Jason’s postings and stuff

My Biostar Socket 754 NForce3 mainboard arrived today. For $50 as of this writing it’s about the cheapest Socket 754 mainboard you can obtain. It doesn’t sport any bells or whistles, just the entry level functionality you’d expect from an inexpensive mainboard.

The retail kit includes a floppy cable, ATA cable, manual, and I/O shield for the mainboard.

The connectors on the board are clearly marked, which I like. It makes the always unpleasant task of stuffing a board into a case and hooking up the little case connectors far less error prone. The USB pins for a case’s front USB accessory ports is easily accessible.

One caveat, the AGP slot is far too close to both the twin SATA connectors and the DDR DIMM slots, making it somewhat problematic depending on the length of the video card you choose. My GeForce Ti4200 AGP barely fits into the slot with the edge of the card only a few millimeters away from both DIMM fasiners. Additionally, the side of my Ti4200 facing away from the VGA connector is quite close to several capacitors. As a result, you need to install any memory before you install the video card and possibly remove the card prior to any memory upgrades.

You may find the ATA connectors, which are on the side of the board farthest from where your disks and, especially, your ATAPI CD-ROM, a bit of a stretch for your ATA cables, depending on the case you’re using.

The board has been running for a few weeks now completely stable, although the BIOS does not have a proper string for my AMD Sempron 64-bit 2800. A BIOS flash may remedy this, but I haven’t had time to investigate.

Windows 2000 installed without incident using the included driver CD, the first time I’ve ever actually had to use a driver CD to get a mainboard up and running.

Update, October 10th, 2006. It’s worthwhile to note that the on-board sound for this board is awful. I added a SoundBlaster PCI card and Line-In actually works now whereas before it wasn’t usuable.

Update, March 18th, 2007. The board seems to be eating power switches, the switch that runs from the mainboard to the plastic enclosure in the case. Strangely, shorting the pins on the mainboard to power it on manually doesn’t work very often now. I wonder if someday I will not be able to power this board on anymore.

What the hell?

Update, April 14th, 2007. As I feared, it is virtually impossible to convince the board to power up. I have to unplug random cables and snap my fingers. I removed the mainboard from the case completely and unplugged all cables. On a nonconductive surface, the mainboard still randomly refused to power on.

Clearly it’s either the PSU or the mainboard at fault. I don’t know which. When the system does power on, it is rock solid stable running FPS for hours on end. So it stands to reason that the CPU, RAM, and GPU are all fine.

Another thing I noticed that has happened a half dozen times in the past year and a half is the NIC will not be recognized in Windows. An immediate reboot resolves it. But that is wrong.

I don’t believe I’d recommend this board at this point.

Update, August 17. I replaced the PSU and the board is fine. It seems this board is still being sold, and for around $40 it seems to be a decent buy. Of course, Socket 754 is basically dead, but that’s another story.