ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA

[allenlux]

Simplepsy, the whole point is to have a fanless graphics card (which is what the Gainward 8500GT SilentFX is).

Since adding my post here I discovered another Anandtech forum thread about this particular graphics card:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=31&threadid=2052006
so to avoid double-posting I'll continue in that thread, since my issue now is the graphics card rather than the motherboard.

But I think you are right about the airflow being the problem. It shouldn't be too difficult to fix.

 

[speedlever]

I have similar gear to several of you:
Fortron 450w PSU (AX-450PN)
ASRock 4coredual-VSTA (BIOS flashed from 1.5 to 1.8 in Vista Home Premium)
e4300 CPU
2x1 Gb Kingston DDR2-667 ram (http://tinyurl.com/2vmmf8)
1 old Pata 60 Gb Seagate HD
1 DVD/RW (PATA)
1 CD/RW (PATA)
eVGA 6600GT AGP
Stock HSF with AS Ceramique

This board replaced an Asus P4S533/P4 1.8 GHz Northwood and 2x512 Mb PC2700 ram.

I installed Vista Home Premium and it's running fine.

I changed the AGP aperture to 128 mb but otherwise left everything else alone except for:
DRAM changed to DDR2-533
FSB changed to 266.

At stock settings I get some interesting temp differences, probably due to where the temp software derives the temps. (see attachments).

What do you think of the temp differences between SF4.32, CT 0.95, and TAT?

I'm not crazy about the stock HSF and the clip style mounting. I used a Noctua NH-U12F on my e6600 build a few weeks ago and I'm pretty happy with that.

Check these screen shots. Should I change the HSF?

Idle at FSB 266:
http://img369.imageshack.us/im...4/e4300analysisfb0.jpg

Orthos for a couple of hours (FSB 266):
http://img362.imageshack.us/im...1010/orthostestzu2.jpg

 

[ronach]

I don't think your HSF is mounted correctly, my temps at idle are close to 30 using stock HSF and TAT.

 

[speedlever]

That's interesting. I can't run TAT on my e6600 box because I have Vista/64 running there and TAT won't run on it. Neither will CoreTemp 0.95. Both e6600 cores idle around 30*c on Speedfan 4.32. And the same readings show on SpeedFan with the e4300.

I ran Orthos and the SF temps got into the low 50's on both machines (20-25* rise over idle).

 

[speedlever]

OK. Looks like the temp differences are due to the programs making different assumptions on Tjunction (85* or 100*). Now which is accurate, I do not yet know. All I can say is that my e6600 core temps on Speedfan are very close to the e4300 core temps. Maybe the stock HSF is not so bad after all.
http://tinyurl.com/3959pt

After running Orthos for 5.5 hours last night, I quit the program and tried SuperPi. It failed right off the bat and wouldn't run. Today, it ran fine through 2Mb (all I tried). Also, I tried TAT stress testing today. The temps got as high as 71-72*C (as reported by TAT). So that is either accurate or 15* high, depending on whether my Tj is 85 or 100*.

 

[Simplepsy]

I have my CPU overclock to 290FSB at 35C idle.

Try the Akasa Blue Evo, at about £30 - £35 its an awsome cooler if you have the space for it.
almost silent at low speeds it has 6 liquid filled heatpipes and a direct contact polished pure copper base with a variable speed controler for xtra functionality.

With mine installed I'm set to clock up to the max this board will allow without having to worry about temperatures.

 

[speedlever]

How is that temp reported? BIOS? TAT? Temp reporting seems to be pretty critical depending on the program/utility used.

My temps differ by 15-18 degrees between SpeedFan 4.32 and TAT/CoreTemp 0.95 (both of which are very close).

A standard we all might can agree on is to use BIOS temp after, say, 10 minutes?

 

[Simplepsy]

Does anyone have a rough guide to what voltages would be required to reach this boards max clocks? I think it would be a nice idea to have a compiled list of tested stable voltages and the results of those mods.

 

[Simplepsy]

Winbond, Intel core ... Thats all i can say really. Not sure what compiles the readings but they are taken but since there are several sensors on this board that will be detected you could get a variation if your apps are reading different ones.

Make sure your applications are reading the correct sensor since this board will report 4+ with a core2

in Speedfan (which I know so far to be accurate for me)

Temp1 = Southbridge (Winbond W83697HF)
Temp2 = Northbridge (Winbond W83697HF)
Core0 and Core1: your CPU (Intel Core)

Then again, I could be barking up the wrong tree.

 

[lookin4dlz]

Originally posted by: Simplepsy
70C is a bit excessive for idle temp.

That's an understatement! Speedfan reports 28C - 38C (depending on the CPU usage, which fluctuated between 1%-75%) on both cores over two hours while running a very intensive Excel application.

 

[Simplepsy]

28 - 38c on stock HSF??

How on earth did you manage that??
Are you sure your not reading the temps of your northbridge?
Core2 temps appear as Core0 and Core1.

If this is right please share your secret!!

 

[Mir96TA]

SO what kind of a PCIe Video Card I can use
Can I use this Video Card ?
What kind of a PCIe slot is this
I am graduating from ATi850 (16 pipe line)
So I want Nice uprade

 

[lookin4dlz]

Originally posted by: Simplepsy
28 - 38c on stock HSF??

