*** Official MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (nForce4 Ultra chipset) Thread ***

[DEredita]

Which ram should I go with:

Crucial Ballistix
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDe...-146-546&catalog=23&manufactory=BROWSE

**** or ********

Kingston HyperX (Low Latency)
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-144-161&depa=1


I narrowed it down to these two. Which would you take?

- Mike

 

[BrokenVisage]

Since its been brought up, I would like to know if the CM Centurian 5's PSU will work with this board, the specs are:

350W Power Supply Connectors
- One 20pin ATX Main Power
- One 4pin P4 Auxiliary Power
- Two SATA Power
- Two 4pin Fan Only Molex
- Four 4pin Molex
- Two 4pin Floppy

Does this mean I can plug the one 4-pin AUX plug into the empty 4 holes?

 

[Elfear]

I love my Ballisitix. It runs tight timings at a low fsb and I've gotten mine up to 280MHz at 3-3-3-10 timings.

 

[Callesen]

Many people are having problem with reboot's when using the nVidia firewall (latest drivers - 6.39)

My system will reboot if I download x MB - If I disable the firewall I can run 25/7 for a week without issues.

Conclution - nVidia's firewall (in it's current state) is a POS !

 

[my sons father]

I have the platinum model, and the chipsets have funny memory requirements. They don't like double sided DDR's, and will kick the speed down if you use them. I doubt they like the different speeds, too. I transfered 1 pair of 256 meg Geils and 1 pair of 512 Geils from a rock solid Asus pentium motherboard, and the MSI kept locking up and giving wrong memory counts, and reduced buss speed. When I stopped screaming long enough to read the manual, I saw that part about double sided and nearly cried. I just bought another set of 512's on Ebay and I'm expecting them in a couple of days! So now ALL the memory has to go out on Ebay and get replaced. I bought a pair of cheap Crucial's from Newegg (2x64 single sided) and if they work OK, I'll buy another set when my old ones sell.
This is a very funny board, as you need to put 1 module in the green and 1 in the purple to get dual channel. I tried mixing mine up as best I could to use them all, but it just wouldn't work.

 

[lordhawk]

Originally posted by: promtbr
After vewing this thread and others that led me to get this board, I thought I'd chime in w/ my build results.

Total AMD noob and this is only my 3rd PC I built. I did OC ("by the book") by isolating
the CPU, memory and Board's FSB limits.

MSI K8Neo4 SLI
AMD Winchester 3500 (don't know week) 2400mhz (x10) HTT (x4)
Zalman 7700 fan (BARELY able to get ram in DIMM 1&2!)
2 x 512mb Corsair 3200XLM @ 2.5-3-3-6 1T
BFG 6800gt (one for now)
Silverstone Temjin T206 (upside down mobo w/ windtunnel)
OCZ Powerstream 520
Plextor 716sa SATA dvd/r
2x 120gb WD Caviars on RAID 0

<snip>

I then tried OC ing the CPU and worked up to 2500 and each time it would post OK but would fail prime. I upped the voltages but after figuring the slightly tricky two settings in the BIOS , the max I could see on CORE CENTER and CPU-Z was 1.55 volts.
I raised the Chip voltage too to 1.6 and 2500mhz kept failing prime. I read about Prime being sometimes a poor stability tester on AMD chips, I ran 3dMark03 and it failed half way. I had to drop the CPU clock back to 2400mhz to gain stability. I must have a poor OCing chip and am somewhat dissapointed there.

Well that's somewhere close to my first results. Try v1.21beta BIOS. It allows you higher voltages (up to 1.7V) which should help get your chip up to 2500Mhz

Originally posted by: promtbr
The Corsair had 2-2-2-5 lat ratings, but when testing memory, it HAD to run @ 2.5-3-3-6
or it wouldn't even post and I had to clear CMOS about 3 times. once I got the timings up though, I could run 280 w/ that ram!

Overall I'm a happy camper. Will probably drop a next gen CPU in when they get affordable and possibly a second 6800gt and go SLI, but w/ a 11960 3dmark03 score, it killed my previous DELL p4 and its 9800pro @ 5600.

Try using RAM dividers (180Mhz) to lower the memory speed and achieve tighter timings. AMD CPUs like low latency rather than faster RAMS.

So jealous of your 3dmark score. My MSI 6800GT was a dud (12 pipelines rather than 16; you may have come across this story somewhere), distro's getting it replaced in 2 weeks.

 

[darkeyed]

Ok here is what I have found so far.

I have played with my system for a while now and have had mixed results.

