AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 - $1031 CPU from 2005

[@RETROHardware]

nForce ... better keep 10+ boards near your hands and one will work :-) also lot of manual chipset settings

[@1tothe2the3]

I used to have so much gear from this era but nearly all of it has died. Some of it just eventually refused to post/or get any output, other parts just behave as if they aren't plugged into anything. So frustrating, I've lost my prized fx-60, motherboards from nf4 to 790i and 955x to 975x, ddr1/2, and a few GPUs. Quite a bit of gear from the RoHS transition, it would seem? I remember Nvidia based boards were extremely picky about ram and bios versions, I lost countless hours trying to get a striker extreme to get into windows and a weekend trying to get an a8n-sli premium to work. However, this is an excellent trip down memory lane. Cheers!

[@mrmcguru163]

Have you ever used the abit kn8 Ultimate?

[@bestopinion9257]

I have so much gear from this era and all is working. You are very unlucky and I am very lucky I guess. In medium we are fine. :)

[@ND22M]

Another great video Phil! If I could I would give you 2 likes! A few words about the problems you encountered: 1. Use driver version 197.77 or earlier with Nvidia video cards in order to maintain compatibility with games of that era including Farcry. Any later version will not increase performance anyway and if you play games from 2007 or later you will need a more powerful video card too. 2. I also encountered error 0X0000007b and this usually refers to the storage controller. When installing Nvidia chipset drivers you need to install in a specific order one at a time: first the chipset, SMBus driver, SATA driver but NOT the SATA raid software that will put a small icon in the system tray, network driver but NOT the Nvidia firewall and restart each time. Bulk installation of drivers of mtoherboards with NVidia chipsets is not recommended. 3. Maybe you can get hold of a Radeon X1950XTX video card. That thing is easily the most powerful directx 9.0c GPU ever. 7900GTO is from 2006 and is actually a 7900GTX in disguise - only the memory is underclocked to 1320 MHz and as such I think it should be compared to a Radeon X1900XT/XTX. Maybe 7800GTX should be a match for the X1800XT.

[@philscomputerlab]

Good tips! Yes I didn't have a X1900 series card I'm afraid...

[@Slinkoguy]

I had the AGP X1950XTX on my 939 rig. I should have just upgraded the board to PCI Express due to the terrible nforce support. lol

[@TheGyuuula]

I had a soc939 Gigabyte motherboard with the Nvidia chipset, and I remember installing the chipset drivers were a nightmare, it caused all kinds of blue screens and freezes. I gave up and just didn't install chipset drivers for that mobo.

[@Tc4ify]

Yeah, I've been on the hunt for a 1950XTX for a while now, but it's managed to elude me every time, although I was very close at least once. Apart from being notably faster than a 1800xt and even 1900xt, it's also much quieter (those two are more akin to a vacuum cleaner).

[@postanimus8989]

@@Tc4ify I've managed to buy an X1950XTX Crossfire Edition for around 30 euro. I believe it was Mac edition, but run perfectly fine in Windows XP PC. Lady that sold it didn't even recognized the card and didn't tested it, so i guess i was lucky. It works, but it gets very hot, so i used Accelero S1 with cooler, so it didn't get past 60 degree celcius.

[@danielefabro4348]

i actually wait friday during to this quarantine only to see what's on your next video! it's very entertaining!

[@MazeMouse]

Oh man, I still know my full specs from the PC I had back then :D Athlon64 2.2Ghz, 1GB of RAM Pc3200, ATI Radeon X800 All-In-Wonder plugged into an ASUS K8N AI-series motherboard. I think I still have the motherboard and CPU sitting in a box somewhere because I loved that system so incredibly much :D

[@madmax2069]

Both of my Nforce boards started having issues after a few years. One failed to see any kind of boot device, and the other I do believe the chipset cooked itself to death.

[@th3d3wd3r]

My buddy had a dfi lanparty mobo based on I think it was the nforce 3 chipset. The cpu mosfets caught fire and burned a hole in the motherboard

[@TheDemocrab]

nVidia made some great performing/featured chipsets for Socket A, 754 and 939 but they never made a reliable chipset that I know of. Even back in the day, people noted they seemed to be problematic or outright die more often than other parts

[@dave7244]

@@TheDemocrab The nforce 2 Sata controller started dying at one point. I would need to leave the PC on for 30 minutes sitting at a black screen and then it would boot. My mate had the sound card (which was one of the reasons to buy the board just die).

[@NightMotorcyclist]

Still have my MSI K8N Neo2 which features an AGP 8X slot and MSI K8N Neo4H which has a PCIe 1.0 16X slot. I was a bit soured on the nForce 1 from MSI on the Socket A platform due to the bulging caps (which was revealed later on that they relied on a cap supplier who used "counterfeit" formulas). I was soured on MSI after my AM3 build that featured piss poor VRMs despite being touted as being highly reliable and overclockable...

[@Jerre27]

My socket 462 with nforce also died, just by being in storage...

[@zankellner150]

Asrock motherboards tend to be strong as rock

[@oddiosanto]

Nope, they suck right off the bat

[@markianclark9645]

On the contrary...they're called AsRock because Asus spinoff company liked the idea of Hard as Rock...so that's what they chose..dropped the Hard

[@randomgeekstuff2560]

Mark Ian Clark big hard

[@SerBallister]

Only board I ever had dead-on-arrival was an AsRock, talk about first impressions. Never bought another one.

[@LB_Amerijuanican]

I've always used Asus and ASRock, the funny thing is the only board i have ever had die on me was a Biostar board from ram oc 😄. My newest rig is the ASRock b450 pro4, 1600af, 16gb 3600 ram dialed down to 3200, paired with a Gigabyte rtx 2070 and the only problem i have is the gpu being loud and hot which after propping it up it's quite now however still runs hot 80c. Once zen 3 is released ill be upgrading the cpu and reapplying thermal paste on the gpu to get the most out of the 2070. Im interested in where you ordered the board from? 9/10 when a DOA happens it's because quality control of whichever warehouse the product came from. Not made wrong by the company but damaged in storage or shipping. I've had a few warehouse jobs, one dealing with tech and I've seen whole pallets of computer parts upwards of 300-500lbs on the pallet accidentally dropped from 5ft out of the back of trucks. Then we're ordered to just restack the pallet and send it on its way like nothing happened. There's where 90 percent of DOA happens. Always use sites with reasonable return policies and good warranties. That way not only will you have a warranty from the products company but also from the distributor. So if anything shows up fucked its 2 weeks later and back in your hands will be a brand new board usually sent by the manufacturer depending on warranty terms thus giving you a board that's never seen a warehouse outside of it's original manufacturing origin. Just a useful tip on pc parts.

