Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2

[Peav]

Originally posted by: brokencase
Peav, From your description it seems that the failure occurs only when your playing the games?

Maybe it's a video related issue?

Another possibility is that maybe it's heat related.
You stated:

"Was playing Armed Assualt earlier today and the pc crashed and reset itself. Now since then the pc just gets into an endless reboot loop. At 240FSB it is a bit more stable but still reboots every 2-3 minutes."

I am wondering if you let the machine cool down after the initial crash if the endless reboot would not occur?

Also did you disable Boot Failure Guard in BIOS?

Hi Brokencase.

If I leave the mainboard disconnected from the PSU, ie pull the cables out, overnight the thing will boot up next time I try.

However if I load the system up, mainly when gaming, the board crashes out and it either reboots into a loop, where it loads XP then reboots etc etc. Or It just doesnt start up.

So to rule out the bits in the rig, I put them all in a dual-vsta board and they work fine, bar the 5% underclock.

I put my spare celeron d341 into the SATA2, it booted once after it was left unpowered for a while. Went into the bios made sure optimal defaults were set and rebooted. It black screened.

Now this was with a Celeron D341, a Radeon 9000, 2x512 Crucial DDR1 Ram and a cdrom connected. SO the whole rig was installed with parts that wroked fine in the VSTA board and the SATA2 still crapped out.

I seriously think these have problems with the Volt regulation circuit and just cannot supply the power needed for a 4 core chip. Chances are it has fried something.

My original 4coredual-Vsta crapped out and took my e6600 with it. When I got it rma'd the tech told me it killed one of there chips. It apparently was putting 3v through the VTT line. (VT2 testpoint on the mobo).

I suppose if you buy cheap you expect cheap. Going to see if the retailer will give me a store credit towards an ip35-e board that i'll use in the future.

I did suspect a PSU issue at first ( although its only 3 months old ) so pulled out my spare I use for testing and it still did it.

Hopefully Asrock might have a bios or some info on what the problem is but despite emailing them twice in the last week I still havent had a reply.

Peav

PS ::: I don't suspect heat. My room is at about 16 degrees Cel atm.. cold. Case left open. 2x120MM fans for intake and exhaust. 120MM on the PSU. XP-120 Heatsink on the CPU.

Temps are usually.
CPU idle 30º / Load 42º
Mobo idle 28º / load 33º
GFX idle 42º / Load 78º

Seems fine. The northbridge sink doesnt get warm as the XP-120 blows through the CPU sink onto the NorthBridge.

 

[Peav]

The SATA2 will not boot at all now. It's going back for either a refund or a credit and i'll get a proper mainboard.

 

[brokencase]

Originally posted by: pauliec77
brokencase, Where in the bios do I change the v link and the ide drive stregnth? Also when I look in my bios the memory is displayed as ddr2 533 but I have ddr2 667? If I change the Dram freq from auto to 333mhz 667 to match my memory the system still has the lock up problems and it causes an additional problem with the sound. It plays but there is distortion. I tried re installing the sound card but the distortion is still there and if i switch the dram freq back to auto it fixes the sound distortion but either way my system still locks up at random times and when transfering files but yet ifs fine to play games. If you could help me that would be great. Thanks Paul

V link and the ide drive stregnth are in the Chipset configuration menu of the BIOS.
Leave the memory at DDR533 settings for now.

 

[scintion]

Hi there folks. I've just joined the club, and i have a problem, as many here do with this board.

Just bought it yesterday, the AsRock 4CoreDual Sata2 with an E2140 CPU as i wanted to keep my ram, i got a briliant Geil ONE DDR 600 kit which i love alot. I also got a Radeon X1950 pro on PCI-X slot. Ok, starting the assembly...

I've put everything in place and when i powered it up, the system wouldn't start. Checked again all the cables and everything was alright. First i said either the PSU can't handle all the stuff which i doubt, Antec Truepower 350W with no problems with the old rig, either something's messed with the bios. Searched for the CMOS jumper, did a reset and bingo the system booted. Immediately jumped into the bios setup, set fsb at 220 Mhz for the start to see how the board handles it, saved, and the system won't boot. Did a bios reset again, no bios setup and started to load Windows setup. At the first reboot the system won't boot again...

