OK what is REALLY going on with the Lanparty NF4 series?

[pershoot]

this particular board needs lots of attention and taming before it can produce. if one of your settings doesnt agree with the rest of the handful of your settings and the mem controller, your unstable. plug and play is definitely not its forte'. this is in part due to the individualness of the ondie mem controller on each cpu, paired with the chipset. the chipset itself should be ahead in the game, as nF3 was a staging ground.

you can even notice the difference from 02xx to 03xx in terms of stability. those 'quirks' are slowly dissappearing. DFI is trying their best (good on them) to tame the wild chipset that is nF4, hehe.

[Sparx]

Update.

Yesterday I decided to take another stab at the NF4 Ultra D.

I employed the "safe mode" jumper on the motherboard and attempted to BOOT and that did not work.

So I cleared the CMOS again and got the rig to BOOT up with my Twinmos 3700 256 stick of RAM. After that I used my Norton Ghost Utility and loaded an earlier made Ghost Image of a clean install with only the motherboard drivers applied. (I didn't think the OS was corrupted but what the heck)

Then I flashed back to 1/25 BIOS, which was the shipping BIOS. I put one stick of Corsair in the upper orange slot after selecting "Optimized" attempted to BOOT, no BOOT.

Installed the Twinmos again and got the BOOT, set up the BIOS with mostly defaults but applied 1.525 x 110% on the CPU and 2.90 Vdimm. Installed the Corsair and finally got a BOOT. I slowly set the BIOS to get back to where I once was except with only 200 x10 for CPU speeds. Then I added the second stick of Corsair and it Booted.

Finally I slowly worked the (htt) FSB back to 258 x 10, with 1:1 and CPC enable. I started prime95 with 100% cpu usage at 12:30 pm (just past noon) yesterday and at 7:47 it is still Priming.

This is the longest time Prime95 has ever run on this board!

So if you get a DFI NF4 Ultra or Sli be ready to spend lots of time setting up the BIOS. And if you want to clear CMOS or flash the BIOS be prepared. Others have needed to BOOT with one stick of RAM to get the rigs running, this is how I got the idea except I needed to use a different brand of RAM, Twinmos 3700 43B (256).

It is great to have things running again. BUT how much trust can I put in this motherboard? I would like to try a different pair of TCCD to see if it might just be Corsair. After 24 hours of Prime95, the RAM begins testing with Memorytest86 on #5 and #8 just for my satisfaction. Then I may just be stupid and drop the HTT back to 220 and see if the rig BOOTS, any rig should; if this DFI doesn't then I may be RMA'ing it.

Sometimes too many features and too much engineering is not a good thing either. You know- "keep it simple stupid".

Don't buy this board if you are looking for a slam bam throw it in case, overclock and run experience. Just look up the page, a little while back I was in the "no problems perfect build" camp, things caught up with me.

But, I ain't giving up yet!

sparx
Edit: Oh forgot to ask: May I vote again, after all I live close to Chicago?

[pershoot]

dont forget, more voltage makes things unstable at an X clock on 90nm. try bumping down your VID voltage.

use a different multiplier as well (9x). for example, 10x250 barely primes for me, but 9x278 (9:10) primes. that multiplier may just be 'borked' for your OC usage, hehe.

keep playing with the settings. it took me a full week to two weeks to go through everything and try different combos to see which worked best. this board is not for quitters, hehe. everything is relative on this platform. from the effect of multipliers on ram settings on voltage settings, etc. this is much more so then AXP land.

hang in there man!

[LuckMan212]

well FWIW, the 3.10 bios seems to have stabilized me some. I had ripped this board out previously and replaced it with an MSI Neo4 SLI but after I killed that with a beta BIOS flash (doh) I decided to give the DFI another try. I went very slow and methodically this time, tweaking one RAM setting at a time, testing, testing, tweaking another setting until I had squeezed just about the last drop from this config. I am now stable at 265x10 using only 1.45 vcore. This passes 24h Prime and 6hrs of stresscpu. Temps never above 44C. For some reason I cannot run my RAM 1:1 even though it's PC4200. I think its the mem controller on Winchester that can't handle 2 sticks of double-sided RAM (I have 2x1gb sticks) so I will probably try a Venice or San Diego core when those come out hopefully I wont have to buy a new mobo/etc. The DFI should support it.

so for all having probs I suggest the 310 or 310p BIOSes and just go slow. Best way is to boot into windows "stock" and then start tweaking ONE THING AT A TIME using A64tweaker and CG-NVNF4 raise FSB in 1-2mhz increments while running Prime until it errors out, then back off a little. Thats how I did it.

[supershanks]

Sympathise with the issues you have had Sparx. Have you used the CMos Reloaded feature to save Good Settings, by doing this it's easy to step back after a problem even after clearing Cmos.