[@joeyvdm1]

Awesome. Thanks so much Phil. The member berries are strong with this video. The AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 was a beast of a single core CPU back in the day. AMD were on top form at the time. I remember mine fondly and I believe I still have it tucked away somewhere in my house. Anyways, thanks again Phil. Stay safe and I will catch you on the next one👍 EDIT: Your video has convinced me to pull mine out of retirement and have some fun with it again😃

[@nap8187]

Have fun mate

[@DuneRunnerEnterprises]

Will you be putting it into the case,or swing it out open bed style??? I wander,what period-specific case to look for ???

[@dontcallmedoll]

Building PCs back then must have been really annoying. This CPU looked like a beast when it came out but it was just a year later that AMD released the 64 X2 5600+ with two cores at 2.8 GHZ each for HALF the price of this one. It's the processor I'm rocking in my XP-era build as it's cheap as chips now and it can easily compete with a Core 2 Duo.

[@sgibb6802]

Jay Arre I remember some games coming out with a patch to utilize dual cores. May have been Doom 3 🤔

[@Nick-ue7iw]

Au contraire, it was a great time. Games usually lagged behind supporting/taking advantage of the latest features by 1-2 years, still the case today (most games are still DX11). However, since hardware was evolving so rapidly, people were upgrading constantly, and the used market was flooded with hardware. So if you were willing to buy used, you could get top of the line hardware from 2 years prior for the price of a budget build using modern hardware. Want a hard choice between a 2.7 GHz single core semphron or a 2.6 GHz quad cor ephenom for the same price. Same for GPUs, would you rather have a geforce 9500GT or a 7800GTX? A ATI x1950xtx or a 3450? Compare that to today and the prices of used 1080tis finally falling below $500 4 years after release, and even older AMD HD 7000 GPUs holding their prices relatively well.

[@Skarfar90]

Many used Opterons as well. I have a retro rig from around 2005 that has the Opteron 185 in it. It's a dual core running at 2.6 GHz. More than enough for the games from that era, as well as games that came much later. @Nick - Yes, 1080 Ti's are still selling for a lot, even after all these years. I bought an MSI Gaming X one last year for around $500 (slightly used). You mean the Asus HD 7970 Matrix, Sapphire Toxic and such models right? Those were beasts when they launched back in 2012/2013 and they pretty much forced Nvidia to release the much more expensive Titan in order to hold the title as "fastest GPU". No wonder they still sell high today. They were also widely used in mining due to the good compute performance of GCN.

[@OGPND]

@Jay Arre while that's true, the 2nd core really helped for running multiple applications. I was in college at the time and I had a fx 3200+ and my buddy had the 4200+ I had a TV tuner card in my pc. I had to give the tuner card to him because my computer couldn't run the TV and play games at the same time.

[@stevef6392]

Yep, I have an A8N32-SLI Deluxe that died a few years ago. Bought it new back in 2005 along with an Opteron 185 CPU. It ran fine w/ the CPU overclocked to 3GHz for 12 years. In 2017 it started falling apart, piece by piece. The first part to go was the nVidia NIC. No problem - the board has two NICs, so I started using the Marvell NIC. Two months later, the PCIe X4 slot stopped working. Again, no problem - I wasn't using SLI, so I moved my X-Fi sound card to the secondary x16 slot. Another two months later, the rest of the motherboard went kaput. One day as the computer was playing audio files from NAS, it just started SCREAMING. The machine completely hard froze & started blasting the loudest, shrillest sound out of the speakers. I immediately pulled the plug and let it cool off. Unfortunately, I never got the board to POST again after that incident. All of the caps looked fine, so I'm not sure what caused it to die. I still have that board. It's framed and hanging on my wall. :)

[@TheShivABC]

Unfortunately some of these caps will show no signs of being bad at all, most of this hardware was manufactured during the capacitor plague where a company leaked an incomplete capacitor formula that many chinese companies erroneously copied

[@MrKillswitch88]

@@nneeerrrd They don't need to bulge to go bad, electrolytic can dry out (slow leak) and with age they love to either short or go open. Ceramics can go bad as well and that stops the majority of people from fixing hardware for all the usual reasons.

[@cesteres]

I have dead or unstable mainboards and graphic cards from pre 2010. I assume it's the caps. Never overclocked them hard.

[@ichinumi]

I also have A8N32-SLI Deluxe. It works just perfect. And have fanless design. Also it has no PCI-E x4 slot. All that it has - 2xPCI-E x16 slots and 3xPCI. And it can handle Opteron 185 since Q2'06. How the hell could you buy Opteron 185/A8N32-SLI Deluxe in 2005 when Opteron 185 had been introduced in March 2006 and this board couldn't hold this processor before BIOS version 1103?

[@stevef6392]

@@ichinumi Have no clue. All I know is that, yes, my A8N32-SLI Deluxe most definitely has an x4 slot, and that I most definitely was using it with an Opteron 185 since the day I bought it. That day could've been in 2006, but my memory is steering me to summer of '05.

[@oscarc6210]

I love this motherboard. AGP and PCIe works at the same time. I got to run simultaneusly Quake 2 in a windows through a AGP NVIDIA card in a monitor, and a DirectX 9 game on another monitor through an AMD PCIE card. All in a single Windows XP 64 bits edition without virtualization. There was, of course, some issues with the drivers until it works

[@JimtheITguy]

The nForce chipset was a pain in the arse when new, and only got worse with age, driver support fell off and then normally the headsinks fell off on the cheaper boards and they died

[@uzernaim1648]

I have an ECS board from 2007 and have no issues, but I have repasted it.

