Any mobo for Core2Duo with AGP & DDR"1"?

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Hardtailed
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:52 am

Any mobo for Core2Duo with AGP & DDR"1"?

Post by Hardtailed » Sun May 06, 2007 10:58 am

I love my system, it's quiet, stable and all... But I'm mixing a full length album right now (Cakewalk Sonar) and I would like a bit more horsepower for running all those plugins without having to resort to freezing tracks constantly.

(See sig for current specs)

I'd love to put an E6600 in there, but Asus didn't not provide a Bios update for my board (865P chipset, can technically support a Core2). I can't even get a Pentium D.
But all the mobos I see for Core2 are PCI-E and DDR2, which means a new GPU and new memory sticks... this makes the upgrade quite costly as well as generating unnecessary waste.

Are there any mobo available to run a E6### (or E4### at worse) with regular DDR and AGP 8X?
Something at least as good as my Asus.

nzimmers
Posts: 271
Joined: Mon Dec 04, 2006 6:13 pm

Post by nzimmers » Sun May 06, 2007 11:03 am

the Asrock dual-vsta is what you are looking for, supports ddr or ddr2 and also has AGP + PCIE

pretty cheap too

the_bruce_dickinson
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Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2007 9:46 am

Post by the_bruce_dickinson » Sun May 06, 2007 11:10 am

ASRock makes the 4CoreDual-VSTA, which has replaced the 775Dual-VSTA. They support AGP and PCI-E, DDR1 and DDR2 (not simultaneously). The 4CoreDual even handles quad-cores.

Both boards are much-loved, esp. for the value. There's lots of info out there on them.

Hardtailed
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:52 am

Post by Hardtailed » Sun May 06, 2007 11:44 am

the_bruce_dickinson wrote:ASRock makes the 4CoreDual-VSTA, which has replaced the 775Dual-VSTA. They support AGP and PCI-E, DDR1 and DDR2 (not simultaneously). The 4CoreDual even handles quad-cores.

Both boards are much-loved, esp. for the value. There's lots of info out there on them.
Yes yes yes!!! THat is exactly what I am looking for!
I didn't mention Quad Core cause that seemed too far fetched... Cool :)

I see also for 20$ less there's the P4 S775 ASROCK 775I65G 865G AGP AVL which loses the PCI-E and DDR2 (which doesn't support PC6400 on the 4CoreDual anyway) but uses the same chipset I currently use (Intel 865). It is a micro-ATX though, which would be crowded with my wifi and 1395 adapters (+ the AGP card of course)

Tamas
Posts: 117
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Location: Budapest, Hungary

Re: Any mobo for Core2Duo with AGP & DDR"1"?

Post by Tamas » Sun May 06, 2007 8:21 pm

Hardtailed wrote:I love my system, it's quiet, stable and all... But I'm mixing a full length album right now (Cakewalk Sonar) and I would like a bit more horsepower for running all those plugins without having to resort to freezing tracks constantly.

(See sig for current specs)

I'd love to put an E6600 in there, but Asus didn't not provide a Bios update for my board (865P chipset, can technically support a Core2). I can't even get a Pentium D.
But all the mobos I see for Core2 are PCI-E and DDR2, which means a new GPU and new memory sticks... this makes the upgrade quite costly as well as generating unnecessary waste.

Are there any mobo available to run a E6### (or E4### at worse) with regular DDR and AGP 8X?
Something at least as good as my Asus.
I've just written about Asrock ConRoe865PE here in the last post:
viewtopic.php?t=29036&start=90 If you have any questions I'll try to answer. :)

Hardtailed
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:52 am

Re: Any mobo for Core2Duo with AGP & DDR"1"?

Post by Hardtailed » Mon May 07, 2007 8:15 am

Tamas wrote:
Hardtailed wrote:I love my system, it's quiet, stable and all... But I'm mixing a full length album right now (Cakewalk Sonar) and I would like a bit more horsepower for running all those plugins without having to resort to freezing tracks constantly.

(See sig for current specs)

I'd love to put an E6600 in there, but Asus didn't not provide a Bios update for my board (865P chipset, can technically support a Core2). I can't even get a Pentium D.
But all the mobos I see for Core2 are PCI-E and DDR2, which means a new GPU and new memory sticks... this makes the upgrade quite costly as well as generating unnecessary waste.

Are there any mobo available to run a E6### (or E4### at worse) with regular DDR and AGP 8X?
Something at least as good as my Asus.
I've just written about Asrock ConRoe865PE here in the last post:
viewtopic.php?t=29036&start=90 If you have any questions I'll try to answer. :)
Well now the question is mostly: which one is best for me. I don't care about being able to add PCI-E and DDR2 later one, the 4CoreDual is limited to DDR2-667 (I'd rather have 800) and the PCI-E is 4X only.
I just want to strap on a Core2 until I can afford a completely new machine.

