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Install

I do not know if we have just been snake bitten but we've had trouble with installs on both of the NForce 3 250 boards we have had. The Nvidia reference board we played with did not have these issues. With both the MSI and the Gigabyte, the install process would go fine until the initial load up of Windows and both would promptly crash during the Windows XP logo. This anamoly was sorted out on the MSI board by disabling one of the SATA or IDE channels which would allow Windows to load successfully and then subsequently reenabling the SATA channel.

Problems with the Gigabyte install were a bit more complex. A lot of the onboard peripherals would have to be disabled in addition to one of the IDE or SATA channels. The Silicon Image SATA controller proved to be the most troublesome - the Serial ATA function did not like to be set to BASE mode. All in all getting Windows to boot with all the onboard peripherals activated was a frustrating experience. We did obtain the newest BIOS from Gigabyte but it did not seem to alleviate these problems.

Presumably future shipped boards with newer BIOS and driver sets should alleviate this problem, since we're one of the first to get our grubby hands on this baby.

Benchmark Setup

AMD Athlon64 3400+
AOpen AK86-L
Gigabyte K8NNXP
MSI K8N Neo
Seagate Barracuda SATA V 120 GB 7200 Hard Drive
Western Digital WD1200 IDE Hard Drive
2 X 256 XMS3202v1.1 Corsair PC3200 DDR
GeforceFX 5950 Ultra Forceware 56.73
NForce Platform 4.12 Drivers
VIA Hyperion 4.51
WinXP SP1

We'll compare the K8NSNXP to the K8NNXP it replaces, the budget screamer in the AOpen AK86-L and finally a 250Gb based MSI K8N Neo