[@JimtheITguy]

@@uzernaim1648 more amazed you have a ECS board still working 🤣

[@BagusHanindhito]

@@JimtheITguy I still have working old PC with ECS Nforce4 A939 motherboard running Athlon x2 4200+. Running it just for a cheap router/ftp server

[@Tom2404]

@@JimtheITguy I have a working Socket 4 ECS board from 1995. I've heard it outperforms most other mainboards for socket 4. Also it offers great possibilities to configure memory and cache timings.

[@JimtheITguy]

@@Tom2404 Glad to hear it, Socket 7 and SS7 onwards boards got so cheap and badly made that they didnt survive or they were so unstable after a few years due to crap caps

[@Gooberslot]

I've had several Asus boards and never had any serious issues. Never used an Nvidia chipset though. My 939 board is a MSI K8T Neo2. Still works and also has Win98 compatibility if you're willing to work for it.

[@Artanys62]

It was mainly NVIDIA nForce problem, even later in AM2 era the nForce Ultra 570 and such were quite buggy.

[@ozmobozo]

Asus boards from that era (the weird orange colored ones) were rock solid.

[@HYDRAdude]

I have his exact board and while the mobo worked great for about two years, it died as soon as the warranty ran out. Was great while it lasted though.

[@611ethan]

Very nice vid Phil. I had a P4 3.2 on an Asrock motherboard with a Nvidia 7600gt back in 2006. I think I upgraded it to a c2d later on where I got a CPU temp error at post but this was corrected with a bios update and all was well again. All up, I was very happy with that motherboard.

[@unitedfools3493]

Ah the memories ... I never owned an FX CPU but that Ai Lifestyle branding bought back the feels of the Q6600!

[@penguin5384]

Q6600, now there's a chip. I still have a rig running one, such a fantastic processor for overclocking.

[@tristanholley7141]

The whole Q2D/Q2Q line was amazing for overclocking. I once put a 3Ghz e8400 under vegetable oil with a water cooling kit in a mini fridge and it just wouldn't quit. I think I got it to 4.5Ghz...

[@bennyhill5173]

Watching this with a Dutch subtitles, just breathtaking

[@jasper8291]

Yeah like what happened there XD

[@MilankoDebil]

Hoi

[@jacobjay2892]

I started with C64 so I have a lot behind me. XT, AT, 386, 486 etc.. Each generation has got its unique milestones. I was building a lot of PCs by then, it was very fascinating time, starting from hardware support for T&L in GeForce 256 progress in graphics was really massive and 5 years was a century. Nowadays if you will take a look at AAA from 5 years ago, there is still progress, there are improvements but then it was like discovering whole new world. In terms of progress Witcher III vs RDR 2 is not as impressive as Quake II vs Battlefield 1942 but there is still a lot of fun in computing.

[@LeeMc007]

I still have all my original hardware from this era with Athlon X2 4400+ Asus A8n Sli Premium , 2gb Corsair 3200 c2 and a Geforce 8800GTX , Intel 80gb SSD , Enermax 535w PSU , everything still works perfectly and I've never had any issues installing XP , absolutely love my XP PC , it's a beast for the games of the era , I need to get a Creative XFI though as I only have an SB Live! in it atm , next step is a Lian-Li case from the era , the case I've got is a bit crap. Love your channel , it's absolutely the best retro hardware channel around , I recently also built a Win 98 retro PC and used many of your videos to help in choosing the hardware , funnily the hardest thing was finding a decent beige box to suit the 98se era. Thanks again , keep it up mate. 👍👍

[@dallesamllhals9161]

OG. A8N-SLI here: 8 GIGS ECC DDR* and Opteron 180. *WHY?? you'd say! ..cause it was fun doing it (cheap ECC RAM) in Windows 7 64Bit. Now in a W2K/XP-build not so much...

[@davidp4456]

A great video . The comments show a strong following for s939. I chose this for my own retro build during covid lock down using an ASsus A8V, Opteron 180, Radeon 4650 and X-Fi. It works flawlessly. I would like to upgrade to the Asrock dual m/b, but whilst it is working so well I”m reluctant to dismantle it and start again.

[@JudasMugensson]

I still have my athlon 64 3500+ paired with a asus a8n-vm csm rev 1.01 and it has worked flawlessly for as long as I've had it. I've had it since 2009 when I got it from a relative. Apart from cleaning it from dust I've replaced the cmos battery once a couple of years ago.

[@mdd1963]

I had a 3500+, as well.....nice processor at the time!

[@hrayz]

I used an Athlon 64 3700+ and the Athlon 64X2 3800+ on that board. Never a problem!

[@abhishekganeriwal9602]

Phil... Love the way you explain every build... It is very easy to understand and follow the guide... Keep up the good job... I always watch your video till the end... Like your work.... Nice 1... You inspire many people...

[@CuttingEdgeRetro]

I'm running the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe with my FX60 and its been rock solid. I suspect your issues are due to dead nv chipsets. It was all too common for these to fail as everyone did FSB overclocking without adding aftermarket chipset cooling. Its a shame, the A8N32 is such a good SLI board.

[@TinyTitian]

You can't blame the users on this. Nvidia chipsets were just thermally garbage. I never overclocked on my system and the one nvidia chipset I owned died quicker than any system I ever owned lasting only 3 years. Thermals weren;t that high either as my gpu was a 7600 gs at 512mb. The graphics card I put the intel based asrock mb through saw much higher thermals with a 550ti in a case with only a intake fan in the case. So the hot air from the gpu was definitely flowing into the system.

[@bookshelffury]

Weird. I guess I've been lucky. I have a 680i and 790i with max Northbridge voltage that have been working for over 10 years like that overclocked. 60c average temps.

[@CrazyMonkeyTM]

@@TinyTitian I had many intel, VIA and AMD chipsets that died on me than I can count. It happens.... Nvidia chipsets (nforce 4 mainly) the best ones for socket 939, specially for OC. DFI Lanparties were the pinnacle motherboards to OC opty's and FX's.

