ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: 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.

775Dual-VSTA Thread

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...AR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

Was the x1950 pro card AGP or PCI-e?

 

[Simplepsy]

Sounds alot like one of the problems I had.
I got a palit 7600GT and was able to replicate your problem Maffer.

in ASYNC mode this mobo runs the risk of loosing sync between the cpu and your pci-e card.
In Vista this will present itself as the Driver resetting ocasionally, in XP this will simply freeze your display untill it either resets your pc or you reset it.

I found that raising the PCI-e frequency to a value proportional to the CPU will fix this.

FSB / PCI-e = ~2.66

example:

FSB @ 266, PCI-e @ 100 (default)
266/100=2.66

FSB @ 295 PCI-e @ 110
295/110=2.68 (acceptable and stable)

The problem is prob not your graphics card, there may just be an issue in its design.

My palit card is a non reference design so that prob explains it alot for me,
Prob also explains why I can overclock the pants off everyone elses card without volt modding.
Currently running stable @
FSB 295, PCI-e 110, PCI 34.4
GPU 695Mhz, GDDR3 Mem 820 (1640Mhz)

As soon as I alter the PCIe frequency my display will loose stability.

 

[Maffer]

Oh my bad. There is the thread...Well doh, I guess my post fits in here too since these mobos are so similar. Or should I repost / link this in 775-thread?

x1950 pro was a PCI-E one. Asus EAX1950pro 256MB model.

 

[Maffer]

Originally posted by: Simplepsy
Sounds alot like one of the problems I had.
I got a palit 7600GT and was able to replicate your problem Maffer.

in ASYNC mode this mobo runs the risk of loosing sync between the cpu and your pci-e card.
In Vista this will present itself as the Driver resetting ocasionally, in XP this will simply freeze your display untill it either resets your pc or you reset it.

I found that raising the PCI-e frequency to a value proportional to the CPU will fix this.

FSB / PCI-e = ~2.66

example:

FSB @ 266, PCI-e @ 100 (default)
266/100=2.66

FSB @ 295 PCI-e @ 110
295/110=2.68 (acceptable and stable)

The problem is prob not your graphics card, there may just be an issue in its design.

My palit card is a non reference design so that prob explains it alot for me,
Prob also explains why I can overclock the pants off everyone elses card without volt modding.
Currently running stable @
FSB 295, PCI-e 110, PCI 34.4
GPU 695Mhz, GDDR3 Mem 820 (1640Mhz)

As soon as I alter the PCIe frequency my display will loose stability.

Thanks for this information. Should I try async mode and set PCI-E freq at 100MHz then as it is now set in SYNC mode instead of async? FSB is 266MHz at the moment.

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: Maffer
Oh my bad. There is the thread...Well doh, I guess my post fits in here too since these mobos are so similar. Or should I repost / link this in 775-thread?

x1950 pro was a PCI-E one. Asus EAX1950pro 256MB model.

Any information that fixes an issue on the 775Dual-VSTA will also fix the same issue on the 4CoreDual-VSTA Motherboard.

I think Simplepsy fix is right on the money with your issue.

 

[Maffer]

Yea, Simplepsy's idea sounds logical. I just wonder what the real PCI-E freq is at the moment if it's in SYNC mode with CPU. It did show 100MHz (266 FSB) and was grayed out when I last checked. Is 100MHz async mode so much different from 100MHz sync (if it is 100MHz like BIOS shows in gray). Well have to tweak some after I get home from work.

 

[Mir96TA]

Originally posted by: 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.

Press Tab >Create Array>Auto Setup for Data Security or select disk drives>Raid 0 for performance the option Stripping does not shows up

 

[Maffer]

Righto. I put OC setting to ASYNC mode and entered 100MHz for PCI-E freq. Nothing changed in XP or in Vista. Vista still gets those "driver not responding" messages and graphics corruption problems exist in XP. Also tried a tabletop fan at full blast next to open case which resulted in 38-40C idle and 55-60C load temps. That didn't help either. :/

 

[speedlever]

Sorry for the OT, but is there a way to get to the end of this thread from the first page other than clicking on the last page (it takes 7 times now)?

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: speedlever
Sorry for the OT, but is there a way to get to the end of this thread from the first page other than clicking on the last page (it takes 7 times now)?

The best way IMO is to create a shortcut on the last page of the thread and save it to your desktop, you will only be one click away from the end page that way.

