Is anyone else's Vnf4 ultra like this?

[Silversierra]

So you can use sata opticals with this board? I thought people were saying that they don't work with amd boards, or is that issue fixed now? Also, does this board need a driver for a regular sata hard drive, or is it "plug and play". I've read that some boards are a pain to get sata working with.

 

[GadgetBuilder]

My Chaintech VNF4 Ultra with XPHome SP2 seems transparent to SATA from the user perspective. I partitioned and formatted the Seagate SATA hard disk using BootitNG (which uses BIOS exclusively for disk access) so apparently the VNF4 BIOS handles the SATA drives.

I then booted from the CD in the 712SA and installed the XP SP2. The default drivers in XP SP2 handled the SATA hard disk and the SATA optical without any hitches, again transparently from the user perspective.

The ethernet driver and NAM (firewall) were installed from the distribution CD, so the default XP drivers work with the 712SA. I haven't installed the NVIDIA IDE driver because of conflicting reports about stability. The XP drivers have worked OK although the disk performance isn't as good as it could be if the NVIDIA drivers were installed.

I tried to install the NVIDIA 6.39 release and ran into BSOD problems when I attempted to access the net via ethernet. I used an image to revert and am awaiting updates to the NVIDIA release or XP, whichever is needed to allow the NVIDIA drivers to work in my system.

YMMV if you're using a different version of OS or NVIDIA drivers or a different NF4 based machine.

 

[Silversierra]

Transparent means the user can't tell the difference between ide and sata? What's ymmv? NAM? Yeah, I'm not up on the lingo lol.

 

[AnnoyedGrunt]

YMMV = Your Mileage May Vary

Don't know what NAM is.

Thanks for the additional info regarding the voltage situation. The 90nm 939 chips are 1.4 Volts, so those shouldn't be an issue. However, the 130nm chips are 1.5 Volts, so I wonder how those would work on this board. Anyone have experience with that.

For me it shouldn't be an issue, since I have a 3200 on the way, but I'd be interested in hearing additional anecdotes. Keeping my fingers crossed that this board will work out for me.

-D'oh!