ASRock 775Dual-VSTA

[bigsnyder]

@bog

Thanks for the post. Sounds like your board is an earlier revision. Makes me wonder if the
newer revisions with the PT880 ultra (vs Pro) was a big "public field test" for the new
4CoreDual-VSTA to iron out some of these bugs? Just thinking out loud.

 

[imported_bog]

Don't be so optimistic, I removed the northbridge heatsink to check interface and it is "ultra"(by the way, the heatsink surface is directly from a poor extrusion machine, I lapped it a little bit and replaced compound with AS5 but didn't get too much).

 

[awesom o]

Looks like theres a new VIA driver out, ver 5.10A:
http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=420&OSID=1&CatID=1070

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: awesom o
Looks like theres a new VIA driver out, ver 5.10A:
http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=420&OSID=1&CatID=1070

Actually, that's the previous version. They pulled 5.11 after reports came to light (from a big OEM customer no less) that audio glitches appeared after installation, possibly due to the SATA or RAID driver. 5.11 is still available from a little text note above 5.10A.

 

[Raikku]

So you ppl say that bios v2.10 is best if user use DDR2 in his mobo?

Hmm, maybe i should try it, i use now 2.20, earlier was 1.80, maybe that 2.10 would cure some of my problems with G.Skill's DDR2s(?)

 

[bl4ckfl4g]

well I installed my 7900GS. It is crashing World of Warcraft occasionally it seems. Battlefield and supreme commander seemed fine and were huge improvements from my x1300 lol.

In Wow the whole system froze twice. I had to reboot. THen a few of othertimes Wow crashed which didn't happen very much before I switched vid cards. Only bios option I changed was Primary adaptor = PCI Express gfx

I had 6 or 7 World of warcrft crashes in like 4 hours which was pretty annoying.

 

[StephenMSmith]

Thanks for posting b/c that's exactly the info I'm interest in since I have DDR400 RAM and an X850XTPE AGP card now and am curious as how much DDR2 and/or a current generation video card would really benefit me now vs. waiting until I get my real C2D mb.

Anything more specific on the DDR --> DDR2 upgrade vs. the X800Pro --> X1950XT upgrade?

 

[StephenMSmith]

No problems w/my 29160 SCSI adapter but I don't have RAID enabled or even anything other than SCSI drives. Does it work fine w/o the SATA drives and/or RAID disabled?

 

[Willyboy]

Originally posted by: StephenMSmith
Thanks for posting b/c that's exactly the info I'm interest in since I have DDR400 RAM and an X850XTPE AGP card now and am curious as how much DDR2 and/or a current generation video card would really benefit me now vs. waiting until I get my real C2D mb.

Anything more specific on the DDR --> DDR2 upgrade vs. the X800Pro --> X1950XT upgrade?

This might help from an earlier Review/Test, regarding DDR v DDR2

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2810

 

[aussieburger]

Well I finally upgraded my RAM:

MDT 2048 DDR2-800 CL5

I put it in and booted up at my previous FSB of 300 with no problems. Tweaked the RAM timings and FSB and ended up with the following:
RAM: 667 @ 3-3-3-3-9-1T
FSB: 305

Booted fine at 310 as with my old ram (MDT DDR-400) but failed ORTHOS after a few minutes (as with the old ram)

Honestly not a whole lot of difference changing ram other than better Sandra Memory Scores (the biggest difference by the way for these scores was the 1 command time and the disabling pci-pipe option in bios - CL 3 or 4 made little difference). But now is a great time to sell your ddr and buy a nice ddr2 (well here in Europe anyway) - I sold my DDR kit for the same price as my new DDR2 kit and i'm already now for a new mobo once a right priced nVidia 8600 gpu becomes available. This board has served it's purpose allowing me to upgrade parts 1 by 1 but once I have the new graphics card i'll want a better overclocking board.

Originally posted by: StephenMSmith
Thanks for posting b/c that's exactly the info I'm interest in since I have DDR400 RAM and an X850XTPE AGP card now and am curious as how much DDR2 and/or a current generation video card would really benefit me now vs. waiting until I get my real C2D mb.

Anything more specific on the DDR --> DDR2 upgrade vs. the X800Pro --> X1950XT upgrade?

And here's your graphics card comparision:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics....elx=33&model1=574&model2=586&chart=225

Graphics card will make much more of a difference ! ... But personally i'd wait for the next round of Directx10 cards hopefully the end of this month

 

[Raikku]

What bios-version you have now?

