ECS nForce4-A939

[jetkins]

Right from the outset I planned to reuse my previous generation PC as the basis for my unRAID server.  It's running an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ in the aforementioned m/b, with 3GB of PC3200 DDR RAM.

 

It wasn't until I was part-way into the build that I read the caveats about problems with the nForce4 chipset, but I added the suggested iommu=soft parameter to the boot menu, and it's proving to be rock solid.  The only downsides I've encountered are difficulty booting one of my USB sticks, and a lack of SATA II support. I resolved by formatting the flash as USB-ZIP. (My other flash drive boots just fine as a USB-HDD.)

 

The latter I addressed by adding a couple of cheap PCIe x1 SATA II cards.  I only have four drives, and only two are SATA II, so I put each on a separate PCIe card, and the two SATA I drives on the mobo SATA ports.  If this board is still going strong by the time I need to expand further, I'll have to do some experimentation to find the optimum combination and placement of drives and ports, but for now this configuration is purring along like a champ.

[RobJ]

Very interesting!  So there may still be some life in my old Biostar nForce 4 board ...  Can't afford to 'refurnish' it currently, but maybe someday.  Before I put it back into production though, I would sure rigorously test it, especially looking for data integrity failures.