XS HWBot Team

[trans am]

*shy* What is it? me = n00b.


You guys like collecting silverware, don't you?



Btw, congrats Tiltevros!
And everyone else too of course!

donny. its like this. ever since amd 754/939 (a64) was released. it was always dominated by nvidia chipset. nf3, nf4 ultra. hence dfi lanparty ultra d and made Oscar wu famous.
Oscar wu (was a bios engineer for diamond flower international/DFI) if you guys dont know was the driving force behind enthusiast overclocking and was the holy grail of ocing bios and ocing options on bios especially ram ocing options at the time. he is what everyone copied and is one of the main reasons we have the assortment of options on bios these days. all the ocing options you see in your bios since then are all copies of Oscar wu's but he was the first. Ati before it was acquired or right around the time amd bought it was looking for a chipset to compete with nvidia. the canadian bios engineers wanted to make a chipset for 939 that had onboard gfx but could compete with nvidia. it was called RX480.
ATi sent some boards out to andantech and some other review sites and was only reference boards. at the time I was heavily into amd athlon 64 ocing and was doing an amd 939 shootout and a member on this site from ati was nice enough to flow me one of the reference boards except this board was very special because not only it was an engineering sample but it was modded to the teeth with vdimm mods to allow insane ram vdimm. note this was also the same time when CH5 the successor of Bh5 started making its way into the scene, Twinmos, ocz VX, etc. thats why we had hipro's and ocz's ddr booster.
the ace in the hole for athlon 64 was the onboard mem controller and you saw a lot of products designed to exploit high performance memory on athlon 64. so when the bullhead came out it was the 1st board to really compete with nvidia. VIA was horsecrap and not even a contest but RX480 was the light at the end of the tunnel and never took off. I think MSI and sapphire made some and they didnt have the options the original ATI samples had and then the nf4 ultra came out and the bullhead was history. AMD took over and the engineers got lazy and were at the top and thought they had the enthusiast market and then intel came out with core2 and that was the end of the amd saga.

to sum it up this board was ati's answer to DFI nf4 ultra with bios options that the legendary oscar wu didnt even think of. Its extremely rare and I probaly have one of the few left in existence and I never had extreme cooling at the time and always wanted to see what it could really do. Its been hanging on my wall as a trophy and just tonight I decided to see if it would still work and it posts but I can clock it until I can get a working bios that will make it compatible with dual core 939. I cant remember if dual core 939 was even around when the engineers were still playing with this board. if thats the case then I need to get a single core 939. there were so few of these boards and Im not even sure anyone ever played with dice/ln2 on it. its totally uncharted territory so its my mission to get this thing back in action on heavy duty cooling and see if I can make history with a piece of history.
Youve all heard of the 7 wonders of the world. well there are 4 canadian wonders of the world...

1. blackberrry RIM
2. colin mckay
3. The trailer park boys
4. ATI bullhead.

Congrats to T! we missed you in the nov contest. good to see you back buddy!