[Jstn7477]

After playing with the 4CoreDual-VSTA (which works fine with my PDC E6600), I have noticed that it does not like 4GB of DDR2 among other things. 3DMark01 and 06 all crash when I use 2*2GB DDR2-800 sticks in XP x86 or 7 x64, but 2*1GB Corsair ValueSelect 533s OC'd to 667 work fine.

My 7800GS artifacts like crazy in Win7 on the 4CoreDual-VSTA, but the 3850 runs great. I haven't been able to get any PCIe cards working, however (7300 LE and GT 440 tried).

My AM2NF3 is only good for XP x86, as Win7 with the 7800GS + quad core has working video drivers but the card runs in PCI mode. I bought a Sempron 130 combo with a Biostar 760G AM3 board I can use later on for a folding card, and I found a new Foxconn A79S AM2+ on Geeks that I had to grab as AM2+ boards are so rare nowadays. If the Sempron 130 single core clocks decently and avoids the multicore limitation, I may *somewhat* like the AM2NF3. I have a feeling I might just send it to crunch for the rest of its life and if it kicks the bucket fast, whatever. $25 boards FTW. Since my 7800GS only works on this board I might as well hang onto it and leave XP on it.

I wish I remembered how crappy NVIDIA's chipset drivers were, or that most ASRock boards from 2005-2007 had no VCORE control, but the boards were so cheap that I was like "whatever." I've spent a ton of time working on them, experimenting, and throwing out bad CD drives that could no longer handle XP installs. :P

My K8NF6P-VSTA happily runs a Turion 64 ML-37 1MB Lancaster @ 2.4GHz with 2GB DDR 480 and Win7. Beats a Pentium 4 630 @ 3.6GHz with dual channel DDR2, surprisingly.

Oh, and the P4VM890 is being returned for a refund next week for being DOA. Decided to refund it after having my PCIe GeForce 6800 die yesterday and remembering how slow Pentium 4s are.

I may consider putting my Zalman VF1000 and a huge fan on my Sapphire 3850 but I don't think I'll get much higher clocks out of it.