[@giovaanflores7019]

I still have two Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboards brand new in box . Should I sell them or hang on to them .

[@bookshelffury]

@@giovaanflores7019 waaaatttttt????? NICE! hunt down some 8800 GTX's to put in em lol

[@michaelwenek76]

Hey Phil! Great stuff as always. I want to thank you especially for the Snappy Drive Installer link. I am working on numerous projects and this tool looks great. The fastest Socket 939 chip I have is the AMD 64 X2 5000 running in an Asus M2NPV-VM 😎

[@mynameiskolia]

AMD 64 X2 5000 for a socket 939? Wasn't X2 4800+ the top one that 939 supports?

[@fuerstlustig]

Great video as always :) Would love to see some more thin client videos for retro gaming. Thanks to your channel I grabbed myself a couple of HP t610s real cheap a while ago to have a retro LAN party with my friends once in a while. Cheers!

[@DeViLzzz2006]

Been awhile since I watched a video of your's Phil and well it was because it reminded me I could not get stuff used from people, did not want to order stuff from other nations and well yeah .... Anyway glad to watch your video today and I hope you and your loved ones are doing well. PS: I was the 670th like matching me using the GTX 670 still today. LOL!

[@nic_s5215]

I still have my Abit AN8-Ultra board, AMD 4800+, a ATI x600, a Asus EN7600GT (Passive cooler), and a Geforce 8800GT... haven't tried to run any of it in many years now. I used that system until 2013 when I finally upgraded. They might still work and I feel like building a retro PC. I even still have my case from 2005... think all I'm short is a working PSU and a nice CRT monitor... I do actually have quite a bit of old tech. Some old intel 478, Celeron D, 2 or 3 Athlon 64 3200, AMD Phenom II 550 black, Geforce GTS250, ATI 9200, some other random graphics cards, old external 56k modem, and all kinds of bits and pieces. Never really thought about it much until I saw some of your vids and now I realize I have quite a pile of old stuff stashed away in boxes. Feels like yesterday me and my mates were updating directX with our TNT2 and Geforce 2 MX440 (Had a 1.1Ghrz Celeron at the time) and running 3D mark to see if it made a difference and then just playing counter strike 1.3 all weekend anyway.... good times.

[@dinkledankle]

I remember when you couldn't really multi-task or double-client while playing a game. I still get a weird feeling sometimes when I'm in a game and tab out to do something in the browser etc, and that was a while ago. Single and double-threaded/core CPUs just weren't it. Glad we don't have to worry about it anymore 😅

[@lukasg4807]

That was still me until very recently. I couldn't even run overwatch and discord at the same time.

[@marcopolo8584]

This brings up some fuzzy old memories of me struggling to play games on my dad's old Dell with a Pentium 4 inside. This was the very reason when I built my first PC I went overboard and got a 5820K

[@ZaPirate]

when I want to test an old motherboard, I just use a PCI Sata controller. Had only issues with the onboard SATA ports.

[@CaptainDangeax]

Good advice !

[@2Mourty]

Love this era of computing!! I built my 1st computer in 2002 so this hardware is near and dear to my heart. As for what to do videos on I would love to see a video comparing the different socket 3 "pentium" solutions. POD83, cyrix 5x86, amd 133 etc......

[@SmelliestStinker]

Thank god you tested it with SC Chaos Theory, if you haven't noticed, some of the computers in the game have a screensaver that says "AMD Athlon 64 FX". I came here just to see how well this game would run on a CPU that the game literally advertises.

[@orangeActiondotcom]

For anyone curious, here's the reasons you don't want to install video and audio drivers from Snappy Driver Installer Origin: For video driver I have routinely had bad luck with it causing system lockups and having to boot to Safe Mode and manually remove or replace them; this has occurred regularly on both NVIDIA and ATI/AMD GPUs, other manufacturers don't really seem to be an issue. For audio drivers, specifically Creative Labs products, the original Creative Labs installation CDs will not detect the sound card once drivers have been installed and so the installers will refuse to run. It's best to install everything you need from the CD immediately after Windows installation, and then reboot. From there, you can allow SDIO to install the latest drivers for the cards and retain their full functionality.

[@PusterPL]

Have the same Asrock board in one of my machines, bought new many years ago :) still works fine :)

[@amindlost]

I have an ASUS A8N-SLI that, as of the last time I tried it, still works perfectly fine. I've had to replace the chipset fan twice since I got the board back when I purchased it as a replacement for an MSI board that died a mysterious death after a simple RAM upgrade; this would have been sometime around the end of the 939's lifespan, circa '05-06. I bought a passive Zalman heatsink that I might get around to putting on it some day. Aside from a single capacitor near the RAM slot sthat's showing signs of bulging, the board appears to still be in decent condition, and now I kind of want to take it out and play with it.

[@theepicemoji5602]

I was a console player in 2005, but I got into PC gaming a year ago, and its nice being able to play games on pc now, I enjoy both console and Pc, they both have their strengths and weaknesses

[@emp.splash]

Loved how smooth Far Cry looked in the video (shame about the 7900 GTO's texture issue, though). It's still such a good looking game, at least to my nostalgic eyes.

[@MaGiKRat420]

If you buy modern creative sound cards, even external usb ones, you can emulate eax configuration on any game from windows xp or below that supported it. I've never heard you mention that in any of your videos, which are otherwise very well made and informative

[@fabiotiburzi]

Awesome like always!!!!

[@daw7563]

Look for swollen caps on those old dead motherboards.

[@nicksolari2856]

EVENT ID 41 KERNEL POWER

[@FingerinUrDaughter]

nah his caps are all in perfect condition, unless someone cleaned them to make the board look better. bulging dosent always happen, but leaking does when they go bad. probably just the shit chipeset.

[@SerBallister]

Especially if it's manufactured in the 90s, a lot of caps back then were counterfeit.

[@daw7563]

@@SerBallister early 2000s too, from my experience.

[@MrEdIsTheSource]

@@daw7563 if i recall correctly it was the very early 2000s; 2000 - 2002.