Well started to get pissed, cos i could spend 100 more to get some Asus board and set of DDR2 and i bet those problems wouldnt happen. But as wiched as i am, i just wanted to see what a cheap board can achieve. So, took another set of DDR, from an old computer, only 512 Mb and the system started perfectly. I was happy, for a small amount of time. The system performance is very poor. I started the Windows setup and it was verrryyy sloooowww. I got fast hard disks so out of question. Finally after an hour or so managed to get Windows Xp up and running. So benchmark time. Before i had a Northwood 3Ghz, and trust me, it was faster. Damn i said i have to overclock it...

NO CHANCE to overclock the baby... At more than 240 Mhz FSB it won't post. At lowr FSB it gives me blue screens. I'm desperate, now i post from work where i found that the same batch ID of my E2140 reached 180% overclock. Tell me where i do wrong and what settings in bios should i do. Plus, i would ask for a way to fix the incompatibility with the Geil ONE set of ram, as it's 1 Gb of DDR600 and would surely help me overclock it more. But dunno how to make it work...

 

[cammell]

DOES ANY ONE KNOW
WHY CANT I SEE
INTEL SPEEDSTEP
In my menu - advanced -> cpu ??? CPU IS E2180
That drives me maaad

 

[cb750rob]

Scinton:

I have an 4CoreDual-SATA2 with an intel e2160 dual core processor running 2x1gb of giel pc26400 ram.

I am currently running it at @2.7ghz instaed of the stock 1.8ghz.

I achived this by doing a "bsel" mod (drawing a contact between 2 of the conductive pads on the processor with a conductive pen from maplin) which changes the strapping on the cpu so the motherboard thinks it is a 2.4ghz model and then upped the FSB to 299. Easy and cheap to do:
Bsel mod

The nice thing about the bsel mod is that its really easy to do because the e2140 and e2160 chips have flat contacts on them instead of pins. If it goes wrong you can easily clean the conductive pen line off with alcahol and get it back to normal.
To ensure you don't get any on the wrong contacts mask the surrounding ones off with insulation tape. Honestly, I was really impressed with the ease of this mod and because you don't solder anything its pretty foolproof. - and I am very crap handed at stuff like this.

Also as an aside I had real stability problems trying to overclock my e2160 before the Besel mod. but after it was a dream.

"Farfle" also had similar problems check out her earlier post on this thread.

This should also sort out your stability problems with the ram!

 

[scintion]

The only thing is i am from Romania and here i can't find a conductive pen. Can i improvise something somehow? Thx for the answer Rob

 

[cb750rob]

See here:
Maplin

They do overseas shipping but I don't know how much it would cost.

Also have a look here:
defogger/demister kit

Maybe you can find one of these products or similar in romania at electronic shops or car accessory shops?

 

[scintion]

Think would cost too much

Here i doubt i can find something like that...

 

[phcahill]

New VIA drivers released 514A. I wonder if they will sort the nvidia AGP corruption under vista. I have swapped to ATI.

Anyone else having trouble with S3 suspend? On the official BIOS it will only go into S1. On the hacked BIOS it will go S3 but I get a black screen on resume. I have tried enabling repost video on resume. E2160 CPU 266 FSB @ 2.4GHZ.

 

[scintion]

Hooray, i've managed to get the Geil ONE to work. I've maxed the Vdimm voltage and now it works. At 230 fsb for now, 1:1 ratio 2-3-3-6 the latencies and i got cracking sound on my PCI M-Audio board. No chance of hearing any kind of sounds, every time the HDD works, i got this prrr noises... and the mouse also isn't smooth at all... Dunno what's bothering my system... Happened something alike looong time ago on the Duron era... But eh, i thought intel shouldn't have this kind of problem... Any ideas why this happens?

 

[Steffche]

Originally posted by: scintion
Hooray, i've managed to get the Geil ONE to work. I've maxed the Vdimm voltage and now it works. At 230 fsb for now, 1:1 ratio 2-3-3-6 the latencies and i got cracking sound on my PCI M-Audio board. No chance of hearing any kind of sounds, every time the HDD works, i got this prrr noises... and the mouse also isn't smooth at all... Dunno what's bothering my system... Happened something alike looong time ago on the Duron era... But eh, i thought intel shouldn't have this kind of problem... Any ideas why this happens?

I had a similar problem with mine. I have G.Skill DDR550 RAM and I found that if I left the Memory Ratio setting at Auto, it correctly identifies the RAM as DDR550, however the system would never boot. I had to manually set the Memory to 1:1 DDR400 in the BIOS in order to get the thing to boot.

I suppose then as you increase the FSB it will ofcourse also increase the speed at which the DDR runs at..

