Monday, January 26th 2009
ASRock nForce 3 Motherboard Supports Phenom II
With the AMD K8 architecture, AMD had made it very simple for CPUs and motherboards to get along. Memory support being purely subjective to the memory controller on the CPU, the only thing the motherboard chipset was left to do was to connect the rest of the system to the CPU using the HyperTransport interface. With the introduction of the DDR2 supportive AM2 socket that was mostly pin-compatible with socket 939, motherboard vendors took to cost-cutting using older s939 and s754-"supportive" chipsets such as the NVIDIA nForce 3. ASRock is one of them. The company used the nForce 3 in the AM2NF3-VSTA motherboard.
Having bought that motherboard in its time, might just pay off now, with the company including it in its latest socket AM3 CPU compatibility list. The motherboard might go on to support the latest Phenom II X4, X3 series; Athlon X4, X3 series, and other processors in AMD's 45nm desktop CPU lineup. That will also add to the reputation of the NVIDIA nForce 3 chipset being the only platform core-logic to span across three generations of CPU sockets: socket 754, socket 939, and socket AM2. And supporting AMD processors from three generations of sockets: AM2, AM2+ and AM3. This is what AMD originally conceived when designing its socket model. Unfortunately, vested commercial interests and "sandbagging" have plagued many a motherboard manufacturer who continue to discriminate CPU support within the AM2/3 socket series, to create new product lines, and to keep their sales up.
Source:
Silicon Madness
Having bought that motherboard in its time, might just pay off now, with the company including it in its latest socket AM3 CPU compatibility list. The motherboard might go on to support the latest Phenom II X4, X3 series; Athlon X4, X3 series, and other processors in AMD's 45nm desktop CPU lineup. That will also add to the reputation of the NVIDIA nForce 3 chipset being the only platform core-logic to span across three generations of CPU sockets: socket 754, socket 939, and socket AM2. And supporting AMD processors from three generations of sockets: AM2, AM2+ and AM3. This is what AMD originally conceived when designing its socket model. Unfortunately, vested commercial interests and "sandbagging" have plagued many a motherboard manufacturer who continue to discriminate CPU support within the AM2/3 socket series, to create new product lines, and to keep their sales up.
32 Comments on ASRock nForce 3 Motherboard Supports Phenom II
www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=AM2NF3-VSTA
And seems you have limited graphics card compatibility and/or some hoops to jump if you have multiple cores
www.asrock.com/mb/note/AM2NF3-VSTA.html
i use Unified Remix for the IDE drivers and the rest are the NF 5.10 drivers.
apparently Windows 7 is doin pretty good at even a beta stage, lets hope that positiveness winds up being the final product.
"To date, Nvidia has not released a complete chipset driver package for nForce3 and Windows Vista. However, Nvidia has posted individual pre-release networking and audio drivers for Windows Vista Beta 1"
Not trying to argue, it's just anyone who has tried to run Vista on an Nforce 3 chipset is painfully aware of the issues that plague it. There is no MCP driver, so a lot of things don't work properly.
Yet another reason why I buy only AMD/Intel now :toast:
If ASRock can fix the issue I'll be pretty freaking pleased. VIA and SiS were able to, nVIDIA pussied out and blamed ATi.
I'm actually surprised ASRock have done this, must have had some nForce3 chipsets lying around doing nothing. :rolleyes:
www.asrock.com/mb/note/AM2NF3-VSTA.html#Phenom
im pretty sure the reason they stated that is because
1 they didnt test ATI cards
2 they did test the ATI cards and were getting DX fails, because they dont know about the hotfix driver (Which works for 9500-3850)
Because im pretty sure GART access is about the same across all AGP boards, and the driver they state to use is for the motherboard to make the slot work
ya btw BTA, i agree with you on Asus, they pump out so many boards that they wind up neglecting ones with problems in the firmware, where if they took their time their reliability would be better across the board, performance is there yes but reliability not so much.
www.techpowerup.com/tags.php?tag=AMD+790FX
First 790FX came with SB600 southbridge and was a AM2+ board, next they upped the southbridge to SB700 and then made it to a AM3 board with SB750. At least they should all support AM3 processors.
Last step is of course with DDR3, so that's ok, but talk about a "new" board when the chipset came in 2007 :)
However, only the AM2NF3 supports phenom due to its larger bios (4MBit)
My experience with AGP were OK when using the Athlon X2... but once I installed the Phenom X4 9550, the AGP stopped working, as nvidia never released the CPU to AGP bridge compatible with quad cores. As a first result a blue screen, then I uninstalled the nforce CPU to AGP bridge and installed the standar CPU to PCI bridge and voilá, my ATI 1950GT would work as a charm, but performance dropped like 50%. Stability on XP had no problems.
I think that despite the low cooperation from Nvidia side to release such drivers, the motherboard is great to a point that I upgraded to a Nforce 7 mobo (ECS 8200/nforce730) and I haven't noticed any performance improvement over Nforce 3, despite going from HT1.0 to HT3.0 (OK, my phenom may not be the greatest thing). But anyway, the new SATA 2.0 ports came handy as well as PCIexpress and now I'm a happy owner of an ATI 4670 which is twice faster than the 1950GT AGP.
EDIT: corrected