Replacing dead socket 939 motherboard - comparison help needed.

I'm looking at two motherboards on ebay to replace it with and I'm not sure if one is clearly better than the other or they each have better features than the other. I'm not too good on hardware specifications and comparisons, more on whether the components are working or not.

So if someone could have a look and advise, that would be much appreciated. The old motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 which says nothing about Rev on it.

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/ASUS-A8V...74981709?pt=AU_Components&hash=item416574194d
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/ASUS-A8V...69942474?pt=AU_Components&hash=item3f171131ca

The owners need SATA and IDE, all the USB they can get, have a video card, AMD Athlon 64 CPU (can't give you more specs than that because I didn't remember to look for the model number and not sure if it's easy to read anyway). They do a lot with photography and one of them is a music student at university. For some reason the computer gets quite dusty quite regularly. (Any ideas whether powerful fans are sometimes more nuisance than benefit and why?) They have 2gb RAM and I'd like to up that at some point.

Thanks, all.

 

If you are looking for a good 939 socket mobo you can do no better than an ASUS A8N SLI PREMIUM they are durable to the extreme been using them for years and still use one as my secondary rig. These boards have EIDE and SATA, the SLI feature is for 2 Graphics Cards. As far as ''Dusty'' Fans go that is easily tackled by putting filters on them which are readily available on-line. Once again the ASUS A8N SLI PREMIUM will knock spots off the ones your looking at. Plenty available on Ebay.

 

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestion but the criteria I'm to work with are a funds limitation and to source a new motherboard - right at the moment their finances don't cope with anything else. Those two boards are the only ones currently on ebay that meet the criteria.

 

I take it you are residing in the USA and thats a pity as a friend of mine has just upgraded from an Asus A8N which is for sale.. I know he is not asking anywhere near what the price of them are on ebay but of course its the shipping costs.. I could check that out if you are interested and I can be of any help. As far as the 2 you have picked out .. there is very little difference.

 

Thanks for your help, Toke, I'm actually in Australia.

I ended up getting the one that didn't have video on board and it was DOA. So since the other one I mentioned is the only other new one on ebay in our country (shipping IS the killer) and I originally thought my friends had a retail version of XP (pays to check the sticker, not rely on your memory), I'm going to suggest to them that we get one of the used Gigabyte boards and hope that being a different Rev. doesn't force us into reinstalling Windows. Mind you, it took us a bit of time to figure out the mobo was DOA because the CPU always turns out to be fried. I'd love to be in a position to just set them off on a new system but it also means finding all their installation disks and they're currently buried somewhere after moving. Them's the joys of life! And what we'll have to do if we run into trouble with the next Gigabyte.

Anyone had any experience that way and knows if we'll be able to get away with the same model motherboard but possibly a different revision? The one they had didn't have any Rev. details and the two on offer on ebay are Rev. 1.x and Rev. 2.x respectively so I'm assuming that theirs is one of the absolutely first of that model board produced.

 

Wayne Hardman wayne at thurnscoe dot co dot uk
Wrote this some time ago= might help- the link from eldergeeks ism 404, ing
so
http://***********.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=42051
http://***********.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=42051

I've seen a few of these recently. "Help me! How do I swap out a board and not have to reinstall Windows?"

So here's your illustrated (Screenshots taken in WindowsXP) answer.

The first thing to do is ensure Windows is in a state where it can work on the new system. In the case of 2000 and XP, this just means that it has to be able to access the hard drives.

To do this, replace the Bus Master drivers with standard generic drivers, as seen below. The drivers you need to be working on are found in Device Manager under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers". Ignore the Primary and Secondary, go for the other one. nForce users will only see one entry per controller.



If you're changing chipset (think in terms of drivers - Drivers for the VIA KT133 work fine with a KT400, but drivers for i815 won't work at all with an AMD760MPX), then you'll want to knock out the AGP drivers too to avoid video problems after the switch. Either uninstall them from the Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs or, in the case of VIA's 4in1, from the driver installation program. If you have neither (ie. SiS, ALi) or just can't be bothered, then observe the illustration below.



The standard PCI to PCI bridge disables everything AGP, but also makes sure that old AGP drivers aren't around to screw your system up.

You should be good to go now, but it's worth it to do some more cleaning up. Remove both USB controllers (don't do this if you have a USB keyboard/mouse, duh) and uninstall your display drivers. Also uninstall any other non-critical drivers from the Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel, or any other option your driver installer has. They'll need to be reinstalled anyway, since Windows has to reinstall devices if they change INT# lines and they will.