 

[brokencase]

Originally posted by: scintion
First i said either the PSU can't handle all the stuff which i doubt, Antec Truepower 350W with no problems with the old rig, either something's messed with the bios...

I don't know scintion, 350W seems kind of marginal to me. I initially fired up my Asrock board with a no-name brand 400w supply and I was getting "brownouts" where my hard drive would spin down and back up again. I switched to my "good" supply (XConnect 500W) that was still in my old machine and the problem went away. I put the 400w in the old machine and it runs fine.

It was quite a suprize. I thought 400w would have been plenty. It sure would be nice if ASRock and other manufacturers would put a little chart in the manual to guide you in power supply selection, or least indicate what the board needs.

I think if you take a look through some of the posts in the Power Supply forum you will conclude that 350w is not enough. Everybody is recommending 450w or more for today's mobos.

Could also be the reason why you hear noises in the speaker when the hard drive accesses.
Every supply behaves a little differently when pushed to the limit. In your case it may be that supply is already at the limit and the little extra current to move the voice coil in the harddrive puts noise on the supply rail that travels through the whole system, and you end up hearing it on your audio.

As I write this I grow curious so I found this link: http://www.dslreports.com/faq/1633

So let's do the math for my system:
Q6600 cpu. Intel says 95w. let's say I overclock it little and make it and even 100w
I have a DVD burner an a DVD rom. Let's assume the worst and that makes 50w
I have two hard drives 30w
I have an ATI AIW 9000, since it also has a tuner well assume the worst 50w
I still have a 1.44 floppy. 5w
Memory 10w per 128mb. I have 2 gig so that makes...160w? Not sure I trust that estimate.
AsRock Motherboard We don't know, the above website says 15-30w, but that url was written in 2003. Let's say 40w.

So it looks like we are at around 435w total. The above url then says to add 30% more headroom.

 

[Microsystem]

memory power should be 10W per module not per 128MB

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: cammell
DOES ANY ONE KNOW
WHY CANT I SEE
INTEL SPEEDSTEP
In my menu - advanced -> cpu ??? CPU IS E2180
That drives me maaad

You need the non official bios to enable speedstep and S3 etc.

1.60a Bios is available from the below link.

http://www.pc-treiber.net/download_kategorie_143.html

:thumbsup:

 

[Mr Vain]

Dude gets good results IMO with previous version of this Motherboard this should be also achievable with this Motherboard.

Originally posted by: stickboy
3dmark06 score of 8362 with EVGA 8800gts 640 SSC.

4coredual
e4400 @ 2.67
2GB DDR2 533 3-3-3-12

Disabling PCIe downstream pipeline helps alot with this card. With it enabled, there was heavy artifacts.

Update: 8712 with Forceware 169.04 drivers

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...TMP=Linear&#lastunread

:thumbsup:

 

[coffeeaddict]

Hey all new to the forums!
Wanted to chime in on this thread as I've had some headaches with this board and wanted to post my findings.

After reading through the entire thread I don't recall seeing any info about ram compatibility that pertained to my specific case.
My specs are as follows:
Antect truepower 380w PS (the one included in the 2nd gen antec sonata I case)
E6600
Geforce 7800 GTS I think.... it's a borrowed card
2x250gig Seagate SATAI drives

I first tried running a 2x2gig OCZ VSTA upgrade kit and no dice. I didn't read the section in the manual that this board will only accept up to 2gigs total. Trying one stick in one bank only resulted in constant BSODs with a multitude of differentt settings. The OCZ forums seemed to think the IC config on the 2gig modules were incompatible with this board.

I then switched to a OCZ 2x1gig PC-6400 Plat Rev 2 kit which seems to be working fine now.

I had to run these setting to get it to work or the comp would BSOD after a while.
RAM speed = 667mhz
DRAM voltage = High

 

[Peav]

Originally posted by: Peav
The SATA2 will not boot at all now. It's going back for either a refund or a credit and i'll get a proper mainboard.

Hmm was ready to rma it. Decided to give it one last shot just to make sure and the thing posted at 2.4GHz with my q6600 and DDR at 667. Either this board is a dud or there is something quirky with the bios.

Asrock still have not replied to my emails.

Anyhoo it seems rock stable atm. Ran orthos for about 5hours and it didnt crash. I've played armed assault and DOD source and all seems fine.

Its a strange one.

