(formerly)tangentmind.org

"While not a grievous crime, it borders on sneaky subterfuge... the deep dark place whence grievous crime comes." - A text message I sent to my girlfriend; I have no clue about the meaning or purpose.

More on my Chaintech 7njl6

Ok, so I loaded up the program cpu-z, which I only learned about recently, so I could get some information about the memory in my computer. Lo and behold it tells me my memory is in channels 2 and 3. Apparently, my motherboard is lying about which channels are which. They look like this || |. The motherboard labels the channels as 1,2, and then 3. I had the memory in what I thought was 1 and 2. So I switched the one in motherboard labeled 1 to motherboard labeled 3.

Lo and behold I boot up the computer and the BIOS boot up screen tells me that my memory is running in dual channel. Apparently they are something like 2,3, and then 1, and once again, they look like this || | and the motherboard says "ddr1, ddr2, ddr3". Also, at first the computer crashed when windows was starting, but I simply reset the bios to failsafe, and then to optimal, set my agp aperture to 64(for HD playback), and set it to "reset" in the menu for pci or something(I don't remember which menu it's under exactly. After that everying started up alright.

Now, apparently I never learned anything about dual channel or I forgot. My motherboard's chipset uses Nvidia nforce2, which supports dual channel and I have two memory modules of equal size, and the same brand but made by different manufacturers. Apparently, in general you need the memory in slots 1 and 3 for dual channel, but it varies by motherboard. The info is easily available using a google search. I may have tried putting my memory in dual channel, before, but as I can tell you now, my memory slots are not in order.

I do not know if this will affect my motherboard stability, but it would be awesome if it did because that would save me the $60-100 expense of replacing it.

However, I have found a new reason to upgrade from Athlon XP. Some of the new games, and possibly other software coming out right now require sse2, which athlon xp does not support. So far I have ran into Lost Planet, and Dirt, which need it.

If my computer stays stable I will post the good news here. I may still need to set the memory to the same frequency as the CPU fsb. I haven't done that yet. Hopefully Dual Channel should speed up a few things though.

So, the first week of both work and school is over. Not too bad.

Never buy a Chaintech motherboard. They're probably not all bad, but mine certainly is. They don't make them anymore so finding one might be difficult, but if you do, beware. I have a Chaintech 7njl6. Worst (new) motherboard I've ever had. A simple google searach for 7njl6 will verify my claims. At the moment it's stable but that comes and goes and I had to fidget with my bios settings for a long time.

I don't remember what my bios settings are now. I think I set it to optimal defaults, turned on resetting the resources, then I started up the computer and rebooted it. Then I turned off resetting resources, changed the agp aperture to 128...and I can't remember if I did anything else. I may have changed the cpu settings. I think I set them all to expert, setting all the settings to match my hardware so both the FSB and memory was set at 166 mhz, and then set something to aggressive that I don't think mattered that much because after the other two settings were set to expert all the aggressive setting did was grey out the menu options on the bottom about something like "spread spectrum". I'd have to look again to make sure.


I have tried getting a new power supply, a new cpu fan, a new video card, switching out sound cards, and many other things. It's just a complete garbage board. For now it is stable though, so I'll cross my fingers.

Worst part is that the processor is socket A and the video card is AGP. Socket A is basically dead, so getting a good motherboard for socket A is difficult and furthermore AGP is on the way out. Most of the motherboards I can find with AGP slots are socket 754, which is also on the way out. I haven't been able to find any AGP socket 939 boards, even though I know some exist. Even still socket 939 has been superseded by socket am2, which is soon to be superseded by am2+ and am3.

I haven't really bothered too much with Pentium sockets. Even though Pentium currently has the fastest processors, which I believe are all on the 775 socket, and they dropped the prices on some of their processors, in general I still find AMD motherboard/processors to be closer to my price range.

Still, I recently bought an AGP video card and I'm starting to feel that I should have gone ahead and upgraded to PCI-Express and gotten a new motherboard and CPU when I did that.

If you have a good socket A motherboard, cpu, and AGP video card and none of the parts are going to die, and you don't need to upgrade, then you'll be fine. However, if any part dies or you ever want to upgrade, you're screwed.

I would recommend anyone who is building a new system or replacing some expensive parts, to go ahead and upgrade to PCI-Express, and at least socket 939, if not am2 if they're going with AMD. Currently there are still some socket 752 amd stuff out there, but they may go the way of socket A sometime soon. Intels pretty much all use 775 so that's not as big an issue, but PCI-express is still the better bet. Also, the 939 and up motherboards and processors are generally better than the older ones, and also pci-express is better than AGP. I don't think AMD motherboards below 939 had dual channel ddr, among other things.

So, let that be a lesson to you. Get the newest or newer AMD socket motherboards or an Intel, and shy away from AGP or you might regret it later. Also, stay away from Chaintech, and if you have a Chaintech 7njl6, I feel for you.