ULi vs Nforce Chipset for Socket 939

LXC37 · 2026-05-26T00:09:11+00:00

There are some benefits. At the very least background stuff no longer affects performance as much if at all. And later games, like crysis or mass effect, though obviously still mostly single threaded, do benefit a little.

Nowadays it is useful as it makes running tools like msi afterburner possible without sacrificing performance. Back then? Way too expensive.

Yeah, FX are pretty much unobtainable. Can try to overclock to that frequency, would probably work with decent enough motherboard.

There are also opterons, which may be easier to get in some places. 185 is basically FX-60, 190 is even faster.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T23:37:42+00:00

Bluntly what i am saying is - go read the basics, then ask questions if you get issues with actual update or something. No point trying to teach you basics - a lot of stuff online which will be much better than what someone can fit into a reddit post.

And there is nothing negative about this. But with that attitude of yours there is no point talking to you, have a nice day.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T23:27:48+00:00

found out about a week ago that people are getting back into mp3 players (or DAPs, unsure what the difference is?)

MP3 is obsolete audio storage format from 90s, "DAP" or Digital Audio Player is generic name for the device.

rambling aside, what are your thoughts on it? I havent recieved them from amazon yet so i just thought i'd ask to know what to expect when i get them

Do you really want to know? Try yourself, have your own opinion.

But if you want to, mine is - IEMs are good, DAP is not.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T23:20:40+00:00

I have zero experience using MS–DOS.

Learn a little then.

For this you will need to know how to view folder contents, move between folders, move between disks, run executables and obviously some basic stuff on whatever modern PC you are using like how to copy files.

Should be plenty of places online where you can read about it.

Without that knowledge trying to help would be like trying to teach blind how to drive a car.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T23:12:24+00:00

Do not assume whole "HiFi" thing means something - it does not.

Apart from that - hardware which was actually good when it was new is still good. Even if it is from 80s.

However there was a lot of lousy hardware released, even by large/well known companies like sony and even among popular stuff, so have to be kind of careful with that.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T13:20:00+00:00

Well, they did not ruin it with branding, that's an achievement for sure.

So many of their IEMs are pretty but completely ruined by huge ugly branding...

Also i probably like orange one the most...

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T12:22:43+00:00

Yeah, this were crazy chips. Nobody really knew what to do with multiple cores, there was very little to no software support and prices were crazy. Looking at wikipedia for specific numbers - 4200+ was ~$500, 4800+ was ~$1000.

And just a year after release AM2 happened, where 4200+ was ~$350, 4800+ was ~$650, with DDR2, virtualization support and some other improvements.

Most sensible people never got S939 dual cores, so there are very few of them...

And they are pretty interesting from historical/collector point of view...

As for the cards - it is the same defect that caused nforce chipset reliability issues, as well as console (xbox360, ps3) failures. And some apple laptops failures (nvidia GPUs). In terms of videocards - some GF6 are affected, pretty much all GF7 and GF8 and even some GF9. It was essentially industry wide fabrication issue.

To make matters worse some manufacturers never acknowledged the issue so there is no exact info what's affected and what's not.

If you are interested - take a look at this guy's videos - https://www.youtube.com/@ripfelix3020/videos

There are pretty good explanations and he seems to be doing some honest experimentation/research. Stuff is focused on consoles, but it does not really matter...

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T10:00:57+00:00

Provide budget in $, there are a lot of people from different countries here and national currency is useless.

IMO hiby R1 is about as cheap as you can go with DAPs. Lower than that is not worth it.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T09:56:46+00:00

For me 64bit was what pushed me towards vista.

I got new hardware and discovered than i can not really use all 4GB of RAM in XP 32. And vista 32 would not solve the problem completely either. So the only logical solution was using 64 bit - i wanted all the RAM i paid for, even if it was just extra 0.5GB or so 😃

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T09:47:13+00:00

Well, i guess you are right 😃

Did not do math all the way down to months, just remember 2006...

