Athlon 64 revision E won't work on some Nforce 3/4 boards

PROBLEMS APPEAR to be affecting Athlon 64 revision E chips on some Nforce 3 and Nforce 4 motherboards. Symptoms include motherboard shut down and failure to boot, according to reports here from CeBIT.

Revision E chips from AMD are just released and brings stuff like SSE3 support inside a 90 nanometre die. AMD on the other hand didn't make a big noise about its announcement.

We learned that if you have this Athlon and already have Nforce 3 or Nforce 4 board that there is a big chance that you may encounter problems. We are told that AMD changed its thermal regulation protection and that's what makes it incompatible with at least some of the Nforce 3 and Nforce 4 boards out there.

In order to solve these problems, new motherboards might be necessary and there doesn't appear to be an instant fix. We are attempting to gather more details here in Hannover. µ