what it's really for. I wonder if that's the missing jumper?

I'm not linking it to the BIOS problem, at least not directly, but obviously this design has a serious heat problem.
This recent reviews/test has linked some of the other problems with this board to overheating
http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/mot...-8rda/index.htm
I think the basic design/requirments have reached beyond the boundries of stable computing.
The bios coruption maybe a symptom rather then the root cause.

I guess my question is what do you expect? No side effects from overclocking?

I think T-Shirt has a valid point. With as many functions as are being crammed into one piece of silicone and as much power as all those functions require anymore, it's time to either start putting heatsinks on almost everything or come up with a new design paradigm. The nForce2 southbridge is carrying quite a load and the one with SoundStorm enabled is carrying an even larger one. Can you imagine how much heat is going to be generated by Intel's new chipsets?

After seeing the thermographic images of the EPoX board I'm thinking it might be time to put a chipset cooler on my southbridge as well and make sure my mosfets have heatsinks on them. BGA RAM sinks ought to work nicely on mosfets, I'm thinking. I don't know what can be done about the little tiny hot spots other than aiming a fan at them.

I was mainly pointing out that those pics of the Epox are with it overclocked and under a pretty substantial load. That's all.

And I totally agree with the heatsink idea. I had looked them up a few weeks ago and found some nice ones. Have to look and see if I saved the page.

Edit: Here's the ones I was looking at. http://www.frozencpu.com/cgi-bin/frozencpu...enu_search.html

funny i never had overclocking problems with soyo boards.

nice link ntrux man... so.... a missing jumper that had been SPECIFIED by NVIDIA.....

I wonder if the MSI has it. they usually do a perfect reference board. And if you are going to Overclock, then too bad for you. You are taking your machine into your own hands.

If you buy a BMW and modify it, it will no longer be in warranty, and for peeps to crab about it after they knowingly f'ed it up is too damn bad.

nf2 is ROCK solid. you want faster? then go buy P4's with Canterwood or something FASTER! all this overclocking is stupid. i am so tired of it. if you fry your mobo, tough shit. you probably deserved it.

pappy, you obviously did not read the article. it is the mobo manufactuers problem. if they would actuallly build it according to spec there would be no issues.

Soyo does indeed produce good products pappy. Nobody here can dispute that fact. If they made an NF2, it would probably be the BEST one ever.

Well, among the best I'd say, Manny. :wink: Although if Soyo did make an nForce2 board it would probably be the only one to include both NICs, SATA RAID, and 2 channels of IDE RAID, AND SoundStorm!