I remember the Nforce chipset. I never owned any of the boards but I do remember them. From what I have watched on YouTube about them is some of them were a mixed bag like some of them were rock solid while others had various issues and others had great Overclocking capabilities some did not.
That's a heat pipe, chunky heatsink, AND a fan on the north bridge chipset. This board was insanely hot, if you touched the heat pipe you could feel the heat. Not to mention the fan blows upwards and chucks all that heat towards the CPU socket area. This board and chipset was I think Nvidias last ever mobo. It was widely slammed by users and critics. It overclocked so badly my q6600 G0 CPU couldn't get passed 3GHz. This board cost upwards of £300 at the time. I moved over to a £150 Asus board and got the same CPU to 3.6GHz fully stable within a few minutes of tweaking the CPU and it was 6hrs Prime95 stable.
I never had NF or AMD chips but remember seeing a lot of issues, maybe that was software/chipset drivers as AMD wasn't supported out of the box OS wise AFAIK. On Intel side, I had a 440BX which was pretty solid MB, Asus P2B.
Doesn't AMD basically own the x86-64 license though? Seen as they basically laid the groundwork for x64. I would of thought they would of been supported out the box by at the very least Windows. But I could be wrong, you may be going back further than I can remember.
I might be thinking before NF2 era, I really don't know it's been so long ago, but that was what I remembered. I think OS wise it was 95/98 timeline, don't think XP was out but I may be wrong. Fast forward now, you need to install AMD chipset drivers even now, for Ryzen to get proper CPU boost and power management?
NF2 was in the 2000's, with the Barton cores iirc. Windows 2000/XP was available. When a Gig of Ram was a lot
I felt like such a badass when I had 2GB of DDR266 RAM with I think 64MB of it used for video memory back in like 2002 lol Then I became an overlord with 4GB of DDR266 RAM and used Windows x86 and didn't realise why Windows only showed 3840MB available when I had a 256MB Geforce 6800GT it was I think 2003 or 2004.
I Think I eventually hit 2GB on DDR400, with some stupidly expensive Corsair ram. NF2 was the only chipset I lapped, and by God was it worth it I'm pretty sure it was an Abit board. AMD CPU + Nvidia chipset back in those days was the only way to go. I Wonder if Nvidia could get back into Motherboards again ?
Same, I had an Abit NF7-S back in the day, I believe I had an Anthlon 3200+ Barton, and together with my 9800 Pro, broke 20k on 3DMark (the one with the Matrix style shootout). So much fond memories of that mobo and CPU.....and GPU.
That was my first attempt at watercooling, with Barton mobile iirc. Should have mentioned that in the OP. Stock speed was 1866MHz (not sure of the PR rating, 2800+ or something ?), and with the 240 radiator and dual fan setup, got it to 2600MHz. That gave me some insane superPi speeds, that I have since lost. Games and stuff were well limited by my GPUs back then. I had a 9500pro i version (not L version), with a aftermarket Abit-like rear exhausting heatsink (OTES) and a big block of shrouded aluminium with fins cut into it. That went from like 275 or 325 to nearly 500MHz on the core iirc. but only a 128bit memory bus. Those were the days you could still get a really good overclock. (8800GTS-640Mb gets a very good mention there too). edit : The 6800GT though went nowhere. First time at GPU watercooling, and didn't bother for quite some time after.
Ah, this takes me back, I recall owning an Abit GF4 4200 Titanium OTES for a couple of weeks or so, before selling it and getting a 9700 Pro. The card shone with the 3200+ Barton and NF7-S, now I can't say for sure if I had broken 20k in 3DMark with the 9700 Pro or the 9800 Pro come to think of it. The NF7-S and Barton chip stayed as my only gaming rig for a long while, and they handled everything I'd thrown at them with aplomb. Another brand that I have fond memory of was Albatron.....I'd gotten an FX5900 from them. Even knew the local rep here, he invited me to be a mod in the Albatron forum and I'd accepted, I was quite active in the forum too, till Albatron folded.
I mistyped i went from 1GB DDR266 to 4GB DDR400. If I remember correctly the latency on those DDR400 was something stupid like 4-4-4-8 or something insanely small. I never lapped any CPU or chipset before, but if I do remember some chipsets and CPU's having really thick IHS. I doubt Nvidia will get back into motherboards or chipsets tbh. They lost a lot of money later on also they had lots of issues too which gained a bad name for the brand. Wiki Quote: It seems I was wrong before that the nforce 680i SLI board was Nvidia's last board. They actually had boards going through the 700, 800, and 900 series. They jumped from the 1xx series and went straight to the 8000/9000 series and dropped the Nforce name and used Geforce instead!? Supporting AMD Phenom II and Intel Core 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_nForce_chipsets
I don't remember Soundstorm crackling back then. I had both Soundstorm on Asus in 2001 and Abit 2003.
Depended on the driver version, the final release from nvidia was horrible for it but the custom nf2 packages myself and others put together back then did fix that.
I still have two Abit NF7-S Rev2.0 boards in working order. One the north-bridge fan was replaced with one of those blue anodised heatsinks. Somebody has to remember the name as it was a known replacement. While the other still has the working fan. Shame I no longer have the first nForce 1 Asus board (if memory serves right it was the Asus A7N266-VM 462A nForce 220-D) as it was a trade in upgrade from the local computer shop back then. That was also a fond board as it had an AMD Thunderbird 1.3Ghz. Though, I still have the 1.4 Thunderbird chip. A 2400+? think that was 1.8Ghz and two Barton 3200+. Plus the Corsair 2GB DDR400 LL LED dims.