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: Maffer
Righto. I put OC setting to ASYNC mode and entered 100MHz for PCI-E freq. Nothing changed in XP or in Vista. Vista still gets those "driver not responding" messages and graphics corruption problems exist in XP. Also tried a tabletop fan at full blast next to open case which resulted in 38-40C idle and 55-60C load temps. That didn't help either. :/

I believe you can run PCI-e up to 110Mhz with no danger to the card, you will need to get it to around 110Mhz from what I have read before.

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: Mir96TA

Originally posted by: 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.

Press Tab >Create Array>Auto Setup for Data Security or select disk drives>Raid 0 for performance the option Stripping does not shows up

Raid 0 is striping

RAID - or Redundant Array of Independent Disks - comes in different flavours from RAID 0 and RAID 1 to combination of those two, and going up to RAID 5 and RAID 10.

For the purposes of this article we will confine ourselves to RAID 0 and RAID 1. You can use either IDE, Serial ATA or SCSI disks in RAID configurations, but not a mixture of any of them (see our guide to hard disks if you have queries not answered on this page).

RAID 0
RAID 0 is simply the combination of two or more hard disks to appear to the computer as one large hard disk. It's also called striping. You could take two 250 GB hard disks, set them up as RAID 0 and the PC will see them as a single 500 GB hard disk. Once that is configured and setup for all practical purposes the PC will behave like there is only one 500 GB hard disk in the machine.

The main advantage of striping is the extra speed that you will get. Writing to hard disks is the bottleneck in most modern PCs. However with RAID 0 the writing is split across two drives, and the PC is writing simultaneously to both; that does speed things up. You won't get 100% speed increases but 20-30% is quite possible.

The main disadvantage is that there is double the risk of a hard disk failure. You need only one of your two drives to go faulty and you've lost all your data.

RAID 1
RAID 1, also called mirroring, is setting up the two disks such that the second one mirrors the first providing you an up to the minute backup if something ever goes wrong with the first disk. Should the first hard disk fail you simply remove it, put the second disk in it's place and carry on where you left off.

RAID 0 + 1
You could have a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1 to provide both the speed and the security. You will, of course, need several hard disks for this.

RAID 1.5
A new concept but the jury is still out on this one. It may give you slightly higher read speeds but write speeds don't benefit.

What you need to setup RAID 0 or RAID 1
You need to have a motherboard that has a RAID controller on it. If the motherboard does not have a RAID controller you will need to add a PCI RAID controller card. Check that the RAID facility it offers covers the type of hard disk you want to use (IDE/SATA/SCSI).

While it is not mandatory to have identical hard disks it is very highly recommended not just that you have similar sized disks but also exactly the same make and model.

Tips:
RAID 0 + 1 will give you the best of both worlds.
You do not need to have your operating system on the RAID drives. It is quite possible to have Windows on a 40 GB drive called C and have two 250 GB hard disks setup in RAID 0 as your drive D for video clips
If going for SCSI RAID note that RAID cards that have dedicated hardware on the card to control the RAID data handling are superior to the software based RAID controller cards.
When buying a motherboard ensure that it supports not just IDE RAID but Serial ATA RAID as well. When buying a server motherboard you can get SCSI RAID on board.
Check that your RAID controller has support both for RAID 0 and RAID 1 AND that it has support for RAID 0 + 1; you never know when you may want to add more disks to your RAID.
If you want the drive containing Windows to be in a RAID array, setup the RAID prior to installing Windows.
Don't panic when an IDE or SATA RAID appears as a SCSI device in Windows because that's what it does

 

[Mir96TA]

Thanks I am not new to RAID, I been setting up the Raid system from last 10 Years
from Adpatec to mylex to Promise (POS)
My Fav is Raid 5
if money and HDD is the issue I would go with 0/1 combo
so.......
Any rate I got Email from ASrock to follow the instructions

Press Tab >Create Array> Array mode RAID1( mirroring) ->Raid 0 for performance
You will "Raid 0 for performance" on the screen.

 

[theslasher]

Guys just to let you know the Leadtek 8800GTS 640mb works.
I have a E6400 stock speeds,
Csair Twinx DDR2 XMS2GB PC5400
Nvidia drivers 158.27.Installed in safemode.
Running great on a 22 Lg monitor.

 

[Simplepsy]

Originally posted by: Mr Vain

Originally posted by: Maffer
Righto. I put OC setting to ASYNC mode and entered 100MHz for PCI-E freq. Nothing changed in XP or in Vista. Vista still gets those "driver not responding" messages and graphics corruption problems exist in XP. Also tried a tabletop fan at full blast next to open case which resulted in 38-40C idle and 55-60C load temps. That didn't help either. :/

I believe you can run PCI-e up to 110Mhz with no danger to the card, you will need to get it to around 110Mhz from what I have read before.

