Upgrading CPU/RAM/MOBO

[sawyen]

998Mhz? Are you telling me you're running 499Mhz HTT? I don't think even an AN8 Fatality or DFI has that sort of ceiling.. Did you get your numbers wrong? I'm guessing its just DDR499... in that case.. you're only running 248MHz HTT.. which is fairly modest for an A8V given you have a PC4000 (stop scaring ppl with overly huge numbers).

Like I said, rev 2 will have a working PCI/AGP lock and a revised BIOS.. I'm sure ASUS would somehow get the board working at higher HTT than 220MHz, but afaik, A8V rev 1 HTT overclocking abilities are bollocks..

Try pushing ur board at 9x280 or 8x290.. and see if you could pass SuperPi 1M or HEXUS Pifast without breaking AGP lock then post back.. 280Mhz HTT is considered a walk in the park for my AV8..

[Fatboy]

Either way, my mind is made up. Gonna go for the Abit offering, with a Thermalright XP-90C. The difference between that and the XP120 with be next to nothing, other than having a lot more room in my case!

[Fatboy]

All ordered!

Abit AV8 3RD Eye VIA K8T800 Pro (Socket 939) Motherboard (MB-053-AB)
Athlon 64 3500+ OEM (s939)
Corsair XMS3200 2GB (2x1024MB) DDR CAS2 PT
Thermalright XP-90C
Antec Smart Cool 92mm Thermally Controlled Fan

Plus a few other anti-vibration bits and pieces.

[sawyen]

As sweet as candy..

When you're done.. clock it as high as you can and see how well you do on SuperPi 1M and HEXUS Pifast... The best I could do was 10 x 280 (which was boiling hot.. 63C load even on my 3D cooler ultra at 4k rpm)..

[Fatboy]

I couldn't resist the 3500 over the 3200, it was only another £40 ....

Forgot to add, also added a Western Digital Raptor 10k into it all. Should be gooooood!

[Fatboy]

Running a few things this evening (without messing with settings or anything):

3DMark05 - 4779 points (Limited version through download)
SuperPi 1M - 50secs
3DMark04 - 2908 PCMarks (trial version) again.

Still, should give me a vague idea when I've got all the new kit in.

Specs are as in my sig, apart from the CPU which is running at 2.30GHz (coz it gets a bit warm)

[sawyen]

you should be seeing roughly 39ish on SuperPi 1M when you run your 3500+ on stock.. Abit sets its stock at 204Mhz HTT..

Up the HTT to 11 x 220 (2420Mhz), you should be seeing 36ish in SuperPi.. 3DMark will be highly dependent on your graphic card.. an X800XTPE should be seeing 5900ish.. My GT at 418/1150 runs 5300ish..

Considering you have an XP-90C, you should be able to do 2600 Mhz without any major problems (11 x 237 or 10x260 or 9x289) - depending how ur planning to overclock your RAM or just running on a divider.. unless you have a really really lousy manufactured CPU, sorry arthurleung.. Refer to my sig should you need some reference on Vcore and NB voltage etc..

[Fatboy]

Cheers for that Sawyen, got 70.04 secs for Hexus PiFast last night, although it could have been quicker, I still had all my antivirus and a few other bits running ini the background.

I'm not planning (at the moment) to overclock my RAM much, I'll keep you posted on how its all running.

Got the fan for the heatsink in the post this morning, not bad considering I ordered it at 2.30pm yesterday!! There should be a fair bit getting delivered today and tomorrow, hopefully I won't have to wait too long to get it all up and running.

[sawyen]

ouch... 70 sec...

[Fatboy]

Finally got the RAM and CPU yesterday, fitted it all no probs - but could I get it to load windows ......

...Eventually I found a setting in the BIOS to support usb mouse/keyboard in DOS mode, and that seemed to sort it. Loaded windows with the SATA driver (non RAID), and it booted into windows fine (or so it seemed).

The problem was that windows didn't recognise my older IDE hard-drive. I turned the system off, played with a couple of wires, and now it won't recognise my new SATA HDD.

Sawyen, seeing as we've a pretty similar setup, did you have any probs setting everything up?

It could just be a loose connection I missed, but seeing as I can't do anything whilst I am at work, I thought I'd see if anyone else has had a similar problem

It is my first contact with SATA, and I'm struggling at the mo - mind, it might just be sleep deprivation....

[sawyen]

hmn... i have a Samg 160 spinpoint on sata and a WD 120 IDE.. I only installed the SATA 3 days (stock delay) after I ran the system. Try setting up everything again using ONLY your IDE.. yes, I'm afraid you might need to do a fresh install.. Mine seems to work just fine.. When you've got the system up and running using your old IDE, install all of VIA's RAID, Audio and etc drivers.. then only shove that SATA in.. at least thats what I did...

Did you check the 4 pin molex on ur IDE? your IDE port connections maybe? Try to run your HDD on IDE1 and route your optical drives to IDE2..

[Fatboy]

I've got a sneaking feeling that I put the wrong IDE HDD back in, one of them was blank, the other still has XP and everything else loaded, going to pop it back in.

It's wierd though that I managed to load windows onto the SATA drive, and now it doesn't even recognise it as being there in the CMOS setup. I don't really want to have windows back on the IDE drives - it's a bit of a waste having a 10k raptor sat there doing sweet f.a.

Going to strip it down this evening and start from scratch, no additional cards or anything. Hopefully I'll get to the bottom of it.....

[sawyen]

you could load the fail-safe setup in your BIOS to bring up the last working state... Once I went too much on the overclock, and my SATA failed to post.. loaded the fail-safe mode.. voila.. me spinpoint's back in business..

[Fatboy]

Sadly I tried that too - might reset CMOS with the jumper and go from there.

Googling 3rd Eye SATA problem is interesting though, loads of SATA hard drives doing a Houdini and failing to show - going to look at potential fixes for it, only problem is going to be transferring them onto the computer, hopefully I won't have to build it with and IDE at the core, run some updates and then reinstall using SATA.

I'll keep you posted.

[sawyen]

well, if you are going to overclock, its best to leave an IDE as boot as they are least effected when AGP lock breaks. SATA would just go kabush!

[Fatboy]

Maybe, I'm going to look at all the options later, given that things aren't going too well at the moment.