bad experience with nforce3

[orph3us]

I just posted this in 360hacker.net but since it doesnt seem to be getting many hits lately ill post it here too.

 

I run an amd athlon 3200+ with an sis 754 chipset and i recently upgraded to an nforce3 board for osx purposes.. unfortunately, this proved to be a mistake. first of all i have a 6800gt for running games in windows, and the nforce3 doesnt seem to work very well with the 6800gt (framerates were horrible i even tweaked a ton and nothing fixed it) and in osx, with my 9600xt in there, qe and ci run unbelievably slow. i dont know if the problems are related, the 6800 and 9600 in osx, but i do know that the nforce3 does not work well for me. That and trying the install cd on an nforce3 machine will give you waiting for root device. So.... i went back to my sis chipset mobo and im gonna give my brother the nforce3 and hopefully he wont have problems cuz he has a 7800gs.... so.. do i have a question? am i informing you that nforce3 might suck? i guess Im looking for confirmation on that point. i like nforce chipsets, i had been led to believe that they were good... but i had nothing but a horrible experience with mine. the only bad thing about my sis chipset is that it has only two ram slots and i wont ever get osx ide drivers unless i port them myself from bsd.... blah.... what are your experiences with the nforce3 chipset? good/bad? in windows? in osx? whats the best amd socket 754 or 939 board for osx? Now that macs boot windows native, i might just buy one instead of trying to run this native on my machine... it just doesnt seem worth it if you cant get full acceleration.

[aqualeviathan]

The Ati slowdown is a known issue for the nForce3 platform. The only known workaround is disabling QE with QuartzDebug.

Don't know what's wrong with your system, but my 6800 worked flawlessly in XP on my MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum. Everything works on this board and the JaS 4.2 10.4.3 DVD installed without any problems. It's a socket 939 board though.