A SHORT WHILE AGO WE REPORTED that there could be a serious problem with Nforce 2 chipset motherboards. No sooner had the article gone up than Nvidia got in contact wanting to know all of the details. Users of a new Shuttle Nforce 2 based machine had reported problems with the BIOS. They had been trying to overclock their machines only to find that, once they went past a certain point, the machine would stop working.
At first it looked like a problem with the Shuttle but then Asus motherboard owners reported the same problem. Then Abit and Epox. Not only would they stop working, it was proving difficult to get them working again. Nvidia stepped into the breach and admitted that there was a fault with the Shuttle and Abit boards. The fault lay in the manufacturers missing off a jumper that Nvidia had specified on the Nforce 2 reference design.
Hard Tecs 4U, a German site, unwittingly uncovered the missing jumper. They had reviewed six Nforce 2 motherboards from different manufacturers and managed to kill all of them. The only one that was easy to recover was an MSI K7N2-L board which has the jumper. Using the jumper sets the BIOS back to a 100MHz FSB safe mode. Other people had discovered that you could use a 100MHz FSB processor, for example a Duron, in a motherboard that had stopped working to get it going again.
News source: The Inq
