Hi all! First post and all that, be gentle with me...
As part of an uber*cheap*, long overdue upgrade I got my hands upon one of these boards. A week later, my supplier popped up with the SATA2 version mind, oh well, not to worry as part of the attraction was the ability to run all my 4 IDE devices and AGP video card without having to shell out any extra cash.. Jobs a goodun. Pair this board with a E2160, sell my old board, CPU and memory (ASRock K7S8X-E, AMD Barton 2500+@3200+ and a straight swap of my 2x512DDR400s for 2x512DDR2/667s..). Total cost for upgrade, about 40 quid. Result!
So far, so good. Board fired up first time, flashed BIOS from 1.40 to 1.80, CPU got a "gentle" overclock from 1.8Ghz to 2.62Ghz (FSB 290), set memory to DDR2/533 in BIOS, disabled flexibility and done all the other little odds&sods that I've read up about with these (and the similar 775Dual) particular boards. All fine. XP Pro and Vista Ultimate all installed, happy and stable.
So, current specs. E2160 @ 2.62Ghz, 1Gb DDR2/667 actually running at 580Mhz, Leadtek A7600GS TDH AGP card, 3xIDE HDDS and a DVDRW drive, all powered from a NorthQ 500W supply, with ample amps all round.
It runs like like a raped ape! Blazingly fast compared to my old AMD rig, nice and stable and anyone who says that the XP3200 shouldnt bottlenext a 7600GS is just plain wrong. CoD2 has never ran so well, also Area 51/Far Cry and assorted other games. Groovy!
Except in 2D performance. 32-bit colour 2d performance in WinXP is all rather sluggish. If there is loads going on on-screen, you can almost see XP drawing the GUI in when minimizing/maximizing windows and so on.
All is fine and blazingly fast in 16-bit colour, just that 32-bit colour is noticably slow. I never had this problem on my old board which made it all the more noticable in this one.
All is fine in Vista, whether using Aeroglass or classic theme, things all happy there..
I've tried a couple of VIA 4-in 1 drivers, made sure the AGP driver updated from the standard M$ one that installs with XP, various Nvidia drivers from the 93.71s upwards, still the same.
3D performance in Dx or OpenGL *rocks*. 16-bit colour 2D performance *rocks*. 32-bit colour sucks a bit.
I've got my trusty old GF4Ti4200 here somewhere, when I finally dig it out I'll try that, see if the problem is limited to my 7600GS or if it is a general Nvidia/VIA thing. I did see a thread a while ago about a similar problem with a 6600GT, but no follow up to it. I imagine its not a common one otherwise various forums would be full of it.
Anyway, any ideas/resolutions for this? I've tried clocking the CPU back down to standard (200FSB) and variations between that and my current speed of 290, I've tried various AGP aperture settings, enable/disable fast writes, 4x AGP instead of 8, and as for the other AGP settings I don't understand what the rest of them mean, but tried flipping a few with no result.
Secondly, a more minor one. The board is supposed to be able to lock the PCI/PCI-E bus whilst fiddling with the FSB. However, according to SiSoft Sandra, the PCI and PCI-E bus is rising along with the FSB.
With my FSB at 290, Sandtra reports the PCI bus as being at 36Mhz, AGP bus at 72Mhz, V-link at 72Mhz and PCI=E at 72Mhz. Having PCI ect set at aSync to FSB appears to make no difference at all, and no matter what I set PCI/PCI-E speed at in BIOS, the same results in Sandra with FSB at 290.
Setting FSB to 200 or 266 seems to resolve all bus speeds back to standard 33/66/100Mhz.
Is this a problem with Sandra misreporting the various bus speeds, as this whole untied overclocking thing is a rather prominent part of the advertising of this board, the 880 chipset certainly is capable of locking the PCI bus according to VIA, so I'm sure more people would have kicked up a fuss if they were lying about it...
Is there a certain BIOS revision that ensures bus locking, or should I just assume that Sandra is telling me porkies.
There you go, first post cherry popped. Apologies for the length, but the missus never complains..