I went through the isolation of FSB,CPU,Mem and my board fails to post when ever the fsb is higher then 235 htt 4x. When the fsb is between 220-235 it will post sometimes if I keep resetting the machine. It always hangs at the CPU information stage.

So I decided to overclock in windows and this seems interesting.

OK my BIOS settings are

FSB=219
HTT=4X
Mem = 180 (fsb X .9) Mem Volts at 2.85 (wish I could get more)
Mem timings at 2.5-2-3-8 1T
CPU at 10X Volts at +5%

At these settings the machine boots fine everytime.

Overclock in windows:
Now leaving everything alone but fsb I can push the fsb all the way to 235 with out relaxing my memory settings at all. I need to do some further testing at different memory settings but in this state the machine went 2 hours running prime 95 no problems.

I dont understand why the machine will not boot higher then 220.

Any ideas?

 

[xjoe]

Originally posted by: darkeyed
Ok here is what I have found so far.

I have played with my system for a while now and have had mixed results.

I went through the isolation of FSB,CPU,Mem and my board fails to post when ever the fsb is higher then 235 htt 4x. When the fsb is between 220-235 it will post sometimes if I keep resetting the machine. It always hangs at the CPU information stage.

So I decided to overclock in windows and this seems interesting.

OK my BIOS settings are

FSB=219
HTT=4X
Mem = 180 (fsb X .9) Mem Volts at 2.85 (wish I could get more)
Mem timings at 2.5-2-3-8 1T
CPU at 10X Volts at +5%

At these settings the machine boots fine everytime.

Overclock in windows:
Now leaving everything alone but fsb I can push the fsb all the way to 235 with out relaxing my memory settings at all. I need to do some further testing at different memory settings but in this state the machine went 2 hours running prime 95 no problems.

I dont understand why the machine will not boot higher then 220.

Any ideas?

So you have 2 GB total of ram? if so, it was my understanding that it is harder to oc ram of chips larger than 512, though i could be talking out of my ass. My setup is identical to you, and with my ocz el platinum rev2 (pc3200) i can get a fsb of 271 1:1 1T with 2.5-3-3-10 timings. If it's at all possible (assuming you DO have 2 gb ram) try and borrow some sticks of something else to see if thats what is holding you back, because my machine runs flawless at 271, hell it even ran at 281 but for some odd reason it wont boot at 281 now.

hth, goodluck

 

[darkeyed]

No I only have 1gig Total.

What I dont get is that I can get it to run when I overclock in windows. So I know the ram can handle over where it fail to post. It will fail to post even if I have a 166 mem divider setup. So the memory is well under 200mhz. Although I have found that just slowing things way down must somtimes create combinations that dont seem to work well.

I will continue to play with it but I know others have had simular problems. Was wondering if anyone solved it.

 

[rhwimmers]

anyone...please - 2 capture cards with this chipset?

 

[imported_Tungsten]

Having the same problem as darkeyed.

 

[Painman]

Tungsten and Darkeyed - have you tried anything in the 250+ range yet? I've seen reports of motherboards in the past that had "blind spots".

 

[Splice33]

I'm having similar problems. I have the HTT set to 4x, FSB set to 250, and my multiplier at max (9x)

Everything is stable, primes for a day, memtest ok etc.

However if I try to reduce the HTTx to 3, or go over 250 the system won't post. I don't really want to go over 250 at 4x.
My RAM is rated to work "normally" at 275MHz. So I'm feeling pretty disapointed at the moment with this board.

Of course when I got it out of the box and set it up I was delighted, got straight to overclocking and had it over the 275 mark. It would prime fine,
but then I tried to reboot..... and no post. The only way to get it back up was to reset the cmos and start again. Next I had massive data corruption on my drive, and windows XP wouldn't boot, so I learned this time. I put eveything back to stock and freshly installed XP, and made a ghost image. ;-)

Now I presume the next bios release will sort out alot of the bugs people have been noticing. Anyone been on to MSI, or know when one is due?

Next, Does anyone actually know the story with regards PCI / SATA Locks? There are alot of posts about this, but so far it seams to be mainly speculation about this board. I did change my SATA drive to port 3. And I also suspect that I only really had problems with my SATA when I was using a CPU multiplier with a .5 in it. ie 6.5 x 275. When I was looking at things with cpuz, my memory wasn't actually running at the same speed as my bus. My bus was set to 275. but my RAM was running at 255 (cpu speed / 7) even though it was set to full speed. Maybe this is obvious, I don't know, and maybe it affects the SATA bus speeds in the same way!!. my last system was /is a semperon with the multiplier locked. I could only vary the fsb. So I'm a noob to modifing the multiplier.

 

[Egger]

Hello all, first post here...

