EPoX 9NDA3J issues

[hectorsm]

Epox 9NDA3J running very stable here too with no problem. But I did have serveral problems at the beginning that were corrected. Here was my experience:

1. 3d games pausing at random intervals. Turning off fast writes solved my 3D game pausing problem. This seems to be a very wide spead with any NF3 boards that have NV cards.

2. This board undervolts the CPU(1.34v). I had no problems until I overclocked my CPU from 2.0 to 2.4. It frooze when running Folding@home. An increase to 1.36 fixed the problem.

3. I had 2 different brand of PC3200 memory. They worked fine on my previous Epox NF2 board but NO BOOT (C1 error) on this board. Replacing one module to match the other fixed the problem.

4. Finally, the BIOS will not recognize my 300GB Maxtor SATA HD so I had to do an image copy from my old 200GB Maxtor PATA HD.

I hope this info help those who bought or are planning to buy this board.

The best thing about this about this board is that it overclocks very good. It is also one of the few NF3 ultras(1Ghz HT) in the market. I heard that NVidia is planning to discontinue this board for the NF3 250 which is only 800Mhz HT.

 

[groebuck]

Actually..............

Problems solved and I now love her (well okay so far)....turns out after all that - after swapping out cpu's, memory, motherboards, cases, power supplies ...

it was my BenQ 1620 pro DVD-RW...It took me two weeks out trouble shooting. I threw in the towel and decided to go back to my old 754 set up. Guess what - same issues. Now I knew something was freaky deeky. I pull everything one by one and sure enough it was the Benq. I finally found some posts in cdr-info with people with the exact same problems!! I felt like Hurley on Lost! Turns out I needed to get some firmware updated for the DVD drive (although the oem verison would not take the retail firmware that fixed it and I could not find the oem firmware that did..so I did a lil flashy magic to make it retail firmware and updated to latest!) and poof - a working system that boots into windows everytime (and at 9X267 HTT3X memory 1:1) woot! all this with a .05 voltage bump.

Man that schizit was driving me crazy!

 

[Zap]

:thumbsup:

Glad things worked out. I once had a slow booting system. P4 2.8C Shuttle mini box that took forever to boot (would hang a few _minutes_ on POST screen, took about 3-4min on Windows boot) a fairly fresh Windows install. Turned out the NuTech DVDR drive was failing. It eventually croaked (about the fourth "82" model that died in various builds) and when I switched out drives, slow boot problem went away.

 

[Goldenboy]

Replying to daveshel:

Hi I am still a newbie at helping out the hardware community. So please excuse me if my comments doesn't make sense. And correct me if I am wrong. As to your matrox G400 vid card problem. What is the specs on this vid card? I want to say the card is a 3.3V agp vid card. I believe the epox 9nda3+/J supports only 1.5V agp vid cards. If the G400 is 1.5V vid card, then ignore my comment. Just merely my $.02.

 

[cubeless]

just got 9nda3j/3000 winch and cannot seem to get 1:1 (200) with my 2 sticks of hyperx... even if i set it to 200 it seems to give me 166 divisor... any ideas?

 

[AnMig]

Originally posted by: cubeless
just got 9nda3j/3000 winch and cannot seem to get 1:1 (200) with my 2 sticks of hyperx... even if i set it to 200 it seems to give me 166 divisor... any ideas?

Thats strange I aslo got this board last week and only now realized that I cant get it to run at 1:1 (also 2 sticks) even if I set it to 200 it seems to default to 166.

Anands article mentions this problem when using 4 dimms but not on 2 dimms

I am using slot 3-4.

Bios 11/01/04
9nda3j

Any help out there

 

[Brian48]

Just got this board a few days ago. So far, everything has been stable. Going to just let it run a while before I try overclocking it. I am just a little disappointed that it's quite a bit slower at stock settings than the previous Soltek SL-K8TPro-939 I had. I would have been happy with the Soltek, but I couldn't get it stable for some reason under WinXP sp2 using the universal AGP driver from MS.

 

[imported_ninnuam]

hmm weird... I am using Kingston HyperX PC3500 (slot 1&2) on my Epox 9NDA3J and I have not fiddled with the volts or anything (the cpu is at 1.4-something) and oc to 2025MHz (from 3000+). The only thing Im having a problem with is that the ide channel drivers for nf3 doesnt seem to be correct for the platform (uhmm this is very weird). No other problems.. this motherboard runs quite good.

Although i am thinking of returning it because of the ide channel problems and go for a Gigabyte.

 

[Brian48]

Just an update. Been running my 9NDA3J w/3500+ Winnie at 11x230HTT (2530mhz) for a bit now. No stability issues at all as far as I can tell

Still using the retail HSF as well. Temps don't seem to go above 47C under load. This MB did undervolt the core for some reason, so I had to bump it up to what a 3500+ Winchester is suppose to run at (now reading 1.43v). Like a lot of other folks, I did have to set my maxmemclock at 166mhz for my 1g of PC3200. Memory now boots up as 191mhz, which is correct according to the formula: 166/200 x 230mhz = 190.9.

Although I lose a little bit in memory bandwidth (bah, a whooping 9mhz), benchmarks are way up across board for all my games and other apps.

I'll probably wait a little bit before pushing it a bit further. I think there's still ample headroom with this processor, but I want to upgrade my cooling before I try.

 

[cubeless]

was out of town a little longer than i expected... running 3000 retail/stock hsf at 9x251, 1.6v, 166 div (205), kingmaxcheepo 2.5/3/3/10, 49c under p95torture... drop the volts, no go... not a great oc, but not a bad oc... pretty fast cheap rig...

 

[imported_ninnuam]

Originally posted by: Zebo

Originally posted by: Wags1974

Zebo, your short reply seemed to have worked, but why?

i've done extensive testing with this board ...over 4x types of memory used and none work very well even at stock speed and SPD in slots 1 and 2. ..maybe epox trace lengths are bad there? Don't know..bu this helps these issues y'all taking about.

I use slot 1 & 2, 1T 2.0-3-3-7... no issues at all. Only issue I've had this far was problems with the IDE channels but they fixed themselfes somehow But now everything runs smooth, and with stock cooling and a 3000+ winnie at 250x9 HT x4 and temps 33/38 I'm happy as a bee

 

[The Green Bean]

thinking of getting this board as well...how does it compare with the EP-9NDA3+ when overclocking? any major differences?

 

[cubeless]

oc wise it is the same board...

 

[Brian48]

Actually, I just noticed something odd about this board, or rather the memory I have in it. According to CPU-z, I'm actually running at 181mhz for the memory, not 188-190mhz like it should. The dividers read as FSB/14 versus the FSB/11 that I get with my NF3 Gigabyte and my recently RMA'd Soltek SL-K8TPro-939. HTT is set at 230mhz for both machines and memory is set at 166, which "should" use a 11 divider. Anyone else running at 230mhz HTT or higher notice this?

Not big deal as I really doubt the difference in bandwidth is noticable at all, but I'm just nit picking.