[dragonfist22]

quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by RIV@NVX
One of these NForce2 boards has extremely lame C-Media sound instead of NVIDIA's one. Which one?
Because this one sucks before even starting discussion.

BTW, Chaintech 7NJS is good featured, and most expensive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[/QUOTE]

Originally posted by Dom
I believe that is the Chaintech.

Yes, it is the ChainTech. But the data isn't exactly correct. It DOES use the NVIDIA sound. All the boards require another sound chip in addition to the NVIDIA Chipset. The other boards simply use AC97 for this. The Chaintech one uses C-media.

I have the Chaintech one and so far, I have no complaints about the sound. It is certainly better that the crackling skipping SBLive! I used to have.

Anyhow, it still uses NVIDIA audio drivers with the same apps, etc. The NVIDIA sound is on the southbridge and requires and external sound system to "connect" to the outputs, etc. It is up to the MoBo manufacter to choose the sound system to serve that purpose. From what I understand, the C-media one uses less CPU time over the AC97 and therefore has better performance.

What I really like about the Chaintech board though is the ability to manually set IRQs in the bios without having to physically change your PCI cards from slot to slot to resolve such issues. It is the only one of these boards that fully supports this method. (I.e. Slot 1 irq=5 and that is it.)

Anyhow, I have only had a few weeks but it is has been stable and fast since day one. I don't overclock, generally, but I did toy with it and had my AMD 2200+ running at 166 FSB with little difficulty.

[DriveEuro]

Dragonfirst. Almost all nForce 2 boards can chnage the IRQs in the bios. Mine can.

[dragonfist22]

Originally posted by DriveEuro
Dragonfirst. Almost all nForce 2 boards can chnage the IRQs in the bios. Mine can.

I check out two others when I was looking and those two (don't remember exactly which but I believe one of them was the leadtek one) and at least out of the box, you could set it to manual but then the choices were PCI or ISA, not direct choice of the IRQ # itself.

Perhaps, Bios upgrades may have given this later but when I was looking, it wasn't the case.

Anyhow, it was my main reason for choosing the Chaintech one as I have had troubles with ACPI on earlier MoBo's and had to go throught the frustration of changing slots till I found one that worked. Of course, this was mostly due to the latency problems of the SBlive! (BTW, I officially hate Creative at this point as I had nothing but trouble with the SBLive! and it took them nearly 2years to come out with drivers that even came close to handling the latency issues. The sound was great when it worked but any PCI device that it shared resources with would be screwed. For a while I lost use of my mouse and keyboard for seconds at a time because it shared the USB IRQ. This is my main happiness with the NForce2 board.)

But my main point had been that Chaintech isn't using C-media INSTEAD OF the NForce APU. It is simply using a C-media/NForce2 APU configuration as opposed to a AC97/NForce2 APU configuration. I don't know all the differences, but I know that I still have 6 Channel sound with EAX, Direct Sound, etc. And it sounds great on my Surround Sound speakers without the skips and crackles of the SBLive!.

So the question would be which sound sub-system is better, AC97 or C-media? I don't really know but I have no complaints with the C-media so far.

[DriveEuro]

You had ACPI or APIC problems? Did you confuse the two? Cuz APIC is the setting that involves IRQs, not ACPI.

[dragonfist22]

Sorry, typo. But I think that you knew what I meant.

Not sure what your point is. I am not claiming to be an expert, just giving my experience since I have the board and it works well for me and I don't consider it lame. I believe there is misconception that it uses C-media instead of NForces APU and wanted to clear that up.

For some reason, though, I find my typo's being pointed out. BTW, check out the Review of several NForce2 boards at Tomshardware.com. He also noted the manual IRQ select of these boards. Of the ones that he reviewed, only the Chaintech had it with that BIOS version.

DISCLAIMER: Not responsible for misconceptions due typographical errors of this post.

[dresta]

Do you guys know that the epox 8rda+ and the fic au11 are the exact same board?

Epox


Fic



Even the bios's are interchangable.....

[Zardon]

sorry for being a little offtopic here, but id like to say I had a terrible time with an abit nforce 2 motherboard, trying to get it to work correctly with the 9800 pro. when I eventually got it working it was exceptionally unstable. perhaps it was the mobo I got to test, but I certainly wouldnt recommend that motherboard atm. Of course there is the possibility it is to do with my specific set of components, but im not sold on the current state of the nforce2 motherboards in general. but ill keep my eye out for new revisions. just my 2cents, ill shut up now

[DriveEuro]

wait, zardon? Is that 9800pro just to test or did ATI hook you up?

[Zardon]

Originally posted by DriveEuro
wait, zardon? Is that 9800pro just to test or did ATI hook you up?

I sold my soul to the devil.....

[sacrilius]

asus is the way to go

[Necrosis]

Originally posted by Zardon
sorry for being a little offtopic here, but id like to say I had a terrible time with an abit nforce 2 motherboard, trying to get it to work correctly with the 9800 pro. when I eventually got it working it was exceptionally unstable. perhaps it was the mobo I got to test, but I certainly wouldnt recommend that motherboard atm. Of course there is the possibility it is to do with my specific set of components, but im not sold on the current state of the nforce2 motherboards in general. but ill keep my eye out for new revisions. just my 2cents, ill shut up now

Hey Zardon I'll be you more than anything else it was your ram. The problem with nforce2 motherboards is they are very picky about their ram but when their running good nothing can touch them. I'm very happy with my board to say the least and has been a much better setup than my A7V8X which I sold for $75.00.