And what voltage settings you use(low/normal/high?), i haven't yet managed to get my G.Skills work on 667Mhz, they(or board) seem to like more 533Mhz.

My voltage-setting is now normal, but i have to try low too, i have pipeline enabled, v-link is fast and latencies are 4-4-4-12, 'cause tras 10 seemed to give problems.

In Sandra's b.width-test i get now around 5500-5600.

 

[aussieburger]

hmmm ... i'm running 1.9 bios - voltage high - vlink is fast ... oops is that pipeline thing mean to be enabled ?? I think I disabled it will have to check

But my Sandra's b.width scores are much lower ! around 4400 ... is it possible scores are better at 533mhz ??

EDIT: ah ok now at 4950 with it enabled but still much lower than your score

 

[aussieburger]

Mem - Mem B'wdth - Mem Latency - cpu FSB - Mem FSB - Ratio - Timings

MDT -DD2-667 - 4924/4938 - 125/86 - 305 - 228.9 - 4:3 - 3,3,3,3,9,1
MDT -DD2-533 - 4895/4922 - 125/82.3 - 305 - 228.9 - 4:3 - 3,3,3,3,9,1
MDT -DD2-667 - 4825/4884 - 130/91 - 305 - 228.9 - 4:3 - 4,3,3,3,9,1


Changing the dramvoltage to Normal made no difference for me ... from what I remember the high setting on this board is not so 'high'.

so DDR2-667 @ CL3 gave the best scores ... any ideas how I can improve these ?

Ah these Sandra scores are also cpu dependent ? I think so looking at the reference scores ... i've only got a E6300 @ 2.13 could explain the big difference there.

anyone got some scores with DDR2 ram and E6300 to compare ??

 

[Modelworks]

Just wanted to add my experience with this board thus far.

Installed it yesterday.
Used 2 sticks of Pc-2700 memory and Leadtek 7600Gt agp card from my old system.
Used old ATX supply 400Watt model, made by Hipro.
Installed fine, very few jumpers on the board , which I like.

Using a Pentium D 930, 3ghz. I stress tested it for 5 hours last night with everest and it was completely stable, temps were a bit high, 52C versus 42C when idle.

I then tried overclocking and was able to get it to 3.5ghz completely stable, but temps approached 59C with the stock cooler, so I put it back to normal until I get a better heatsink.

One thing I did was to mount a fan in the case to blow on the heatsink and the place behind it between the parallel port and the cpu. This area has the voltage regs and they seem to get really bad cooling. The only air normally blowing across them would be from the heatsink exhaust. Hot air on already hot components seems like a bad idea.

Overall I'm happy. So far so good.




Overall I'm happy, so far so good.

 

[StephenMSmith]

Here's why I keep discounting benchmarks in reviews vs. actual numbers from peeps in this thread.

1) As the Anand article shows, there are too many factors when comparing DDR vs DDR2 w/this particular board and DDR2 may be faster or may be *slower*, so it's impossible to know w/o being able to directly compare against someone else w/exact same specs.

2) http://www.imagesoftcorp.com/temp/SandraMem.gif.

Old System:
P4C @ 3.3ghz
DDR400 @ 220mhz

New System:
C2D @ 2.7ghz
same DDR400 but @ 225mhz

So I have like double the CPU horsepower and am running the memory 5mhz faster, yet I'm still 500 down in Sandra mem throughput??? This tell me that there is a price only we 7756Dual-VSTA owners pay for getting both DDR and DDR2 support, so we really only compare amongst ourselves.

 

[Willyboy]

Originally posted by: bl4ckfl4g
well I installed my 7900GS. It is crashing World of Warcraft occasionally it seems. Battlefield and supreme commander seemed fine and were huge improvements from my x1300 lol.

In Wow the whole system froze twice. I had to reboot. THen a few of othertimes Wow crashed which didn't happen very much before I switched vid cards. Only bios option I changed was Primary adaptor = PCI Express gfx

I had 6 or 7 World of warcrft crashes in like 4 hours which was pretty annoying.

Try this in bios
PCIE Downstream Pipeline [Auto] should be set to Disabled ..might help !

 

[BaseGrizzly]

Originally posted by: StephenMSmith
No problems w/my 29160 SCSI adapter but I don't have RAID enabled or even anything other than SCSI drives. Does it work fine w/o the SATA drives and/or RAID disabled?

