Fwd: nForce woes?

[Astrodog]

Oops. Only sent this to Peter. Sorry if it reposts.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Astrodog <astrodog at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 17:28:06 -0800
Subject: Re: nForce woes?
To: Peter Wemm <peter at wemm.org>


On Mon, 6 Dec 2004 16:17:40 -0800, Peter Wemm <peter at wemm.org> wrote:


> On Monday 06 December 2004 01:55 pm, Scott Dodson wrote:
> > Do we expect the nForce 4 chipset to alleviate many of the problems
> > found in nForce 3 or should I steer clear of products using this
> > chipset as well?
>
> My experience is with the nForce3-Pro150 and the reference bioses for
> it.  The nForce3-Pro250 might be better.  The same goes for the
> nForce4.
>
> There were two problems on the Pro150 boards, possibly one was an
> artifact of the other.
>
> 1) the bioses were really shoddy.  If I understand things correctly,
> this is because the reference bioses were shoddy and few motherboard
> makers bothered to do anything about it.
>
> 2) the APIC subsystem was very unreliable under FreeBSD.  It is
> distinctly possible that this was bugs/races in our code, but I believe
> it far more likely that it was genuine chipset bugs or malfunctions due
> to bad bios setup of the hardware.  The problems should exist on
> FreeBSD/i386 as well.  I verified that the easiest ones to reproduce on
> my boards do show up in 32 bit mode as well.
>
> I was so gun-shy over the whole thing that I've avoided them like the
> plague.  Since I was buying them myself and not using sample boards or
> the like, I didn't want to risk wasting money on more junk.  For all I
> know, they've fixed bugs in the chipset.  But I'm not going to be the
> one to fork out $ to find out, I've already lost enough sleep over
> them.
>
> --
> Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com
> "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5
>
>
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>

NForce3 150 is what's on all the R3000 AMD64 compaq notebooks. Without
ACPI enabled, the notebooks crash on any power management feature, and
with ACPI, they just lock up mid-boot. I'm working on resolving the
ACPI stuff, so if anyone has docs on how they've implemented ACPI on
the NForce3s for notebooks that'd be great. On a sidenote, the ACPI
blacklist does not correctly determine the board in these machines.