How on earth did you manage that??
Are you sure your not reading the temps of your northbridge?
Core2 temps appear as Core0 and Core1.

If this is right please share your secret!!

Temps @ 62.9% CPU usage, Core 0 & Core1 - 36C & 36C

Ambient temp is about 25C (76F).

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: Simplepsy
Does anyone have a rough guide to what voltages would be required to reach this boards max clocks? I think it would be a nice idea to have a compiled list of tested stable voltages and the results of those mods.

This is the best volt Mod guide on the net for these boards.

http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=93127

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: Mir96TA
SO what kind of a PCIe Video Card I can use
Can I use this Video Card ?
What kind of a PCIe slot is this
I am graduating from ATi850 (16 pipe line)
So I want Nice uprade

That card is compatible with this board.
This is the supported video card list for this motherboard.


http://www.asrock.com/mb/vga.asp?Model=4CoreDual-VSTA

 

[Mir96TA]

so at what speed it will run at ?

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: Mir96TA
so at what speed it will run at ?

4X PCI-e which is still pretty good.

http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2814

 

[Mir96TA]

Wouldn't that a Down Grade if I go from AGP 8X to PCIe 4 x
After reading that article it says I might lose 10% Performance
WHich not bad

 

[Demon82]

Originally posted by: Mir96TA
Wouldn't that a Down Grade if I go from AGP 8X to PCIe 4 x
After reading that article it says I might lose 10% Performance
WHich not bad

Actually unless you have a high end card in that PCI-e x4 slot, (8800 card, 7950 dual card or an HD2900, the most badwidth hungry cards maybe) you'll not find the difference between it and a PCI-e x16. It's that high end cards the group that sees that variable 5-15% lesser performance, wich dould get acceptable dependign on the situation.

 

[Mir96TA]

Goodie Good
Another Question
How in the world I can install RAID 0
I do not have that option in Bios
I am using P1.70 Bios
I have Raid 1 (Mirror) option no option Striping
Any Clue ?
I called the Tech Support
He said he will call me back

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: Mir96TA
Goodie Good
Another Question
How in the world I can install RAID 0
I do not have that option in Bios
I am using P1.70 Bios
I have Raid 1 (Mirror) option no option Striping
Any Clue ?
I called the Tech Support
He said he will call me back

In the bios under the IDE Configuration Set to Raid and reboot.
Upon reboot the raid options come up then you can set to the raid mode you want.
Raid 0 stripping is the first option in that page.
You will have to make up a raid floppy to set it up.

 

[akeene]

Hi Jeffspam,

Having same problem, did you come up with any solutions? I have tried just about everything I can think to try.

 

[Maffer]

Hello everyone!

I wonder where the 775Dual thread vanished...maybe it was renamed. However, I recently swapped out x1950 pro card for brand new ASUS 8800GTS 640MB board and everything seemed to work quite nice actually to my surprise under Vista Ultimate 64bit. 3DMark 05 (12021 marks) & 06 (7194 marks) ran stable with acceptable results for this board I guess. Drivers in use were 158.24 loaded from Nvidia site. Then I noticed these "Display driver not responding" -messages started popping up with certain software (World of Warcraft and VMR9 video playback to name but a few). WoW hard crashed at login screen almost immediately with noticeable graphics corruption around mouse cursor and Mediaplayer classic just crashes after a moment of starting video playback with random corruption on screen. Oblivion, on the other hand, runs perfectly fine with max ingame details and so does TR:Anniversary. No matter if Aero is in use or not.

Windows XP is another story. Here I installed 160.03 betas loaded from guru3d and they installed fine. Everything seems to be working here what does crash under Vista. But now I have another graphics corruption issues. 3DMark 05 & 06 show major corruption in canyon flight scene when the monster from water pops up whereas other tests run without any artifacts and scores do go up compared to Vista too. Around +800 marks in 05 and 350 in 06. Oblivion plays perfect again. I installed Dark Messiah and STALKER to see how they would do only to notice minor corruption in Messiah (not often) and major glitches in STALKER.

If I enter BIOS during bootup the keyboard input is VERY sluggish compared to when I had x1950 pro board installed and screen seems to update slower too.

OC setting in BIOS is CPU/PCI-E sync at the moment. Everything runs at default clock speed. I also installed rivatuner and rised the fan speed cycle to 80% which resulted in ~57°C idle and 70ish °C under load. Overclocking the card to 540 core and 840 memory actually makes makes some corruption to vanish in 3DMark and STALKER. My PSU is Enermax liberty 400W and other important components are mentioned in my sig.

I'll be ordering new mobo next week (Asus P5W DH Deluxe maybe) but then again, I really need to know if:

1) My 8800GTS is borked
2) 775Dual VSTA PCI-E implementation is really that bad
3) My PSU does not provide enough juice

Oh my...this is so frustrating. Everything worked completely fine in Vista with x1950 pro.

 

[djcoolio]

Oh my god. Are u serious?

Minimum psu for 8800 is 450watt. Change your psu now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Maffer]

Liberty delivers (according to it's specs) 30A combined to 12V rail and voltages seem to be running very stable. This *should* be enough. But yes, I will replace the PSU after mobo if that doesn't help a bit.