Good mobo with Crap RAM

[nukes]

Right, I'm fed up with the K7S5A not allowing me any real overclock with an unlocked Tbred B 1700.
I'm looking at these two boards:
Epox 8RDA+
Asus A7N8X Deluxe
The main problem I can see is that I have Generic PC2700 RAM. Now it will run fine at 150mhz at Ultra timings on the K7S5A. I can't afford new RAM as well as a new mobo, and its pointless buying better ram to put in this one. So the question is:
1) Will it WORK?
2) I still have an old Radeon 32mb SDR. (4x AGP) will that work in these (I don't see a problem, but I'd better ask)
Don't say I'd do better upgrading the graphics card, because this board sucks and I've had it for like 1.5-2 years. I need a decent overclocking board.
3) Its a 350W PSU that came with the case. ATM it manages to run 3 hard disks, 3 CDROMs, 5 fans (2 of them LED fans), Coolermaster X-Dream on CPU with no problem. Not so much of a quiver in the 5v line. See any problems there?
4) Is there somewhere I can get a good overclocking board with 3 or 4 IDE ports rather than SATA for under £70? I have 6+ IDE devices and I don't like the controller card. It effectivley doubles my boot time in its autodetection.
5) Are these boards fully Linux compatible?
Thanks for your time

[dafanman]

nukes
I can try and answer some of your questions.

Generally speaking most nforce2 mb's do not work well with generic or oem ram, but who knows you may be the exception.

Is the video card 3.volts or 1.5v as required by most nforce2 chipset boards?

Based on the hardware you have, when you add a nforce2 board into the equasion, you can expect to have power problems if the 12v, 5v, and 3v outputs are not adequete, nforce2 boards draw more power than via boards, and alot of users that have migrated from older via-sis, whatever systems have discoverd that their previous power solution is no longer adequate.

As far as multiple ide channels, the gigabyte series of nforce2 boards feature 4 ide channels in addition to the two sata channels, thats the reason I have gigabyte, the extra ide capabilities.

Dont know about linux compatibility.

Good luck with your search, but above all else be prepared, with most any nforce2 board, ram and power supply are major items.

Laterz,
dafanman

[nukes]

I thought as much with the RAM. doh!
Looks like I'm not going to get this upgrade unless I can get a good deal somewhere.
I was under the impression that AGP 3 was backwards compatible with 1.x/2.x. Is this incorrect? My card uses the higher voltage which is what I was asking about. I knew I couldn't go and buy a 9800 pro or something and stick it in this board.
Looking around the internet, I see lots of people are running Generic RAM fine in these boards. The CPU is 133, the RAM is 166, so that should give me a bit of leyway.
Next question: Do all NForce2 boards have that constant PCI clock thing?
Have they fixed the issue with the boards just dying?

[dafanman]

nukes,
Well the question would be can your generic pc2700 ram run at 200+fsb? Cause im gonna assume that like me with my xp1700tbm you would want to run 200/400 fsb to run that proc at 2.2ghz.

Bottom line on the vid card, Is it 1.5 or 3.3v, cause looking at the first few pages of my manual, it clearly states no 3.3v cards.

Far as pci lock goes, It appears that the giga boards are pci locked at 33, the agp is adjustable from auto at 66 or changeable up to 100, the only way to tell for sure is with pci giger, most software will not properly display bus speeds on nforce2 boards, some manufs have come out and said that their specific product is not locked, while others wont say. The stability of the systems at high fsb seems to suggest that the majority are.

The SBD (sudden bios death) seems to be a thing of the past, the reason I have the gigabyte in addition to wanting the extra ide channels, was the dual bios feature, I had chaintech 7njs previously 3 of them all rma, all flaky bios, or sbd.

My interpretation of the problem is that the older nforce2 chipset boards implemented a 2mb flash bios, and therefore created problems with making multiple changes, or whatever caused them to get overloaded and just fail, the giga board implements a 4mb flash bios, and just feels and works more solidly than boards with 2mb flash bios.

[nukes]

Ok then. How does the Nforce2 400-M compare to the -S chipset in terms of performance. I'm also looking at the Abit NF7-S/M.
I guess I could pull the card and look for any marking relating to voltage. I know its a 4x card but haven't paid that any attention until now. (I don't game much -- I use Linux. )
I can cope with the RAM only running at 166. That's what I've got an unlocked chip for.
I can't afford a graphics card right now. There's nothing I can do about that apart from pull it and see what it says. You say that will be the same for ALL Nforce2 boards?
AGP 2.x was 1.5v wasn't it? (that's 4x AGP btw)

[Etruscan]

Hello nukes, it looks like 3.3 volt cards lost out in scramble for AGP survival. Here is a techimo thread that deals with your problem. I don't know if it answers all your questions, but it might get some discussion started.

[Peter M]

AGP 1.0 defined 1x and 2x modes, with 3.3V signalling.

AGP 2.0 added (optional!) 4x mode with 1.5V signalling, and kept what was there before.

AGP 3.0 added (again optional) 8x mode with 1.5V signalling (w/ reduced swing of 0.8V).

Now, any 4x capable card uses 1.5V signalling for the 4x mode, and hence is compatible with a mainboard that does nothing but 4x and/or 8x.

It's simple ... unless people keep confusing AGP standard revisions, transfer modes, supply and signalling voltages and whatnot.

Radeons are all 4x AGP capable, thus useable on the NVidia chipsets.

[nukes]

That's what I thought.
I think I'm going to go with the Gigabyte board, it looks nice, and I can live without the Dual LAN.
Its just finding a supplier who sells it for a price like ebuyer, but doesn't charge me £20 on delivery.

[Starfury_2260]

the abit nf7-s is a good board. i've got a 2600+ and i took it right to 11x200 with no voltage changes needed.

[nukes]

I like the look of it as well, but I need more than 4 IDE devices. I have 3 hard disks and 3 optical drives. I also need room for if I need to plug in another if a seperate computer breaks or gets virussed.
Is there an option to get IDE raid instead of SATA?