I've had my rig for about a week, here's the specs:

winchester 3000+ dont know the week
neo4 platinum (non sli)
ram: a-data vitesta 566, 2x512 sticks
2 seagate 7200.7 IDE drives, 200gb each, no raid (need the space unfortunately)
palit 6600gt vid card
tagan 480w PSU
Thermaltake BigWater water cooling system.

here's what i've learned:

For some inconcievable and obtruse reason, never put a single memory stick into a purple slot. doesnt work. when using more than one, put one in the green first, then the purple (my d-bracket shows ram trouble otherwise). interestingly, the ram slots are somewhat loose on mine, so if you are having ram issues with sticks that you know to work, try fiddling with them in the sockets, pushing them around a bit for full contact (my friend tends to wipe his with a lint-free cloth then lick them, and it works on his athlon xp). having good airflow over the ram slots can increase their performance somewhat, i'll explain later.

The power regulators on the non-sli versions dont seem to come with heatsinks, i've heard getting some would be a good idea but i havent, and no problems so far.

Regarding the pci lock thing (cant comment on sata, dont have any), i couldnt find it anywhere in the bios.

Now the fun part, OCing:

Originally, I had no case fans at all, and the radiator for the TT was kinda propped against the wall with a bookend to prevent it from falling over. here's what i got:

283x9, ram 1:1 1T 2.5 3 3 8 HT 3x

this worked fine for a few hours then problems would force a reboot, which wouldn't even post on occasion. a quick feel on the rams revealed the problem. i'm lucky they didnt melt i guess.

upon acquiring a single case fan and lodging it between the "in" water pipe for the cpu block and the IDE cable running to the DVDRW, the settings above work fine for days.

Wanting to push the limits, I fiddled around all the way up to 295 fsb. rams at 3 4 4 9 1T 1:1, and everything is just dandy for about 10 hours (HTT 3x). mind, I had to increase the cpu voltage to 1.5 and the ram to 2.75, with the "over VID" option at +5.5 and it seems everything works fine. here's where i'm stuck.

upon trying 256 fsb, i get to windows loading screen and it reboots. anything above 295 wont boot, no matter what latencies or ratios I use. i'm pretty sure it's not the cpu because its highest recorded temp is 38. voltages dont help either. at 300mhz i get a post screen followed by corrupt windows. it wont get into windows at 296 and above, and data corruption begins at 297. I'm hoping to try a pair of a-data vitesta 600's some time soon to see if it's the ram that's holding me back but i doubt it.

here's more stuff i learned:

if overclocking, cpu center spread should be disabled.

manually setting ram timings, then changing the thingy back to auto leaves your settings the way you set them in the bios but rebooting fixes it back to auto settings.

only the yellow pci-e slots are UV reflective, the white and orange arent (irrelevant i know, but they look nice dont they).

so, my question is, how do we get to the "stable" 350+ fsb's that testers are reporting?

 

[darkeyed]

Actually no I havent tried going up that high. I have alot more testing I need to do. I am also uncertain about the SATA lock issue. Ports 1-4 are all part of nvidia chip but you cant boot from 5-8. I dont think that is my problem because others have gone very high with simular hard drives as mine.

I am beginning to think I have a weaker CPU chip. I need to find my maximum memory speed though before I decide that is the cause. Maybe somehow when the machine is overclocked in windows while the CPU is running it has a higher limit. But I had problems with a 8x mult and fsb speeds of over 220 too.

Problem is I need a whole day to do nothing but testing and experimentation.

 

[Splice33]

Interesting thing:
I set my HTT multi, to 2x in the bios and I was able to boot sooooo...

I use the clockgen program just to see what fsb I could get to. I set the cpu muli in the bios to 6, and the fsb to 300, I set my ram to half, just to elimate it, I managed to get the fsb to 370, when I went for 380, it hung. So it does get there ;-) Oh, I droped the mulit to 4 to in clockgen, was more interested in what the board would let me do....

I tried different combos and it would hang at anything over 250. I really don't like this instability. Will just have to hang on till the bios update. I supposes you can't really expext too much form a 1.0 verion bios.

 

[Elfear]

I'm finding the board to be less than stable also. I tried using Zebo's quick and dirty ocing guide to get a feel for the limits of my ram, mobo, and cpu. The board will post into Windows at a 360Mhz fsb but, upon rebooting the system, the screen shuts off. I've had it Prime stable for 14hrs (I stopped the test) and it'll pass Memtest 20+ times at the following settings:

288x9 9/10 divider, ram@259MHz 3-3-3-10
Vcore= startup +9.9% (1.50-1.52V according to Speedfan)
Vdimm= 2.70
North Bridge= 1.50V
HTTx3
CPU temps= 29C@idle and 37C@load

It seems completely stable at running Prime95 and Memtest but when I try surfing the net or messing around with files or programs on the desktop than I get random bsods. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the high fsb as I get the same thing even when I lower the multiplier and keep the same fsb.