[@xephorce]

I not sure but I believe years ago I had nothing but issues with a mobo that had Nforce chips.

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

man, some pandemic killing people around the world but Phil uploaded another video about retro hardware. this world is cool

[@happygimp0]

Don't watch the media.

[@HVDynamo]

I had the first board you tried. I ordered it because it had integrated Sata in the northbridge specifically so it didn't need the F6 driver method to use data. I never had to do that with that board. I ordered that board as soon as it launched, and it had a lot of stability issues at first, but then on a later bios update it became the most stable and solid system I have ever owned. I paired mine with the Athlon 64 X2 4400+. I still have both the board and CPU.

[@magman48]

I had that asrock board myself and asrock sent me a daughter board to upgrade it to am2 socket. I never used the daughter board and still have it. That board was rock solid for me and used it for many years

[@cybergarri]

Last version of Easy2Boot work fine for me I just installed windows xp sp3 (Building a retropc after several weeks of quarantine here in Spain)

[@realpolitik2617]

That's the primary reason why Nvidia Chipsets disappeared in the face of the earth.

[@ErikMinecraft]

I have an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe, almost the same Board as you wanted to use. Got it CIB almost new, but the seller sold it really cheap, due to a faded memory of having issues with it. I tested it and it would always spit out the same post beebs and a black screen, regardless of cpu or powersupply. Got another used but in good conditon A8N (don´t remember the exact model) also with an Nforce Chipset but without SLI capabilites. That board worked fine, apart from booting issues sometimes. Sold it as a complete system to a friend, so he can play some games from back in the day, that he really enjoyed.

[@matthewplehn4271]

Great Video Phil...Im pretty sure i was all AMD/ATI in 2005...couldnt afford anything else..I did have an X850XT...and i believe at one point had an Nforce2 mainboard..one problem i had was that i had purchased a antec 500w "green" PSU..every time i would play the original Prey my whole system would shut down after about 20 minutes..took my along time to figure out it was that shitty PSU...have never bought an Antec again...lol

[@AncientElectronics]

I have an FX-57 build with an A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. don't recall ever having any issues with that motherboard. Even have 4GB of that special RAM they specifically recommended for that motherboard with the fancy LED lights.

[@chazbotic]

when i was still doing system builds in the early 2000s with nvidia MCP chips, they were very sensitive to the BIOS for the CPU support. sometimes the latest BIOS would not be stable with certain processors based on the stepping - E4 FX-57 was the best supported with E6 sometimes being a beta BIOS or not even supported at all at some memory speeds. certain boards had BIOS releases that were more broadly compatible too, like Biostar or MSI. if you look on the Asus site for that A8N-SLI board, you can see it only supports the E4 stepping. your CPU is an E4, but a different BIOS might be better supporting that specific release (CAB2E).

[@klym8_]

I love this classic pc reviews, 8 years old me would kill to play those games back in the days

[@mapley2167]

What a nice early Friday present :)

[@ritiksaini778]

Great work

[@Nanospark0]

I had issues with my ASUS M2N-E (not with SATA as it didn't have AHCI support) with random crashes. I thought the board was complete toast until I looked at it and noticed a blown cap near the RAM. I replaced all the caps that had the same values as the one that blew and no more random crashes. For your boards that don't POST, check the caps (top and bottom) to see if any have blown and recap if necessary.

[@KeyToTime]

Great video as always Phil! I have a similar retro XP gaming PC. I went for the similarly bonkers Pentium 4 extreme edition (3.4GHz on socket 775) Nvidia GTX 7950GT (XFX overclocked silent edition) ASUS P5WD2 Premium motherboard 4GB (2x2GB) ddr2 RAM (1066mhz Corsair XMS2) Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Edition (the original PCI version with 64MB of X-Ram and the 5.25" bay) It's all build around the P4 EE, there are so few motherboards that support it. I chose the nvidia card because of its looks and the fact it was silent. It also evokes more nostalgia for me as I always had Nvidia cards back in the day. (I think I had a GeForce 6200 at the time) I'm currently playing Doom 3 on it during the lockdown! I'd love to see you do a video on the Prescot 2M vs the 1M and see if the extra cache made any difference in retro games and if it makes any difference to more modern applications and then maybe compare that to the extreme edition. I'd also like to see more of the Intel vs AMD series.

[@PixelPipes]

Hmm, none of the boards worked except the 939Dual-SATA2. One more point in favor of possibly being the best Athlon 64 board ever?

[@Shenron67]

Perfect timing, I'm waiting for some 2x1GB DDR for my Athlon 64 3200+, I will put a HD7850 on this one.

[@dhgodzilla1]

Rare to see AGP & Full size PCIe on the same Board. I recently put together an older AMD system & it is a little buggy too. It is a Gigabyte GA-MA770T US3. It has a 1090T Black Edition CPU & 16 Gigs of DDR3 RAM. The Issue it kept giving me was Randomly I would get a DMI Pool Data Error on Boot while it is detecting the Hard Drive/ SSD. I did use an SSD for Windows & it is Windows 10. I updated the Bios but strangely enough it had to be done Twice in a row to take the Update. Now it does it a lot less but still every now & than doesn't detect the SSD, but restarting usually fixes that. I still think it's a Bios issue like maybe the Bios itself is suffering from Bit Rot, interestingly enough though it is also a Dual Bios Motherboard so I may try to swap the Bios Chips just to see what Happens.

[@blackterminal]

Can a bios suffer bit rot?

[@RetroTinkerer]

Look for Phil review of this board, ULI did such a good job that NVidia bought them, it was the only board with pretty fast AGP and PCIe

[@fabiosemino2214]

I had had ton of problems with Nforce chipset and socket 939 back in the days, I RMAed a Gigabyte motherboard and I had stability problems also with socket AM2, partially solved using Ubuntu, I had also the 939 Dual Sata 2 and it was my mainboard back them, very nice experience with that and ULi chipset

[@Nikke-Nakke]

Great drinking game when watching your videos.. You win if your alive at the end of the video. The catch: when phil say "BUT" you drink.. Good luck!