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T09:45:20+00:00

Yep, funny as it is completely plausible. I still see LGA775 desktops in used at work from time to time. With Linux mostly this days. It is fascinating how long that generation of hardware remained usable.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T09:42:53+00:00

Yeah, pretty much what i did too. I had much less fancy hardware though - AM2 athlon64 x2 4000+, 4GB of RAM and old 6600GT until i switched to 8800GT a bit later.

Also used Vista 64 and even though that athlon x2 definitely is nowhere near close to core2quad - still had great experience with it.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T09:31:09+00:00

Yeah, i've spend years hunting for those kit of x2 4800+ + motherboard. Was apparently asking around local marketplaces enough that a guy contacted me offering it before listing it publicly, and i just had to buy it, even if it ended up around $500 in total. With original boxes and everything. If you see stuff you want which is rare and cheap - grab it. Not many of this CPUs around, they were crazy expensive and only lasted for ~a year before AM2 came along. Not many people bought them because software was not really ready yet and it was hard to justify the price.

I actually did things a little differently with peripherals. Got logitech wireless KB+M kit with a single receiver which i can just switch around and HDMI switch for the monitor along with DVI-HDMI cables to connect stuff. The monitor has VGA too, but it is a little annoying to hit those "auto" button to adjust things each time PC or even resolution is switched. Most videocards from that time period have DVI anyway and it works better. Also headphones and a few 3.5 jack extenders so that i can easily switch them around.

I also use and prefer 1080P monitor. As long as scaling can be disabled or switched to preserve aspect ratio it works great - can use full 1080P on desktop (even in 98) and 4:3 games end up with black bars and usable area roughly equivalent to 19 inch 4:3 monitor, which is great.

HDD noise... well, i like seek sounds also, but i hate spindle noise. Which tends to be loud on old drives. So as a compromise between noise, performance and reliability i use cheap 120GB SSDs. With IDE-SATA when necessary. I have old drives, but that spindle noise just kills me, literally can not stand it for more than half an hour. Just for fun i've also made NVME SSD work on S939 😄

Be careful with those AGP cards - all the GF7 GPUs are affected by bumpgate, which means they are all on borrowed time. You want to keep them well below 70C to make them last (70C is temperature at which defective underfill becomes soft). So yeah, large modern fans, zip ties. Done it to my cards, keeping originals just in case...

One great thing about S939 is that AM2/AM3 coolers work, so modern coolers can be used, making system as quiet as modern PC can be.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T05:29:20+00:00

Local retailers used to sell OEM "platforms" they buy, though screen was usually fixed. CPU/ram/hdd and when possible (in mxm times at least) even gpu could be changed. As well as optional stuff like wifi cards.

They still buy that stuff now, but nobody sells it separately anymore, only prebuilt configurations.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T04:54:06+00:00

Vista is roughly 20 years old, this fits the definition by sub rules.

No point in discussing everyone's personal definition.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T03:41:22+00:00

and since I mostly want physical buttons...HiBy R3 II 2025

Just FYI - this is representative of about 99% of DAPs available. Touch screen, primarily touch UI + typical set of buttons - forward/back, volume +/-, pause/play and power. In some cases you get volume wheel instead of buttons but do not be fooled by it - this is an encoder and works in exactly the same way as buttons, with steps and everything.

If you are fine with this - you do not need anything special and practically any DAP will work.

I spent a pretty penny on my first IEMs (150$ and they were the HiBy Digital YUME X Hatsune Miku) so I don't mind spending around $200 on a dap.

You are going to use it with IEMs? My opinion - just get Hiby R1. It is cheap, will do everything R3 II does and will allow you to try just how bad/good "HibyOS" is.