Yes, everything works fine when the RAID utility option is disabled. I had been running it that way for at least 4 months now and I've experienced absolutely no problems. It's only when I enable the RAID utility that my SCSI card is not detected at all.

 

[Reckoner]

I'm thinking of throwing in an x1950xt in replacement of my current 6800GT. What can I expect on this board?

 

[bigsnyder]

Originally posted by: StephenMSmith
Here's why I keep discounting benchmarks in reviews vs. actual numbers from peeps in this thread.

1) As the Anand article shows, there are too many factors when comparing DDR vs DDR2 w/this particular board and DDR2 may be faster or may be *slower*, so it's impossible to know w/o being able to directly compare against someone else w/exact same specs.

2) http://www.imagesoftcorp.com/temp/SandraMem.gif.

Old System:
P4C @ 3.3ghz
DDR400 @ 220mhz

New System:
C2D @ 2.7ghz
same DDR400 but @ 225mhz

So I have like double the CPU horsepower and am running the memory 5mhz faster, yet I'm still 500 down in Sandra mem throughput??? This tell me that there is a price only we 7756Dual-VSTA owners pay for getting both DDR and DDR2 support, so we really only compare amongst ourselves.

What FSB are you running? This board certainly prefers a 1:1 memory ratio according to
the DDR vs DDR2 comparison linked a few posts ago. This is certainly the case with DDR2,
maybe DDR results are similiar?

C Snyder

 

[StephenMSmith]

Originally posted by: BaseGrizzly

Originally posted by: StephenMSmith
No problems w/my 29160 SCSI adapter but I don't have RAID enabled or even anything other than SCSI drives. Does it work fine w/o the SATA drives and/or RAID disabled?

Yes, everything works fine when the RAID utility option is disabled. I had been running it that way for at least 4 months now and I've experienced absolutely no problems. It's only when I enable the RAID utility that my SCSI card is not detected at all.

It must have something do w/the BIOS. This is the 1st board I've ever owned w/a BIOS that was actually aware of SCSI devices in any way. This BIOS recognizes the individual SCSI drives attached to my 29160 and will even let me pick which one to boot from.

Have you tried leaving RAID enabled in BIOS but physically disconnecting the SATA drives? That might indicate whether the issue in the RAID part of the BIOS or the drive recognition.

 

[StephenMSmith]

Originally posted by: bigsnyder

Originally posted by: StephenMSmith
Here's why I keep discounting benchmarks in reviews vs. actual numbers from peeps in this thread.

1) As the Anand article shows, there are too many factors when comparing DDR vs DDR2 w/this particular board and DDR2 may be faster or may be *slower*, so it's impossible to know w/o being able to directly compare against someone else w/exact same specs.

2) http://www.imagesoftcorp.com/temp/SandraMem.gif.

Old System:
P4C @ 3.3ghz
DDR400 @ 220mhz

New System:
C2D @ 2.7ghz
same DDR400 but @ 225mhz

So I have like double the CPU horsepower and am running the memory 5mhz faster, yet I'm still 500 down in Sandra mem throughput??? This tell me that there is a price only we 7756Dual-VSTA owners pay for getting both DDR and DDR2 support, so we really only compare amongst ourselves.

What FSB are you running? This board certainly prefers a 1:1 memory ratio according to
the DDR vs DDR2 comparison linked a few posts ago. This is certainly the case with DDR2, maybe DDR results are similiar?

C Snyder

300 FSB. But there is no 1:1 ratio for the DDR BIOS memory selections once you exceed 218mhz. Selecting DDR400 for RAM will give you a 1:1 ratio up until 218mhz, at which point it switches to 4:3:

At 200MHz FSB (quad-pumped 800MHz for an E4300), the motherboard will give the following memory speeds for its stated 'DDR' speeds when used with DDR memory...

'DDR400' = 1:1 = 200MHz = DDR400,
'DDR333' = 6:5 = 166.7MHz = DDR333,
'DDR266' = 3:2 = 133.3MHz = DDR266.

These dividers hold true until the we reach an FSB of 240MHz where a new set of dividers are invoked as shown below. Now, suppose that we take the FSB straight up to the level that most unmodified Dual-VSTA motherboards will reach. This seems to be around 290MHz. The dividers and memory speeds will then be as follows...

'DDR400' = 4:3 = 217.5MHz = DDR435,
'DDR333' = 8:5 = 181.25MHz = DDR362.5,
'DDR266' = 2:1 = 145MHz = DDR290.