SATA INTEL NOTE
Now, go into Device Manager, select "Show Hidden Devices" from the menu, and enter Non-Plug and Play Devices.

Unless you now look under "Non-Plug and Play Devices" and delete "IntelIDE" and "IntelPPM", you will get a failure after the swap.
My discovery comment is on page 8 of this thread.

This is a problem with WindowsXP SP2's SATA drivers for Intel systems and is not present on AMD systems. Indeed, it only manifests when leaving an Intel system to go to an AMD one.

Finished all that rebooting? You're half way there.

Do your build and power it up. Windows will boot up and complain about drivers. Don't install any of them, just cancel every time. It'll do some automatically, these are probably the ones you don't have any drivers for anyway and you're quite happy to let Windows use the internal drivers.

Open a command line (Start>Run>cmd.exe) and enter the following:



set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

start devmgmt.msc

Now from Device Manager's "View" menu, tell it to show hidden devices.

With the devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices set to 1, and "Show Hidden Devices" enabled, you can see the trash left from your previous machine.

Don't get rid of filters, codecs or anything you don't recognise just the actual hardware that used to be in your system (or still is, you're reinstalling all the drivers). Just kill anything that's ghosted and not something you shouldn't kill. You may be surprised by how much crap you find. Don't touch anything under Non-PnP Drivers or anything you recognise as a USB device. USB devices are 'reinstalled' on a per-root basis, as their location has changed, so you may see many duplicates, which is normal.

Next, let's get going. Install your chipset drivers first. Then the display drivers. It sucks to work in 640x480x16, doesn't it? Now go nuts. Install the drivers for everything and we're done. Remember to reboot every time you're prompted. Nothing screws up a driver install worse than the drivers not knowing what they need to know about the system.
We now have a clean system that doesn't even know you've changed the board.

I've done some really drastic changes like this. In one, I just tore the HD out of the machine (An old PPro200 and slapped it in a Duron).




FAQ

What happens if I don't do the IDE drivers step?
One of two things.
1. The system will give INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE and won't even boot up.
2. It'll work if you're upgrading between compatible chipsets (ie. i845 to i850 or KT133A to KT333)

What happens if I don't clean up in Device Manager?
You end up with a whole heap of ghost devices. These can cause problems if you install compatible hardware later on. For example, if I didn't clean out those Crystal CX4624 drivers and I then installed a Santa Cruz (CX4630), I'd have hell trying to get Turtle Beach's drivers on there.

What about the other branded drivers in System (Device Manager)?
You'd worry about these in 98, ASD would kick in probably. 2k and XP are smart enough to replace them with the right ones. The old ones are removed during the clean up phase of this procedure.

Do I need to change the PC Type (ie. ACPI Uniproc to Standard PC)?
You can change freely between ACPI types, but not from ACPI to Standard or back again. So you can go from ACPI Uniproc to ACPI Multiproc (even on a uniproc system) and expect no problems.

Can I do something like this to move my HD from an onboard controller to a RAID or PCI controller, or vice versa?
No. The onboard controller has a standard 'location' where standard drivers will always be able to work with it. PCI and RAID controllers have no such standard, you'll just get INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. You may also get this error if your boot drive is on a PCI controller and you change the slot it's in. This can be worked around on systems with APICs by changing the INT# mapping to match the old INT# to the new location. Other systems can't do this.

I just swapped as-is between incompatible chipsets and it all worked!
Lucky you. You probably didn't have busmaster ATA drivers installed, or you were using a chipset that Windows has full drivers for.

What is the tech explanation behind all this?
Windows enumerates all devices on boot. DriverGuru explained this on page two of the thread, so I won't repeat it. However, it doesn't remap where the boot drive is if it has changed location or changed controller hardware. If the driver it used last time won't work this time, you get a 0x7B. The standard driver will work every time, where every is as far as we're discussing the standard ATA controller. Those who boot from SATA or SCSI are on their own.
In terms of AGP, different manufacturers' implementations vary. Some use helper services, which must be removed. Uninstalling the drivers sometimes removes them, but always deactivates them. Same with video cards, all major vendors use helper services which must be removed. Thankfully, NVIDIA and ATI have uninstallation programs (Add/Remove Programs) which do a thorough job.

