Like I said, I've mainly had problems with the on-board things. My main
system is an NForce3-250 (K8N-Neo Platinum), and both the sound and gbit
lan are unuseable, as well as the "optimized" NVidia IDE driver which I
dare not install or my system goes south hard and fast with corruption
left and right.
The primary known issue is of the hardware firewall. I am
not discounting the problems you have, but when others with
the same chipset aren't having them, it rules out the
chipset as being solely to blame.
What other cards are you running, for example a video card
or other high bandwidth cards? You do of course realize one
card misbehaving badly may work, but cause another problem?
If I avoid using the onboard things (I have a PCI NIC installed and will
get a decent sound card once I get the cash for it) it runs fine and
stable. I'll wait with windows x64 until I have the sound card since
using directsound under winx64 actually crashes the chip (and
subsequently windows). Since the sound is an integral part of the
chipset it's not the motherboard manufacturer to blame here either. Not
that MSI has a bad name though.
Untrue, your sound problem can't be attributed to chipset
when others run their sound OK. Finding fault is about
looking at the variables, what is different but also what is
constant on other working systems (functions).
Next to that 2 different friends of mine, totally unrelated, have had to
put in USB expansion cards in their NForce 2 boards to get normal use
out of their USB (both for storage and for instance using a scanner --
anything with a high data throughput), and it's not OS related either
since it occurs under both Windows and Linux.
What specific boards?
Again it would have to be taken in the context of what the
variables are. Many people will randomly blame a
motherboard, or randomly blame windows, or whatever- they
never really know what was wrong and begin continually
blaming same part(s) out of a habit that never should have
started. I am not suggesting any nForce, nor any other
chipset for that matter is perfect, but they are usually not
as much of a problem as the OS, additional things integrated
onto a board, additional things plugged into the board, or
the bios.
So there's been quite a
few problems with the chipsets in at least 3 unrelated systems that I
know of in my small circle of friends. I can assume it's not isolated
incidents.
Do you assume others who have (take your pick of...) other
chipsets have every single function working right on their
system? Some may, as do some nForce owners, but typically
the more features a board has and more things plugged into
it, the more worn the OS installation, the more little bugs
pop up. Consider that it's fairly routine for OEMs to
suggest a complete wipe of the HDD and factory image
reinstalled for this very reason. Other times users just
dread doing a clean install of windows themselves.
So, if used just as interface to the CPU, it does a good job (no
complaints about stability). If used fully, there are problems.
So you say. Again, it's not the variable.
