ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA nForce3 250 good choice?

[marc]

I am looking to replace my motherboard (I think something is wrong with mine and I can't find out what), but having just recently bought an ATI 1650 AGP card for it I really want the replacement board to support AGP and have more than 3 pci slots which limits choice some what. Easist available seems to be an ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA which has a nForce3 250 chipset and I would install a low end AMD dual core processor in this. Are these known to be a good or problematic motherboard / chipset?

more details of the board here
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=AM2NF3-VSTA

Any feedback good or bad welcome

Thanks Marc

[cameluk]

I upgraded to this motherboard a couple of months ago without any major problems. I struggled to find any other non VIA chipset motherboard with more than 3 PCI slots.

Hibernation and resume work fine.

I was surprised as I always stayed away from ASROCK due to their low cost.

Only catch I had with a dual core was it stopping on POST until I found the bit tucked away on their website to disable cool n quiet, I didn't bother updating the BIOS to resolve the cool n quiet problem

[marc]

Thanks for your response cameluk, it’s good to know that the hardware has been proven to work correctly for the purpose of running GBPVR. Looks like its time to spend some more pennies…. One day I will be able to sit back and just watch some TV…. May be!

As to the “cool and quite” function, it would be nice but there are a choice of possibly quieter coolers if it doesn’t work even with a bios update (who knows what version it would be shipped with) My other PC has an ASUS motherboard that claimed a similar feature but that was never successful even after a bios update! It either did not work or with the update killed the machine every time it was enabled…