[@rebeccaschade3987]

Would I be completely off base if I said that I seem to remember from reviews back then, that the Radeon cards had higher image quality by default in their driver settings? Better texture filtering or something of that sort.

[@appwraith]

Last year I've built myself a little retro project box around the Athlon XP platform, mainly to archive old stuff from 5.25" floppy disks. I had an Asus motherboard initially (A7N8X), which would lock up in the BIOS, and 50-50 chance to POST. I've swapped it out to an Abit NF7-S, and that one still works well to this day. Oh, and the video card in that box is a Geforce 6600 GT, but only because that was what I had in spare. I might swap it out to a period correct ATi card at some point.

[@2007tantrum]

Like this video and idea, to use CPU from 2005 and two GPU’s around that era. I would like to see such videos moving forward to 2006 as example and adding at last Window Vista RTM or Vanilla, whatever you call it)

[@Alcononymous]

the very day after i start asking for one on the facebook channels, now the price is gonna go through the roof, thanks fill. Kidding awesome work as usual.

[@Alcononymous]

ive had massive problems with via chipsets not haveing speed mitigation.

[@philscomputerlab]

What's the going rate of this CPU?

[@Alcononymous]

Havent been able to find one, theres a fx 60 goong for 160 us

[@jibbles42]

Still got a working A8N-E. I think 2 of the ram slots are flakey now though :(. Was in my system from 2005 until maybe 2010.

[@ultra_code_]

My experience with Socket 939 has been overall positive. Recently, I purchased an Asus A8N32-SLI (never really had any serious problems with Asus boards, unless they were actually broken), and after giving it a thorough cleaning because it was a bit disgusting (spraying it down with some CRC QD Electronic Cleaner after popping off the heatsinks, doing additional cleaning with 91% iso. al., and using some new Arctic MX-4 and Arctic thermal pads for the VRM + chipset heatsinks), I threw into it my AMD Athlon 64 FX-60, 2 different kits of 2x512MB DDR-400, a Zalman CNPS9500 LED CPU cooler, and a Teamgroup L5 3D Lite 120GB SSD, and went off to install XP Pro. 64-bit. I never had as much trouble installing XP as I did when I tried with this platform. It turns out that if you slipstream the Nvidia SATA drivers (which you can get by unzipping the all-in-one Nvidia chipset+storage+other-stuff driver package and going to the "IDE\WIN**\sata_ide" folder), you have to allow XP's installer do drive formating, or else it'll essentially not copy anything over from the install disk. If you try to format your boot drive under modern Windows for proper SSD allignment and the like, and try to make the slipstreamed XP installer do something with it, the installer acts as though the volume is write-protected from the looks of it. Besides that multi-hour troublshooting nightmare, the rest went swimmingly. Installed the latest Nvidia all-in-one driver package for the chipset, then sound, LAN, etc., fully-updated XP with _all_ of the latest updates, installed the latest GPU drivers for my given GPU, did some tiddying up, and the install was ready for some GPU testing (I was testing a 7950GT and a 7900GTX that I had just acquired for this test-build). After that was all said and done, I decided to try some OCing with this CPU. I got decent results I think with this chip (2.8Ghz with stock bus speeds, multiplier of 14, and Vcore of 1.45V; the chip was over 2 hours stable under Prime95 at 1.435V (?), so 1.45V should equal rock-solid stability, although I didn't test it; after all, 'tis was just for a little benchmarking, not long-term use; BTW, I had some fans over the VRMs, just in case). Sadly, I could not go any higher and hope for any reasonable stability. From what I could gather, this was due to temperature - these chips get real sensitive at around 60C, unlike modern CPUs, so if I want to get beyond 2.8Ghz, I'll need a beefer cooler or a more exotic solution. I don't think I won the silicon lottery with this chip. Anywho, getting an FX-60 to 2.8Ghz (which I think with nearly all FX-60s is easily doable with a decent cooler) should easily put it toe-to-toe with an FX-57 at least in clocks, all the while giving you the benefits of two cores with 1 megabyte of cache per core. @PhilsComputerLab Maybe you should compare the FX-57 with the FX-60, and if you need an FX-60, I'd be happy to loan you mine. :D

[@Benman2785]

4:00 with my old 939 Asus A8N-SLI-Deluxe i had problems with RAID - so i switched to an MSI K8T-Neo2-FIR with Via Chipset

[@denton8047]

Same mobo as my Athlon 64 build back in the day! I also had issues with nForce boards, but the Asrock was pretty stable. It didn't die that I know of, but I think it got stuffed in a closet. GPU's that it featured were the 6600GT, x1650pro, and then a 8800GTS when it launched. Nearly got a 7 series, but held off; The 8800's were great! (Until they cooked); I had 4 by the end!

[@SUCRA]

Would you recomend the sound blaster X-fi or the audigy 2 zs for such a retro pc? I've been watching all of your videos, great stuff by the way. I have come to the conclusion that the audigy 2 zs is the best, but now I'm a bit confused.

[@philscomputerlab]

X-Fi is best for XP. Audigy 2 is ok for XP but best Creative card for Windows 98.

[@moofree]

I think these came with those neat four-heat-pipe-coming-out-of-the-same-side coolers which I found a lot at Goodwill Computer Works. I need to compare those to the later style you're using here.

[@philscomputerlab]

Good question, not sure what the boxed cooler looked like. Did it even come with one?

[@moofree]

@@philscomputerlab After looking into it, I was thinking of the cooler that shipped with the FX-6X series which came out maybe 6 months later. Hexus reviewed the FX60 and references that it features an upgrade over the original cooler-- "When FX-57 was released it was shipped solely with a PIB cooler developed by AVC. Since launch, AMD...sought...another model to ship ... with FX-57 and their other ~100W CPUs... Manufactured by Coolermaster and called CMHK8-8I22A-A2"

[@101m4n]

I have an am2+ board from about 2008 with an nforce chipset. Still works today! I guess they ironed out the bugs later.