It's really mind-boggling to me as I've read great reviews about it and I've never seen ocing probs like this before. Usually if I've pushed the cpu too far it'll just freeze on me and it's never stable in Prime95. I've had these problems with both the 1.1 and 1.31 bioses. My sata drives are on ports 3&4.

I hope MSI can get their stuff together and fix these problems as I really like the board.

 

[darkeyed]

What seems weird is things dont seem consistant. I will try lowering my htt mult and see what I can do. And I am not sure why you can overclock in windows at a much high level then hat you can boot into. Makes finding a sweet spot really hard.

 

[Roper]

Hi All,

1st post...

After a 7 year dry spell of no new computer for myself (exclusively) I decided to go all out and get the fanciest motherboard I could find. I was wondering:

1) I read somewhere that the nForce4 chipset came with an integrated hardware firewall. But since I didn't see any mention of this in the manual I guess MSI left it out. Is that right? I'd feel really dumb if I found out years down the line I had a feature I never used!

2) What are people's experiences using the microphone jack? I have an old, cheap, unpowered mike that works OK with my old computer. But recordings made on the K8N in MS "Sound Recorder" are so faint you can't really hear them. I've gone into the Creative Mixer and maxed the mic recording levels, but it dosn't do much. I've also toggled the "do not monitor" option, but that dosn't help either (does anyone know what this does, BTW?)

 

[xjoe]

where are you getting the beta bios from? is 1.31 the latest? i was under the impression that 1.1 was the only release from MSI, correct me if im wrong.

Thanks

 

[Mari0Br0s]

For those who have some stability problem when overclocked, I've made some test. Here's my result. The K8N Neo4 should prove to be an overclocker?s delight. Using a 1:1 ratio with memory, I was able to go all the way up to 270MHz using Corsair?s 4400C25 modules- definitely very impressive. Whats even more impressive is that setting the memory to DDR333, I was able to achieve FSB speeds of an incredible 370MHz.

 

[feverish]

Hello,
My question is this.
From what I gather the TWINX1024-3200XLPRO is Double side ram as opposed to single side. I do not know what that means but I think I am correct on this. In my K8N Neo4 motherboard manual, it states that the "Recommended Memory Combination" being Green(1st slot), Purple(2nd), Green(3rd), Purple(4th). I will just list the combos they say. Going from 1st slot through 4th and S=Single, D=Double
S,-,-,- DDR400
-,-,S,- DDR400
D,-,-,- DDR400
-,-,D,- DDR400
S,-,D,- DDR400
D,-,D,- DDR333
S,S,-,- DDR400
-,-,S,S DDR400
D,D,-,- DDR400
-,-,D,D DDR400
S,S,S,S DDR400
D,D,D,D DDR333
I already put most of my machine together and have the TWINX1024-3200XLPRO ram in when I saw this. The only problem is that I am running D,D,D,D DDR400. While sitting in the bios last night I noticed that the modules on DIMM 3 and DIMM 4 were being worked pretty hard according to the leds on top and DIMM 1 and DIMM 2 were not having any activity. Someone please explain to me what all this means and where I need to go from here. I will also add that I have booted up into the bios and all 2 gigs of ram are showing up. I really just want to know what will happen if I use it this way. Do they even make 512 single sided ddr dual channel ram?
Thanks,
David

 

[darkeyed]

Originally posted by: Mari0Br0s
For those who have some stability problem when overclocked, I've made some test. Here's my result. The K8N Neo4 should prove to be an overclocker?s delight. Using a 1:1 ratio with memory, I was able to go all the way up to 270MHz using Corsair?s 4400C25 modules- definitely very impressive. Whats even more impressive is that setting the memory to DDR333, I was able to achieve FSB speeds of an incredible 370MHz.

Hey Phil,
Thats great although from the reading I have been doing some people are able to get high clock rates and some are not. The question is what are the differences. What is the rest of your system?

You are not the only one to get good results and there are many of us who have had some problems.

 

[feverish]

Has anyone found out if the dual channel memory should be installed in the first green slot then the second in the first purple slot?

 

[Elfear]

Originally posted by: feverish
Has anyone found out if the dual channel memory should be installed in the first green slot then the second in the first purple slot?

Yup, either that or one in the last green and one in the last purple.