 

[etherdude]

Regarding the RAID BIOS option and PCI "SCSI" cards,....

I installed my old Promise Fastrack TX2000 ATA133 Raid card with two Maxtor drives in Raid 0. As long as I use the SATA in non-RAID with my new WD740ADJD Raptor there is no issue. By mistake, when I did a BIOS upgrade, I forgot to change back to non-Raid. I found out that the ASRock BIOS reported that it coulld not load the "SCSI" card BIOS into the system since it did not have enough room. It appears that the BIOS extensions for RAID in the ASRock occupy the space that the adapter card BIOS wants to use. (Note that even though it is an ATA133 Raid card, the system sees the Fastrack as a SCSI add-in).

Also, I am finding that the SATA Raptor reads at the same performance (almost) as my dual Raid 0 Maxtor drives and writes at about twice the speed with better seek rates overaqll. That Raptor sure is noisy though....

Etherdude

ASRock 775Dual-VSTA, E4300 @266FSB (2.4GHz), 1GB Crucial Ballistix PC3200 (2-2-2-8, 1T), ATI AIW 8500, WD740ADFD, Dual Maxtor 6E040L0 Raid 0, CompUSA Firewire card with external WD MyBook 250GB, HP Lightscribe DVD-RAM, SAMSUNG DVD/CDRW, Lian-Li PC60 case with AeroCool Infinite Friontpanel.

 

[BaseGrizzly]

Originally posted by: etherdude
Regarding the RAID BIOS option and PCI "SCSI" cards,....

I installed my old Promise Fastrack TX2000 ATA133 Raid card with two Maxtor drives in Raid 0. As long as I use the SATA in non-RAID with my new WD740ADJD Raptor there is no issue. By mistake, when I did a BIOS upgrade, I forgot to change back to non-Raid. I found out that the ASRock BIOS reported that it coulld not load the "SCSI" card BIOS into the system since it did not have enough room. It appears that the BIOS extensions for RAID in the ASRock occupy the space that the adapter card BIOS wants to use. (Note that even though it is an ATA133 Raid card, the system sees the Fastrack as a SCSI add-in).

Also, I am finding that the SATA Raptor reads at the same performance (almost) as my dual Raid 0 Maxtor drives and writes at about twice the speed with better seek rates overaqll. That Raptor sure is noisy though....

Etherdude

ASRock 775Dual-VSTA, E4300 @266FSB (2.4GHz), 1GB Crucial Ballistix PC3200 (2-2-2-8, 1T), ATI AIW 8500, WD740ADFD, Dual Maxtor 6E040L0 Raid 0, CompUSA Firewire card with external WD MyBook 250GB, HP Lightscribe DVD-RAM, SAMSUNG DVD/CDRW, Lian-Li PC60 case with AeroCool Infinite Friontpanel.

Yup, you are 100% correct. I actually found this out by myself prior to your post. So the SCSI BootROM won't be loaded so long as the [RAID Utility] option in the CMOS (note: this is actually the onboard RAID BootROM) is enabled because the RAID BootROM has priority and Asrock didn't design enough memory space to load both. So I disabled the [RAID Utility] option and found out that Via has Windows drivers/utility for the onboard RAID. Now I can boot with SCSI and use the RAID in Windows.

Thanks for your help, Stephen and Etherdude.

Unfortunately I have a new problem with the Via VT-RAID drivers causing my Windows to hang during startup. I suspect it's a Via issue, however, so I'll keep investigating...

 

[pengo]

aussieburger,

I'm running a E6300 & 290FSB. This seems to be the ceiling regardless on what I do with voltages.

The ram is set to DDR-533 in BIOS (ram is Corsair VS DDR2-667).
RAM = 290Mhz (1:1), 4-3-3-9 2T
Sandra B/W Score: I get anywhere between 5460MB/s to 5690Mb/s

I found a CL of 4 is better than 3 with my RAM as far as stability is concerned.
When playing Company of Heroes I can't load games if its set to CL3 but is fine with CL4, nontheless I get close to the same performance of CL3 with the above timings.


OK, noticed people have used 1T command rate, so I gave that a shot and I'm now showing Memory B/W of 5800~Mb/s. Same timings and speeds as above.

 

[aussieburger]

so why such a difference in the Sandra B/W scores do u think Pengo since we have similar setups ??