A7N8X performance/compatibility issues

[CaptainBobo]

Okay guys, here's my story...
I know it's a bit "out of date", sorry )

I own a relatively old Athlon XP PC which was running fine until about a month ago. There were some power interruptions and, since i don't use a UPS, my mobo got fried. At present, i don't have the opportunity (and money) to buy a new PC, so i decided to get a quick and cheap replacement. It wasn't easy to find a SocketA mobo in 2008 but after week or so i found a guy on the internet who was selling ASUS A7N8X rev2.00 + Athlon XP 3000 CPU for about $120. I thought i was in luck and immediately bought it. So my current config is:

Athlon XP 3000+ Barton 400Mhz FSB CPU
Asus A7N8X rev2.00 motherboard (nForce2 Ultra 400)
512mb Kingston PC2700 (ddr333) RAM
MSI GeForce4 Ti 4200

And everything seems to be working fine except the performance turned out to be MUCH lower than i expected. I know, there may be A LOT of reasons why this is happening, but i have some clues which may help us to get to the bottom of this.

Upon start everything was identified correctly. In bios cpu was set to 200Mhz, 10.5 multiplier, memory was By SPD. The same in windows, it showed Athlon XP 3000+, 2.09Ghz. I thought 3DMark2001 SE was the most reasonable benchmark for a computer my age, and therefore used it for testing. And my score was only 9656 I don't understand it, computers with similar configurations tend to get around 13k-14k.

The first thing i noticed wrong was that 3DMark identified my processor as AMD <unknown> CPU @ 2.09Ghz. I read on the internet what people said having similar problems, tried upgrading/downgrading BIOS, tried every possible version of nForce UDP drivers, reformated and reinstalled windows. Nothing seemed to be working. Although i noticed one thing: after BIOS upgrade, 3DMark started identifying my processor as AMD Duron(tm) @ 2.09Ghz, so i thought it was the bios problem, but after trying every version available, i gave up.

I did try one more thing. I have a friend who is working in IT field, and he was kind enough to let me "borrow" another motherboard on nForce2 chip, the Gigabyte 7NF-RZ (ordinary nForce2 SPP chip, non Ultra). I installed everything onto this board, 3dmark identified my CPU correctly and the result was 11600 3DMarks. And ASUS is newer and SHOULD be faster, but...

Does this mean my A7N8X is defective?

[Digikid]

Unfortuneately the A7N8X series of boards were not very good as they had a LOT of problems. We had an awful lot returned for various reasons such as AGP slots not being detected, caps falling off, missing jumpers and bad BIOS codes.

If you insist on keeping your current PC Guts I would recommend a brand AWAY from Asus/Asrock as they are not that good in my eyes. Gigabyte is much more recommended.

[TwL]

I always love some old box to tweak. about the CPU detection don't worry about it get the driver updates to latest from AMD and processor identification tool from AMD and if there is some tweaks, but I doubt the processor would be any slower than it actually is even while misreading the CPUID by BIOS or simply by beeing reported wrong. (I think you can even type the processor name to be what ever you wish with some tools.. hehe)

There's several tweaks & actions on OS you are using (no matter what it was) you should be taking. There is so many ways to get old hardware to function faster. Sad news is they update new system so much that old hardware kinda squuezes under them while would work perfectly well with decent security solution (3rd party firewall and not too active AV (Old NOD32 perhaps)) and using much older versions of XP with newer compatibility & general windows 'internal' tweaking patches. (Be frank: nLite XP remove a lot, tweak a lot, when on windows defrag a lot(Auslogics good compined with windows internal defrag), make sure there's half the HDD free all the time on root.)

Although the honest truth is that box of yours ain't gonna be fast no matter what you do, but bareable and ''''maybe''' play something (Heroes of might and Magic III), (Warcraft II - III)... etc etc style.


-edit-

hmm, for note. about drivers.. fellow here on forums at nforce drivers who calls himself 'AdvModDev' knows probably more on there nforce 1-3 than anyone. So, he might give a few hints on that area after all some new drivers functions with this old hardware still. Might be worth a shot.