That wont even work for me, My PCI-e must be proportional to my FSB otherwise I get the same graphics lockups with my pci-e card.
I've disabled the down pipeline as I read that this can help prevent stalling but that didnt help. My system is running well at FSB 300 PCI-e 111, cant seem to push any higher without lockups even after pencil modding the Vgap, and a mild pencil mod on the Vtt.

I think what I need now is more volts to the CPU since i'm running a 1.35v E6300 at 1.28v on this board, then still I will have to increase the PCI-e propotionaly with the FSB,
think I've hit my limit at 300FSB

Current best 3Dmark06 result is 3865

 

[Mir96TA]

Originally posted by: Mir96TA
Thanks I am not new to RAID, I been setting up the Raid system from last 10 Years
from Adpatec to mylex to Promise (POS)
My Fav is Raid 5
if money and HDD is the issue I would go with 0/1 combo
so.......
Any rate I got Email from ASrock to follow the instructions

Press Tab >Create Array> Array mode RAID1( mirroring) ->Raid 0 for performance
You will "Raid 0 for performance" on the screen.

ok it works

 

[Maffer]

Meh...I'm a little worried that my 8800GTS is really borked if theslasher has his card working flawlessly. I'm ordering ASUS P5W DH soon and will keep you updated about this matter. I tried upping PCI-E freq to 110MHz, didn't help either. One thing bothers me: Why can I run Oblivion with maxed out settings with videocard overclocked to 550 core and 860 mem without any graphical corruption or glitches? Played it 5 hours yesterday.

 

[Simplepsy]

Is your 2D overclocked too???

If you've overclocked the chip accross all profiles then you could very well get alot of issues on the 2D.
I've noticed that the 1st thing to always go on my card as I push the GPU and Mem up is the 2D, always 2D artifacting way before I get 3D artifacts.

Maybe oblivion is running fine because your clocked up to a comfortable level for the 3D but if the profile isnt going back to stock settings for your 2D or low 3D then maybe your getting some issues.

Sounds unlikely tho, but I cant think of many other reasons. If your card was truely for the scrap pile I doubt very much you would be able to play anything nevermind overclocked.

 

[Maffer]

Problems come no matter if it's overlocked or not. I used Rivatuner for 3d performance mode clock tweaking only AND all the problems popped up before any overclocking as soon as card was installed. Weird thing also is hellish laggy screen refresh and keyboard input at bootup screen too. Didn't happen with x1950 pro or previous 6800GT AGP card. Too bad I can't test this card in other PC anytime soon

I'll take few screenshots later so you can see the corruption I'm getting. If it's any help.

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: Maffer
Problems come no matter if it's overlocked or not. I used Rivatuner for 3d performance mode clock tweaking only AND all the problems popped up before any overclocking as soon as card was installed. Weird thing also is hellish laggy screen refresh and keyboard input at bootup screen too. Didn't happen with x1950 pro or previous 6800GT AGP card. Too bad I can't test this card in other PC anytime soon

I'll take few screenshots later so you can see the corruption I'm getting. If it's any help.

It may be a driver clash, perhaps a fresh install and following the theslasher tips in safe mode Install Nvidia drivers 158.27.

 

[Maffer]

Woohoo guys! I think I got it working now. There was this option called PCIE Downstream Pipeline in BIOS. You know what - disabling that mofo (was AUTO by default) made every corruption problem vanish under XP! Everything runs flawlessly under XP now. Not a hitch anymore. Have to try Vista later now I'm gonna go play some S.T.A.L.K.E.R which by the way runs at maximum details very smooth. Damn I'm one happy camper now

Thank you for all the help!

UPDATE: Vista works perfectly too. Experience rating calculation does not crash anymore either.

 

[theslasher]

Nice one m8 that's probably why i did not get that prob different motherboards

 

[theslasher]

Guys has anyonr tried overclocking with this combo on this motherboard E6400 and Csair Twinx DDR2 XMS2GB PC5400
if so let me know what your options in the bios were i have a aska evo cooler so there will be know trouble with temps,so any ideas?

 

[Mir96TA]

Will HIS X1950 Pro would Work ?

 

[Simplepsy]

OK, I'm having a bit of trouble finding the voltage measure points for the Vagp and Vtt pencil mods.

The pics on the thread dont show where you put BOTH probes.

Could someone enlighten me...?