[@markianclark9645]

Great retro review as usual..back then I was only a year into PCs..my Athlon XP 2000 was replaced in 2006 by the short lived socket 754 Athlon64 3000+ another single core..in an MSI K8M800 6741...still runs but has a Sempron 1600 now...like your many failing boards from this era...mine won't work with the 3000 or 3200 or 3400...no signals...but all the same starting noises and fans...I had to wait another decade to get a Foxconn 939 board and processor...which I use everyday...and I also have a few pentium based old PCs too...wouldn't mind one of those AsRock AGP/PCIe boards...

[@sinusshephard5314]

Yep,I had the fx-55 and Asus m2n32-sli deluxe with four 80gb hdds in raid 0 and a 2 EVGA 8800gts video cards in sli.

[@zarkeh3013]

sold MDSI @ the time and I remember problems like this with Nvidia Chipsets. Also remember many tests with nlite integrating drivers as well ... bleh, Glad to know I'm not the only one with Nvidia problems! Always had great luck with Via and ATI chipsets! Thnx,

[@matcarfer]

@PhilsComputerLab why not use Rufus to install XP? I found it great, and when I had problems, I just disconnect CD/DVD Drive and reconnect it when install is finished. Super fast.

[@philscomputerlab]

Easy 2 Boot has all the AHCI SATA drivers included!

[@matcarfer]

@@philscomputerlab I understand. I just 2 isos: one by me and from other guy (Integral) which has them all integrated.

[@CaptainDangeax]

Hi. Did you test your first motherboard (the one with BSOD) with Linux ? I remember saving PCI-64 and PCI-128 sound cards just by installing'em in a Linux powered rig.

[@kami4542]

Nice video as always Phil :) I had the same issue you had with the Asus boards but with an Asrock AM2NF3-VSTA which also has an Nforce chipset, for me the board wouldn't even power on, no green LED, nothing. I had the same thing with a Gigabyte 939 board with AGP and Nforce chipset though with this one the southbridge was getting hot gradually (I had to remove its cooler to notice that) but no power on, no LED etc. I think it's a chipset problem

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks for sharing!

[@commodore71]

I bought an Asus A7N8X-E deluxe back in the Athlon XP days, and had a lot of problems with it, I had the same issues that you had in the video, but only with the ethernet controller. When I tried to make a RMA the vendor had gone bankrupt, so I had to get a VIA based board from Msi instead. Worked like a charm until lightning struck :-)

[@Kaio7]

Great video as always. Quick question: as I see @ 5:06 did you leave SATA operation mode at RAID and SATAII at IDE mode? I wonder if that's why XP was crashing after installing the sata drivers. Also, I would always leave SATA modes at AHCI before installing Windows. Note: you probably know this but when you do that, you should NEVER go back and change that mode back to IDE after Windows has been installed, otherwise the O.S. will fail to boot. I learned that the hard way. :( You have to switch it back to AHCI mode, start in safe mode and tweak a registry entry to regain normal O.S. functionality.

[@philscomputerlab]

I tried all the options! Using a floppy with F6 Driver worked with either BIOS settings...

[@Choralone422]

There's a reason why Nvidia no longer makes PC mainboard chipsets. I've very rarely had good experiences with Nvidia chipset mainboards, both at home and working in IT during that time. The most reliable Nvidia chipset based board I've ever used was in an older Dell Dimension PC that has an 939 Athlon X2 3800+ CPU in it. But even that board can be somewhat finicky with SATA devices much like you also had issues with. Back in 2005-2006 I still had an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU overclocked to 3200+ speed and a ATI 9500 Pro video card. The whole setup was long in the tooth, but I was going through a divorce & bankruptcy at the time so I didn't have a lot of money for several years.

[@ovalwingnut]

Very cool that you were wearing a ankle antistatic strap. Good on you 👍😉

[@AmartharDrakestone]

I didn't use an Asus, but an ASRock with an Nvidia chipset. The N68C-S UCC AM2+/AM3. I used it from 2010 up until 2018 when it started giving out. First the USB headers started failing, then some of the SATA ports, and finally one RAM slot died on me. But it did give me a solid almost-decade of use.

[@mistermudpie]

Awesome video! Reminds me of the days when I got my first dual core CPU, the Opteron 185, which was basically a cheaper FX-60. How cool would it be to check those out too?

[@simsluver]

Awesome video! It would be great to see modified drivers

[@philscomputerlab]

What modified driver are you after?

[@blai5e730]

I started with a MSI 939 board (chipset fan was a bit flakey) with a 3500+ with a 7800GTX, changed to a 4000+ and finally paired a FX-60 with a DFI eXpert 939 SLI board with 2 x 7900GT's (all watercooled). The graphics cards were finally replaced with a GTX 260 which I left aircooled with the CPU under water.Still have all the parts, might dig it out and run it up in my test bench during this lockdown for giggles.

[@gloriousnait]

I own the same A8N-32 board that I picked up second hand a few years ago. I've only had stability problems with, but nothing like the driver issues you had with yours. Normally older ASUS stuff is fine but I wonder if something going on specifically with their 939 stuff.

[@TheJamesKF]

I love this! I had a Abit Nforce socket A board and moved to an Asrock 939 board with a Venice 3200+ and 2 gb of Corsair xms.. That ram was ungodly expensive back in the day. I ran with a BFG 7950GT. Was a great system for its time.

[@pachodomi]

I have used an ASROCK M3N78-VM with NForce chipset with absolutely no problems until a couple of weeks. It has been paired with Phenom X3 710 and X4 955 BE. Always overclocked and no problem.

[@CHiLL72]

Hello Phil, CHiLL here.... Your video triggered me to try the NForce mainboards that I had stored away. And what do you know? My two ASUS boards, both A8N-32 SLI Deluxe, would not boot. There was a small difference between the two: on one board the fan on the graphics card would not spin up, but on the other one it did. I seem to recall that these boards are quite specific about the power supply and I only tried one. So maybe I'll get back to these with a different power supply and see if my luck changes. I also have a Gigabyte mainboard with the NForce4 chipset and fortunately that one will boot without an issue. And then there is the king of the NForce4 boards, the DFI LanParty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert. I also have on of these. I noticed one bulging capacitor near one of the PCI slots, but decided to fire it up anyway, with the FX-60 CPU (an idea for for a future video?) and that mainboard is also still alive. So I must agree with you that said about the ASUS boards. This generation of boards from them seems to have failed the test of time. I'm contemplating trying one more A8N32-SLI board, as someone near where I live is selling one for a low price. I'm tempted..... Finally, I also tested an MSI mainboard with the NForce3 chipset that I have. Apparently that one is also working fine. I think I will do a fast Windows 98SE build with that board, as it still has AGP and I have a few of the fastest AGP cards out there. In the meantime, good luck with your website and videos and stay safe!