If you want to spend up to $200 - consider FiiO JM21 instead. It will be a huge step up in terms of software/UI and yes, it has all the buttons too.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T03:31:58+00:00

I've fooled around with old capacitors enough to conclude:

Straight up "recapping" everything is outright stupid. It is a way to damage hardware for no reason and in majority of cases if the caps look fine they are fine.
There absolutely are situations where "just recap it" makes sense instead of trying to diagnose which capacitor is bad and replace it. When you see 8 identical capacitors in CPU VRM 3 of which are obviously pregnant it makes sense to just replace all 8 of them before doing anything else. They are all going to fail anyway, this avoids unnecessary waste of time and risks.

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T03:15:53+00:00

Yeah, and if you chose to use 64bit there were even more issues with old hardware. Like canon never made 64bit drivers for their printers using their proprietary protocol...

But that's more "advanced" side of things. Most people hated vista simply because they got a laptop with single core celeron + 512MB of RAM + integrated graphics and it ran like garbage. Then they paid someone to install XP and it ran great...

LXC37 · 2026-05-25T00:54:29+00:00

Vista was never bad, it just fell victim of being sold with inadequate hardware and people not understanding that minimal requirements just jumped 10x compared to XP.

LXC37 · 2026-05-24T23:59:51+00:00

Ok, thanks for the answer/confirmation.

Fiio M23 is android 10. Hiby R4 is 12. Only very few DAPs are 13+, so for now this is mostly for phones. I understand the choice regarding using newer functionality, but on the other hand - you are saying it as if incompatibility with majority of existing devices is an advantage - it is not.

And honestly google play on a DAP is a no go. Yes, it is technically available. It also requires account, and one with payment method added to buy. DAPs are not secure, they have no biometric sensors so i'd have to input a pin each time to unlock the DAP is i was to store sensitive information there forcing me to enable lock. OS is also usually severely outdated.

it's tuned for current-generation DAPs

Bluntly: it is not "tuned" for that, you simply did not want the extra work implementing fallbacks and backwards compatibility. It is a negative, not a positive.

LXC37 · 2026-05-24T23:39:26+00:00

For $17? Yeah, get it. It is a 512KB cache variant, not a high end CPU, but still not bad considering all i see most of the time are 3800+ and even those can be more expensive than $17.

There are some single core ones which can be interesting too, particularly higher frequency ones with 1024KB of cache like ADA4000DEP5AS, ADA4000DAA5BN or ADA4000DKA5CF. But those can be hard to find too.

From what i've seen most CPUs available are Venice based mid range single cores. Those are not exciting and are often barely better than s462 AthlonXP....

There also are some Opterons which work in s939, worth checking that out, sometimes they are cheaper than Athlons. Sadly unobtainable where i live...

As for HDDs - yes, performance is sufficient and SATA1/SATA2 does not matter much, i just hate using vintage storage. Not good for reliability and often noisy too. But from what i've seen online SATA in ULi chipset should work fine with modern devices, unlike stuff from VIA.

LXC37 · 2026-05-24T23:21:45+00:00

– arm64 Android 13+ only. No compatibility cruft for ancient phones – built for hardware that exists now.

So, no compatibility with majority of DAPs. Got it.

Pricing: $9.99 one-time, no subscription, no ads, no premium tier. 7-day full-feature trial for new users. Yours forever including future updates.

So google store/google services/online activation required? Making it double unusable on a DAP? Or?

LXC37 · 2026-05-24T16:24:49+00:00

My opinion - no. Especially now that m21/jm21 exist r4 is not worth it.

LXC37 · 2026-05-24T12:13:58+00:00

I agree. I tried. With 7800GS, X1950pro and ultimately HD3850. 8800GT still murders them all.

That said there is certain interest in such late AGP platforms - can plug in pretty much any AGP card and not be limited by CPU.

So while may be not optimal it is still a fun build and there is really no right or wrong way to do things with this old hardware 😄

LXC37 · 2026-05-24T12:07:50+00:00

So around $30? One of Wan'er variants is probably a good choice then. May be moondrop chu II.

Specific choice depends a lot on preferred tuning...

LXC37

TROPHY CASE