It is a feature rich bios which is why the CMOS Reloaded feature is great. I used it the other day after building my son's DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR, & having an hour or to to checkout the capabilities of his G.Skill 1Gb PC4400/PC3200 TCCD Dual Channel kit
.
luck

[Sparx]

Sympathise with the issues you have had Sparx. Have you used the CMos Reloaded feature to save Good Settings, by doing this it's easy to step back after a problem even after clearing Cmos.

It is a feature rich bios which is why the CMOS Reloaded feature is great. I used it the other day after building my son's DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR, & having an hour or to to checkout the capabilities of his G.Skill 1Gb PC4400/PC3200 TCCD Dual Channel kit
.
luck

How's that G.Skill working out? I need to get that stuff. I never tried that CMOS feature, I am aware of it though.

I just complete 24 hours of Prime 95 @ 258X10 1:1 and 1t. So I moved it to 260. This is the best stability and hightest overclock so far. I guess you really need to abuse the DFI NF4 Ultra D to the point where it will not BOOT before you get a significant and stable overclock!



Sparx

[supershanks]

got it up to it's max rating 9x275 @ 2.5-4-4-8 1T ran xp quiet happily for a while then i booted into memtest & found a few errors, so wound it down. left it running at 11x225 @ 2-2-2-5 1T (Didn't want it crashing on him)which sailed through 3hrs memtest. Son's bin on it since so not has a chance to play
Think I'm in danger of getting hooked there's so much to play with
Need more time

[danny5]

I am patiently waiting for my bigger PSU before I can try an OC on my new rig.

Sofar, the DFI has been one of the easiest builds I have ever done. I like the board layout, nothing in the way. Startup was easy, hit the power, cleared cmos, and installed the OS. I have not had one hiccup since (expect for lack of power when trying to OC).

The only thing I regret is the hours I will waste trying to optimize all of those memory settings in the bios, could take weeks before I am happy.

[highoctane]

Yeah it takes a little while to get the memory timings optimized, change test, change test, over an over but once its done its done.

What will make it a little easier is set/test is to flash to the 0310 bios which integrates memtest into the cmos/bios which will load at every reboot automatically when enabled.

With the shipping bios there was a problem with my vcore settings not holding, I found out what it was, I had to completely power the system off and back on after making vcore changes, if I just warm booted the vcore would stay at stock/default, simply powering it off after saving bios settings fixed the issue.

[danny5]

Thanks for the tip Highoctane, what a great idea to have Memtest incorporated right into the bios. This tells me that DFI is THE innovator among the manufacturers at the moment.

[mobdragon]

"flashed to 310. But after that I have not been able to set BIOS to get a BOOT" <-- have same problem, signed up so I can get some help.


1/25 bios - system works perfectly and is super stable (except CS:Source and other steam apps, can play them for a while with great frame rate and everything but it crashes to desktop after a while)

3/10 bios - Can play CS:Source perfectly and system is stable but I lose the firewire port (which I need) and the second ethernet port (marvell one) Also if I change anything in BIOS computer will not start (can not even change the date and time)


Is this just a BIOS issue? I hope it is, if anyone has a solution.

[Sparx]

"flashed to 310. But after that I have not been able to set BIOS to get a BOOT" <-- have same problem, signed up so I can get some help.


1/25 bios - system works perfectly and is super stable (except CS:Source, can not play this it crashes to desktop)

3/10 bios - Can play CS:Source perfectly and system is stable but I lose the firewire port (which I need) and the second ethernet port (marvell one) Also if I change anything in BIOS computer will not start (can not even change the date and time)


Is this just a BIOS issue? I hope it is, if anyone has a solution.

How about a sig on your DFI?
sparx

[mobdragon]

Computer Specs

AMD Athlon 64 3400+
DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra-D
1 GB 2x512MB PC3200 Kingston
ATI X700 PRO PCIe
Antec Case Black
Antec NeoPower 480W PSU
Thermalright XP-90
Artic Silver 5
2 SUNON Case fans, 2 LED Antec Case Fans
TDK 52x CD-R Burner, Acer 16x DVD-ROM, NEC 2510a, Iomega CD-R, floppy
80GB HITACHI SATA 8MB Cache

[Sparx]

Do you have a 24 pin connector on that power supply (not a converter) and are all the 12 volt molex connectors attached to the motherboard, there are three?

sparx

[highoctane]

Well has a Neo Power 480 which is atx 2.0 and uses the 24 pin plug, I'm using the same ps without issue.

Does the problem only occur with games, if so you might want to check your video card hs to make sure its properly seated and that tim is applied adequately.

Not sure what to tell you about the bios issues, I've run both without any problems at all so I really can't say.

What is your HTT multiplier set to, seeing as you have a 3400 it should be a 4x multiplier rather than the 5x for other s939 cpus.

Check your chipset temps and try upping your voltages a notch just to check and see if there is any gain in stability, run memtest on test 5 for a couple loops, run prime95 blend for a while, and maybe let 3dmark2001 loop test for a couple hours.