 

[cammell]

Thans Mr Vain
Will give a try this 1.60a

Now overclocking is working to about 270Mhz - after that processor keeps value 2.7GHz even with 340MHz FSB. Othos tests @2.7GHz was positive for 3h - but when i woke up computer has been reseted. Proc temp was about 50C, cores about 70C. Im using noname 350W PSU - which should be enought since AGP card is just riva tnt2. Have in other comp chieftec 450, maybe i should consider swap.

ALSO how can i be 100% sure if my processor mod is positive ? Where i should see diferences ? Im not total newbie with mods, still have moded, unlocked BARTON with the same conductant i used now.

Have noticed that during bootup in low-left corner is number displayed - like 0075 - i have checked that - looks like multiplier (0.75)*setFSB=realFSB. Anyway its frustrating that you set the mobo and its changing seting at its will. Would prefer no booting at all... Reseting CMOS isnt pain.
Greetings for all having fun with this MOBO.

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: cammell
Thans Mr Vain
Will give a try this 1.60a

Now overclocking is working to about 270Mhz - after that processor keeps value 2.7GHz even with 340MHz FSB. Othos tests @2.7GHz was positive for 3h - but when i woke up computer has been reseted. Proc temp was about 50C, cores about 70C. Im using noname 350W PSU - which should be enought since AGP card is just riva tnt2. Have in other comp chieftec 450, maybe i should consider swap.

ALSO how can i be 100% sure if my processor mod is positive ? Where i should see diferences ? Im not total newbie with mods, still have moded, unlocked BARTON with the same conductant i used now.

Have noticed that during bootup in low-left corner is number displayed - like 0075 - i have checked that - looks like multiplier (0.75)*setFSB=realFSB. Anyway its frustrating that you set the mobo and its changing seting at its will. Would prefer no booting at all... Reseting CMOS isnt pain.
Greetings for all having fun with this MOBO.

If BSEL Mod is successfull the first bios page will show 266 for cpu also CPU-z will also show 266FSB = 2600Mhz processor speed.

My E2180 is @305FSB with little effort on this Mobo, I have not run extensive Orthos tests but it runs ok.

:thumbsup:

 

[Steffche]

I have this motherboard too and I am running an old Intel P4 640 at 3.7Ghz (FSB is at 230Mhz).
I am using G.Skill DDR550 2x512Mb RAM at 2.5-3-3-6 1T timings.

At these settings SP2004 would fail after around 30 mins or so...sometimes sooner. I found that I acheived a more stable system and hence a 9 hour run of dual SP2004 instances by disabling the following in BIOS:

V-Link Auto-disconnect. I am not sure what his parameter does, but it has helped me achieve stability at these speeds. I can now slowly increase FSB to get a little more out of it. I'll see how far I can go with this new discovery.

ALSO

Has anyone tried the 'non-official' firmware? Is it good/safe?

 

[fritzfield1234]

Well, I've been following this topic for about 2 months. I'm still running my E6600 at a 305 FSB, stable, with no problems, using crappy DDR 333 RAM, an old ATI Radeon 9600 AGP video card, and Vista-64. I'm probably the type of user that ASROCK was targeting when they made this mobo.

Does anyone know if this mobo could support 2GB sticks of DDR2 RAM? I'd like to be able to run 4GB of RAM because of Vista-64 and because it's so damn inexpensive. Do you think that ASROCK would be able to add this functionality with a BIOS update?

 

[brokencase]

fritzfield1234

I don't know about the ram, other PT880 motherboards are also limited to the 2 gig.

Tell the rest of us with q6600's how you were able to get to 305 fsb. Bios settings and so fourth.

I seem to hit a wall around 280. Windows hangs on boot.

 

[cammell]

At least - BSEL mod sucesfull - before my conductant wasnt conducting JUST STIRL IT UP

Can run about 2850MHz - an on ORTHOS after few minutes cores (metered by SPEEDFAN) are 80C and comp is reseting. At 3GHz BSOD just after boot.
Will search an opinion if its a cooling or proc problem.

 

[bigsnyder]

Originally posted by: brokencase
fritzfield1234

I don't know about the ram, other PT880 motherboards are also limited to the 2 gig.

Tell the rest of us with q6600's how you were able to get to 305 fsb. Bios settings and so fourth.

I seem to hit a wall around 280. Windows hangs on boot.

I'm only taking a guess here, but this board seems to OC better with AGP cards. I could get
300Mhz with my AGP, but my X1900XT PCIe dropped me to about 295MHz and that speed
wasn't completely error free.