[@philscomputerlab]

Interesting findings! I did get a comment that I shouldn't have tested with a FX, but a regular Athlon 64. I'm sure that the second board, has latest BIOS, and was running FX-57 and FX-60 in the past. But not sure about third board... I love my VIA chipset boards HAHA. I'm a minority but they always worked well for me, even with Windows 98 and DOS :D

[@CHiLL72]

@@philscomputerlab I did some more testing over the weekend with my Gigabyte K8N Pro-SLI. It turns out that this board supports ECC RAM, like servers do. As I read about the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe supporting ECC RAM, but being unable to test it, I tried it on the Gigabyte board and with just two DIMMs I get 4GB RAM! I only tried it with the Athlon 64 4000+ and it would not boot with 4 DIMMs, but maybe my Opteron 180 or FX-60 will support that amount of RAM. In the Gigabyte BIOS, you can press Ctrl+F1 to access the Advanced Options, where you can enable support for ECC RAM. I bought 8 sticks of (HP) 2GB Registered DDR-400 DIMMs a few years ago. As it turns out I have three bad sticks and five good ones. I also updated the BIOS on my MSI K8N Neo FSR 2.0 (socket 754) mainboard. It had some trouble booting, but then I noticed a bad capacitor on the board. When I have the time, I will try and put in a new one, to see if that helps with the booting issues. To be continued....

[@wishusknight3009]

Before my M2N32-SLI Deluxe I had one of those asrock boards. Strait up, when it first launched, it was crap. Stability and performance issues abounded, but every time I looked there was a new bios update. And one by one the bugs were all fixed. And then finally with one of the later bios revisions they gave them a great performance boost, so they were as good as any other board at the time on 939. I passed mine down and it was used happily for many years. Best budget board of its era that allowed me to hang onto my AGP card and upgrade to a dual core and pcie card, and later AM2. Very great experience.

[@TrueThanny]

There are a few performance tweaks with _Far Cry_ that can only be done with the console. One in particular, which requires Shader Model 3.0, is geometry instancing. That can have a significant impact on performance, as one of the things it allows is creating just one tree geometry, which is duplicated on the GPU for every instance of that tree, rather than creating that tree everywhere it appears. You won't get that functionality using presets.

[@bdhale34]

I actually still own two Asus main boards that were manufactured for OEMs one from a Compaq one form an HP. Both are M2N68-LA models one with 2 ram and 3 audio and the other with 4 ram and 6 audio jacks, both use the nVidia nForce 430a/GeForce 6150LE chipset Socket AM2 and never had a single issue out of either board, i use them to soft mod old school xboxes and run retro software if the occasion calls for it.

[@GAMMAXII]

I've still got my MSI nforce 4 neo4 and that still works and caps are still good, on the otherhand. I had 2 939 gigabyte boards that died of cap plague.

[@Leviathan609]

We need a review of that motherboard and the funky AGP-esq slots, not to mention all those header jumpers!

[@youtubasoarus]

I've had quite a few AsRock boards up to this point and they've always been reliable. I still remember the first time I got one on sale thought WTF is this, but it turned out great. Would recommend them. I generally go with Radeon for video if I can. But i've run some nVidia stuff in the past.

[@welliben]

I have the A8N32 and there was an issue with something buggy on the USB, you couldn't use both a usb mouse and keyboard (can't remember off hand which one), which could cause random crashes or freezes on boot. Replace whichever one of the two and it would go fine. The NForce 4 chipsets do really like cooking themselves, and the location under the back of the graphics card doesn't help - that heat pipe system is pretty overrated although it looks nice. I have a FX60 and two 8800 GTX's in SLI on mine and needless to say it only gets turned on on the coolest days of the year... ULI's 939 chipset was as good, but ran markedly cooler.

[@thesighthesound]

I have an A8N-E, and it has been perfectly reliable. However it's extremely picky about memory configuration. I also have an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (also N-force3) and it works great. I've used both boards with an Athlon 64 x2 3800 and a SATA SSD with no issues at all.

[@borjaevo]

I was using a nforce chipset motherboard for some years as a server using a phenom x4 cpu without problems, but compatibility was very poor for cpu but also for graphic cards. I suspect it could be some compatibility problem rather than mobo being damaged even when cpu list says its supported.

[@wyattsyverson8603]

I had an asus m2r32-mvp back in the day and it was always problematic. Switched to an asrock board that was flawless. The asus board does still work I believe it’s crowding up one of my closets somewhere.

[@modlabs]

Did you tried to install not a latest drivers? I figured that latest drivers (for example for 6800u for Win9x) is very buggy. Also it is happening with chipset drivers.

[@TrueThanny]

04:00 I used a number of ASUS boards from that era with nForce chipsets. Never had any issues with them. My last Athlon X2 processor (6000+), before I upgraded to a Phenom II, was on an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe board. I also built a few PC's for work using other manufacturers (Biostar and Gigabyte come to mind) which also used nForce chipsets. But that was all over ten years ago now. I have no idea how well they've aged. I still have that M2N32-SLI board with processor (probably have some compatible RAM about), but I haven't tried to boot it in ages.

[@batman9592]

Now we're back on track! BUT DOES IT RUN CRYSIS?!?? I had P4 (1.6>2.8>2.8HT OC'd) and both nVidia/ ATi (FX5500>X800GTO later HD3850) I only used Gigabyte boards which still work today. (I did buy a dual PCIe/ AGP but the neighbour stole it!) All my later XFX boards died (nForce).