Hey all,
Just got the new system up, and have noticed some strange things. The system is as in sig.
1) First off, in the bios the "CPU Bus Clock(Mhz)" is set to 200 and the "DDR Clock(Mhz)" set to 400. Shouldn't a 800fsb cpu be 400 bus clock and then 800 ddr clock ?
Also there is abit in this section of the bios called Performance Mode, which is set to "slow" ... LoL this is very weird, you'd expect it to be set at High or Medium or somthing, the options in the perfromance mode section are: Slow, Fast, Turbo & Ultra Turbo, and it's set on slow, lol. This can't be right can it ?
2) Also the "DRAM Timing Settings" section is set up as follows
-------------------------------
Configure DRAM Timing by SPD = ENABLED
DRAM Cas# Latency 2 Clocks
DRAM Ras# Precharge 4 Clocks
DRAM Ras# to Cas# Delay 4 Clocks
DRAM Precharge Delay 6 Clocks
DRAM Burst Length 8
DRAM Integrity Mode = DISABLED
-------------------------------
Are these setting geting the most out of the Corasir 3200 (400mz) ram, actuatly I can't find any indication of what seed the ram is operating at anyway, so actuatly what im asking is are these timings what you'd expect to see for ram at 400Mhz in dual channel setup ??
3) The 2x80gb sata drives in sig are setup in raid at 0, but there isn't any mention of any 80gb drives or any raid arry's anywhere in the bios, lol. In fact the only time raid is even mentioned in the bios is in one line I think called Onboard Promise IDE, which is set to "As Raid" but this dosen't make any sense, as the drives are sata not ide which is a completly different interface. lol
Also in Device Manager in windows, it reads the drives as "Promise 2+0 Stripe/RAID0 SCSI Disk Drive" this is also off, as sata and SCSI drive's are different types of drives.
4) Lastly, there is another line in the bios called "APG Aperture Size" which is set to 64mb. Shouldn't this be 256mb as eg graphics card has 256mb onbaord, or is this aperture size thing nothing to do with the graphics card ?
Cheers for all help, Dave![]()


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RAM timings set to SPD tends to be the safest setting and 2-4-4-6 isn't bad at all, esp on P4 which benefits less. Lower is obviously faster as there's less waiting. If you do tighten timings or o/c your RAM you need to ensure you are perfectly stable. IIRC Intel 800FSB mobos can behave a bit freaky (as in slower) when certain timings are used, benchmark to check the gains match up. I'd leave DRAM integrity mode disabled, it may be for ECC RAM but basically home users really have no need for it (not mission critical) and it will slow you down a bit too.
It's normal for SATA to be considered as SCSI, they are more SCSI like than the std ATA (PATA). AFAIK SATA is still IDE, just a more updated version than PATA with it's own channel and Serial instead of Parrallel. SATA is still early, I doubt many drivers, BIOS' and Windows itself will get it listed 'right'.
AGP Aperture Size is the MAXIMUM amount of system RAM which can be used by the gfx card when it runs out of its own gfx RAM. Even with 128MB that's very rare (read 3Dmark03 with 4xAA+8xAF and even then only on Nature), 256MB gfx RAM definitely nullifies it but some people believe it has hidden properties. Since the system RAM will only be utilised when the gfx card runs out there's no harm setting to anything up to your total amount of system RAM. One thing to note is that the Aperture Size is wasteful, 128MB Aperture using the maximum 128MB of system RAM only gives the gfx card an extra 58MB due to tables, virtual addressing etc. Those with 64MB cards really want to set it to 256MB, for cards with 128MB and certainly up it's virtually pointless at the mo.
The basic principles are the same but the internal way in which the Athlon and P4 go abot things is different just as we see in the Rad8500-9200 vs GF3/4TI and Rad9500-9800 vs GF-FX. The products are different in their design, internal structure and implimentation. We see the P4 requiring much higher FSB and memory bandwidth to perform well, not so for the Athlon. Just as we see the GF-FX generally require higher clocks, much higher memory bandwidth, optimised code etc. It's been proven on many occasions that the Athlon really benefits quite significantly from lower RAM latency while the P4 though still benefits shows smaller gains. Why should memory timings have anything to do with pipelines or instruction sets? I'm talking pure realworld perf which is what counts, not paper specs and theory. I hope that addresses your point.
What I'm trying to say TiG is that because the P4 and Athlon work in very different ways they respond differently to different optimisations such as higher FSB, memory bandwidth (eg Dual Channel), RAM timings etc. What is important is real world perf, we can talk internal designs etc until the cows come home but bottom line is that 2-2-2-5 vs 2.5-3-3-7 shows roughly 2-3% over all perf boost on P4 and 3-5% perf on AthlonXP. The reason is because they go about the same job in different ways. They conform to the same basic stds much like Rad8500-9200 and GF3/4TI conform to DX8 (likewise Rad9500-9800 and GF-FX with DX9) but they go about things very differently internally. Hence GF-FX shows big gains from extra memory bandwidth while the Radeon design doesn't need or use it, gains will be there but they will be far smaller.
That's why I bought gfx cards in to the discussion, they have many parrallels with P4 vs AthlonXP in terms of conforming to a given std and producing the same output form the same input but in different ways. Since it's a small side point anyway I don't see what good it really does to dig so deep, maybe start your own thread TiG?