What is a 'helper service'?
It's something that works in tandem with a device driver. Sometimes they're session drivers (DScaler, Sandra and many other programs which need hardware access use session drivers) and other times they're just normal services running as LOCAL SYSTEM. ATI and NVIDIA use helper services for HYDRAVISION and nView, respectively.

I want to clean up my system, where do I find old services that old drivers may have installed?
HKLM>SYSTEM>CurrentControlSet>Services
Device drivers are just a special case of a system service under Windows. You can safely delete the entire key for services you no longer have the hardware for, and which aren't removed by the uninstallation of the associated driver. Common culprits are viaagp1 and nv4disp, though they're harmless anyway.


You're a moron! It didn't work!
It should work on any 2k or XP system, regardless of hardware. First off, you probably made a mistake somewhere. If that's not the case (are you sure?), then a driver probably hasn't been uninstalled correctly.

Redistribution
After the nth permission request was granted last night over email, here's the lowdown.
Reproduce this in electronic or physical format for personal, educational, academic (does not include academic systems support) or archival use, properly citing the author (Wayne Hardman). Commercial or government users still throw me an email (wayne at thurnscoe dot co dot uk) for permission, and I'll grant it. I just like to know what companies are using my stuff. Anyone else can use it and redistrubute it gratis and without notifying the author.


H@
Seems link is lost but I kept this but its Wayne's answer

 

Baklogic, that's terrific info and I'm glad you reposted it. I'll keep it in mind for future use.

Future use because if I understand correctly, if your reason for swapping out the motherboard is because the motherboard died, you can't do any of that, can you? Because once you put in the new motherboard, Windows will refuse to boot even in Safe Mode until you reinstall or get a new authentication number. And my current understanding of authentication numbers is that you still end up reinstalling.

I'll tell you one thing for sure - if I'm ever confronted by a system again where I suspect the motherboard of heading for failure, I'll go through that process immediately in case! (Pity we thought it was a dodgy power switch...)

 

I thought the general information might give you some help-
Chipset , and graphics seem to be the main stumbling blocks- Possibly if these are similar, it could start in safe mode, and allow you to change any other driver not compatable to new/replacement motherboard.
If costs are the problem,and discs for re-installation of programs are missing-
It would be a lot easier with same motherboard, possibly a revision of same
Gigabyte support page
http://ee.gigabyte.com/products/page/mb/ga-k8nf-9_1x/specs/
GIGABYTE GA-K8NF-9-- Sydney, australia
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Gigabyte...75043306?pt=AU_Components&hash=item41657509ea
China resales have a couple of working pulls
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/GIGABYTE...64519676?pt=AU_Components&hash=item3cb6c6ccfc
GIGABYTE GA-K8NF-9 manual
http://www.retrevo.com/support/Gigabyte-GA-K8NF-9-manual/id/23286dj179/t/2/
Overclock that motherboard
http://www.ocinside.de/go_e.html?/html/results/mainboard_gigabyte_ga_k8nf9.html
Model

BrandGIGABYTEModelGA-K8NF-9Supported CPU

CPU Socket Type939CPU TypeAthlon 64 X2 / Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64FSB800MHz Hyper Transport (1600MT/s)Chipsets

North BridgeNVIDIA nForce4 4XMemory

Number of Memory Slots4×184pinMemory StandardDDR 400Maximum Memory Supported4GBChannel SupportedDual ChannelExpansion Slots

PCI Express x161PCI Express x12PCI Slots3Storage Devices

PATA2 x ATA100 4 Dev. MaxPATA RAIDNV RAID 0/1/0+1 JBODSATA 1.5 Gb/s4SATA RAIDNV RAID 0/1/0+1 JBODOnboard Video

Onboard Video ChipsetNoneOnboard Audio

Audio ChipsetRealtek ALC850Audio Channels8 ChannelsOnboard LAN

LAN ChipsetCicada CIS8201Max LAN Speed10/100/1000MbpsRear Panel Ports

PS/22COM1LPT1USB 1.1/2.04 x USB 2.0S/PDIF Out1 x CoaxialS/PDIF In1 x CoaxialAudio Ports6 PortsInternal I/O Connectors

Onboard USB3 x USB 2.0 connectors support 6 portsOnboard 13942 x 1394b connectors support 3 portsPhysical Spec

Form FactorATXDimensions12.0" x 9.6"Power Pin24 PinFeatures

FeaturesSupport NVIDIA Firewall
Norton Internet Security
Xpress Installation
Xpress Recovery
Q-Flash
@BIOS
2M bit flash ROM