Thinking of upgrading mobo.

SeanW

(Hard to believe my new build is six months old alread but anway)

When I ordered the parts for my new computer in April/May, for a new Socket 939 system, I had, and still have, very picky requirements for the motherboard. One, I had/still have a bunch of Maxtor hard drives that I didn't want to fall afoul of some problems those had been having with the nForce chipsets, I wanted lots of PCI slots (I like to have lots of room for peripherals) PCI Ex-16 graphics, 2 IDE ports, floppy port, at least 3 of those 4 pin USB port thingys for a case with 2 front side USB ports and a 7-in-1 floppy+card drive.

I eventally chose a cheap Sapphire Radeon XPress 200P based board from Komplett that had no model name. As well as fitting all my requirements at that time perfectly, it was also the cheapest board in the whole category, so it seemed like a no-brainer to buy it. You can see the resulting rig in my signature.

The problem is that I found out that the board is a watered down version of the Sapphire Pure Performance, with 3 differences, the PP has an onboard Radeon X300SE, internal and external Firewire, and support for Athlon 64 X2 processors.

It's the last of those that I now regret getting cheap on, because with the way AMD kit prices have gone, an Athlon X2/FX62 processor might be a reasonable upgrade at some point in the future.

And now, S939 boards are disappearing from the market, especially the ones I liked which seem to be the first to go >_<

So now I'm thinking of upgrading my mobo to allow me to upgrade my processor at some point in the future.

I'm torn between two potential moves: the first is to find and purchase the real Sapphire Pure Performance mainboard, but I've also been looking at the MSI Neo4 range of boards, each of which mostly fulfills my requirements and some of them sport a wide variety of compatible processors including S939 Opteron.

Does anyone have any experience with the Neo4 range of boards? http://www.msi.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_list.php?kind=1&CHIP=68&NAME=Socket

I'm looking specifically at nForce boards: Neo4, Neo4-F, Neo4-FI, Neo4 Platinum and the Neo4-FX, and their Radeon RX480 Neo2-F.

I'm super-satisfied with how my current board is performing to specification, and have some reservations about using an nForce chip but I'm curious as to whether these boards have any advantages over the Sapphire Pure Performance.

Questions: Has anyone used any of the above boards? Do they require the setup floppy to use a SATA HD? Can a SATA Maxtor HD be used on them? (I know Maxtor HDs had some problems with nForce chips.) And finally, are they good for overclocking? Also, how good are the S939 Opterons?

Comments, advice etc. welcome.

8T8

In regards the Maxtor issue a full listing of the drives affected can be found here, the firmware revision can be identified by looking at the drives label or going into the device manager and checking the properties as Maxtor tend to include the firmware string in the device instance ID under details.

There has been some effort to fix the issue without doing firmware updates to the HD as my Epox nForce 4 board works perfectly fine with drives that are on that list but it is difficult to say which boards have gotten this treatment and which have not.

MSI have their own community forums your best would be to post in their NVIDIA chipset section and simply ask anyone who has one of these boards and do they work with the Maxtor drives on the affected list.

Alternatively to avoid any issues whatsoever make use of those PCI-e x1 slots and get some PCI-e SATA controllers bypassing the nForce SATA controllers altogether.