Chaintech 7KDD AMD dually board, my experience so far.
I got this board a few days ago from Newegg's refurbs for $119 and when I received it I was very surprised as it was still new in box and the mobo anti static bag had never even been opened. It also came with the manual, driver cd and value pack cd and the cables. Real good deal for the money.
First of all I took out the manual and look through it; it is sparse in the extreme, with no good pics of the locations of the various jumpers. Definitely not a board for the dually beginner, with this sparse manual.:( I started looking in the manual and reading the features on this mobo and was pleasantly surprised because it has a Promise "Lite" raid controller onboard as well as NEC USB 2.0 controller built into the mobo. No extra USB connectors were sent with the mobo in my box; I don't know for sure if they weren't included because this is a refurb or that Chaintech just doesn't send them with the motherboard. There is no onboard nic though. The layout of the motherboard is fair, with adequate room around the sockets to install premium heatsinks and the board does have the 4 holes around the sockets for installing your Swiftech or Alpha hsf's or waterblocks. The 20 pin ATX connector is located just north of the cpu2 socket and right under the intake fan on my 550 watt Antec psu, which makes you have to be creative so that it doesn't impede airflow too badly. The 12v power connector is right above the AGP slot, but doesn't hinder you in installing or pulling your video card. This board also uses the flat +5/+3.3v connector, which is next to the dimm slots. on the upper right hand side of the board, out of the way. All in all, not too bad of a board layout.
After modding the 2 procs that I planned to use in this board by closing the last L5 bridge and setting the vcore to 1.85v by the L11 bridges, I went ahead and mounted them into the board and installed a Swiftech MCX462+ heatsink on cpu1(the right side socket) and installed my new SLK900a on cpu2's socket. I'm not sure that 2 Swifty's would fit on this board because they are so big but there shouldn't be any problems mounting 2 of the SLK900's on this mobo. Both of these procs had previously been modded to a 16 multi when they were running in older single proc boards that don't have a 1/5 divisor, so I didn't have to worry about doing that mod today.
After mounting the procs and hsf's and installing the memory, I went ahead and installed the mobo into the case. If you do it this way, be very careful how you handle the board as you now have around 3 pounds or so of copper and aluminum hanging on the board.
After hooking everything up, it was time to see if this puppy would boot up OK. I hit the power switch and the familiar boot beep sounded, so I went into bios to monitor temps. After watching the temps for a couple of minutes, I started looking around in the bios. This board isn't an overclockers dream; it has no vcore adjustment or vdimm adjustment anywhere, and no multi adjustments either. However, there are some fairly decent dimm timing adjustments in bios. The board does have fsb speed adjustments all the way up to 166 fsb speed in 1 MHz increments. I then saved my bios changes I made and went ahead for the install of XP pro. The only problem I ran into on the install was a couple of warning messages that popped up about the drivers for the Promise raid not being XP qualified. XP installed with minimal hassles(beyond the usual M$ product activation crap) and it has been running (and folding) now for around 3-4 hours with no problems.
If you are looking to build a dually for folding and either don't plan to overclock much or like to tinker and overclock by hard coding your proc, then this board is decent. It's big lack for overclocking in my opinion is the lack of vcore and vdimm adjustments either by jumper or in bios. With my other 2 dual AMD boards you can change vcore and vdimm either by jumpers or bios.:)
First of all I took out the manual and look through it; it is sparse in the extreme, with no good pics of the locations of the various jumpers. Definitely not a board for the dually beginner, with this sparse manual.:( I started looking in the manual and reading the features on this mobo and was pleasantly surprised because it has a Promise "Lite" raid controller onboard as well as NEC USB 2.0 controller built into the mobo. No extra USB connectors were sent with the mobo in my box; I don't know for sure if they weren't included because this is a refurb or that Chaintech just doesn't send them with the motherboard. There is no onboard nic though. The layout of the motherboard is fair, with adequate room around the sockets to install premium heatsinks and the board does have the 4 holes around the sockets for installing your Swiftech or Alpha hsf's or waterblocks. The 20 pin ATX connector is located just north of the cpu2 socket and right under the intake fan on my 550 watt Antec psu, which makes you have to be creative so that it doesn't impede airflow too badly. The 12v power connector is right above the AGP slot, but doesn't hinder you in installing or pulling your video card. This board also uses the flat +5/+3.3v connector, which is next to the dimm slots. on the upper right hand side of the board, out of the way. All in all, not too bad of a board layout.
After modding the 2 procs that I planned to use in this board by closing the last L5 bridge and setting the vcore to 1.85v by the L11 bridges, I went ahead and mounted them into the board and installed a Swiftech MCX462+ heatsink on cpu1(the right side socket) and installed my new SLK900a on cpu2's socket. I'm not sure that 2 Swifty's would fit on this board because they are so big but there shouldn't be any problems mounting 2 of the SLK900's on this mobo. Both of these procs had previously been modded to a 16 multi when they were running in older single proc boards that don't have a 1/5 divisor, so I didn't have to worry about doing that mod today.
After mounting the procs and hsf's and installing the memory, I went ahead and installed the mobo into the case. If you do it this way, be very careful how you handle the board as you now have around 3 pounds or so of copper and aluminum hanging on the board.
After hooking everything up, it was time to see if this puppy would boot up OK. I hit the power switch and the familiar boot beep sounded, so I went into bios to monitor temps. After watching the temps for a couple of minutes, I started looking around in the bios. This board isn't an overclockers dream; it has no vcore adjustment or vdimm adjustment anywhere, and no multi adjustments either. However, there are some fairly decent dimm timing adjustments in bios. The board does have fsb speed adjustments all the way up to 166 fsb speed in 1 MHz increments. I then saved my bios changes I made and went ahead for the install of XP pro. The only problem I ran into on the install was a couple of warning messages that popped up about the drivers for the Promise raid not being XP qualified. XP installed with minimal hassles(beyond the usual M$ product activation crap) and it has been running (and folding) now for around 3-4 hours with no problems.If you are looking to build a dually for folding and either don't plan to overclock much or like to tinker and overclock by hard coding your proc, then this board is decent. It's big lack for overclocking in my opinion is the lack of vcore and vdimm adjustments either by jumper or in bios. With my other 2 dual AMD boards you can change vcore and vdimm either by jumpers or bios.:)
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I bet you could swap the Promise bios out of the mobo bios and replace it with a "Full version" and find the right drivers. If you don't want to do it I bet you could get Equito or Spinner to help. Then you would have a lot more powerful RAID capabilities.
Mine has worked well for over a year but just tonight it decided to go quirky causing the 2nd USB ports to cease functioning and a drive on one channel to cease to function.
I have gotten back the USB but not the second channel of the RAID. (drives were in single mode)
Dual Processor motherboards are also not well known for an extensive BIOS.
...I can't believe we live so close and still haven't hooked up!
I saw K7D for 139 and K7D-L for 99 at newegg refurb. why is the K7D priced higher?
mtgoat, I thought it was Tex that I remembered helping someone, which must have been you, flash that Promise controller to the full version.:)
csimon, yeah we need to get together soon and meet. I've just been so busy working on my house the last 3 months it's been hard to just find time to mow the grass, much less get out and visit.:( I'm finally getting close to finishing my present project, which is rebuilding all the shutters on my house. Good old La. weather had gotten wood rot well started on all my shutters; lots of patching and wood replacement was required.
sev, I imagine that the K7D-L that was cheaper than the K7D was most probably a board-only refurb, with maybe something broken off the board like a dimm latch. I saw that mobo too, after I had ordered this Chaintech board.