However, the 4CoreDual does support RAID on the SATA ports... I would like to set up a raid pair for my media drive. I'm assuming this is a hardware based RAID controller.

But the question would be: which one could get the most out of an E4300???

JazzJackRabbit
Posts: 1386
Joined: Fri Jun 18, 2004 6:53 pm

Post by JazzJackRabbit » Mon May 07, 2007 10:23 am

There aren't any good options for Core2Duo motherboard with AGP and DDR support. Most of those options are based on via chipsets (I have one of those). Via chipsets often have trouble with AGP videocards when gaming (normal working stuff is fine) and they also cannot overclock. There are also motherboards with agp slot on intel chipsets as mentioned in the thread, but those are mainly based on G chipsets with integrated video which also rules out overclocking. Asrock board in Tamas post only supports 1066 FSB via overclocking. So if you want a C2D CPU with 1066 FSB you are already overcloking your rig.

What I'm saying is, unless you are really short on money I would suggest you buy another motherboard with PCIe and DDR2. DDR2 memory prices are dirt cheap now, you can buy 2Gb of GSkill DDR2-800 memory right now for about $100 at newegg. Or you can buy 2GB of premium Ballistix DDR2-1000 for about $120 after mail in rebate. A budget passive 7600 PCIe card will cost you less than $100. So your additional expenses by going PCIe/DDR2 way are going to be less than $200, $160 if you can get a good price on videocard. That will get you better rig that you can upgrade easier in the future and overclock if you want to. Going with AGP/DDR just because you can save $160-200 is not worth it. If you can sell your old stuff (motherboard/CPU/Memory/Video) which should fetch at least $200-250 you can come out even.

Hardtailed
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:52 am

Post by Hardtailed » Mon May 07, 2007 3:41 pm

JazzJackRabbit wrote:There aren't any good options for Core2Duo motherboard with AGP and DDR support. Most of those options are based on via chipsets (I have one of those). Via chipsets often have trouble with AGP videocards when gaming (normal working stuff is fine) and they also cannot overclock. There are also motherboards with agp slot on intel chipsets as mentioned in the thread, but those are mainly based on G chipsets with integrated video which also rules out overclocking. Asrock board in Tamas post only supports 1066 FSB via overclocking. So if you want a C2D CPU with 1066 FSB you are already overcloking your rig.
Actually, I've never oc'ed a system in my entire life. I mainly use my computer for digital audio multitracking and stability is what really matters.

If I get the 4CoreDual, I'd probably just get an E4300 which is as you know has a 800MHz FSB.
Now the question is whether this would be an improvement over my 630 P4 that would be worth the added cost (and the "downgrading" from an Asus/Intel mobo). Since what I do uses a lot of parallel processes, I guess so...

The plan is to do that now, then later on when my divorce is settled and I have cash, I will build a Core2Quad system and relegate the Asrock/E4300 to my mobile rig (tracking doesn't use much CPU power, it's the plugins when mixing that do)

I wish Asus would provide a Bios update to run an E4### on my board...

Tamas
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Joined: Fri Dec 17, 2004 11:53 pm
Location: Budapest, Hungary

Re: Any mobo for Core2Duo with AGP & DDR"1"?

Post by Tamas » Mon May 07, 2007 10:14 pm

Hardtailed wrote:
Tamas wrote:
Hardtailed wrote:I love my system, it's quiet, stable and all... But I'm mixing a full length album right now (Cakewalk Sonar) and I would like a bit more horsepower for running all those plugins without having to resort to freezing tracks constantly.

(See sig for current specs)

I'd love to put an E6600 in there, but Asus didn't not provide a Bios update for my board (865P chipset, can technically support a Core2). I can't even get a Pentium D.
But all the mobos I see for Core2 are PCI-E and DDR2, which means a new GPU and new memory sticks... this makes the upgrade quite costly as well as generating unnecessary waste.

Are there any mobo available to run a E6### (or E4### at worse) with regular DDR and AGP 8X?
Something at least as good as my Asus.
I've just written about Asrock ConRoe865PE here in the last post:
viewtopic.php?t=29036&start=90 If you have any questions I'll try to answer. :)
Well now the question is mostly: which one is best for me. I don't care about being able to add PCI-E and DDR2 later one, the 4CoreDual is limited to DDR2-667 (I'd rather have 800) and the PCI-E is 4X only.
I just want to strap on a Core2 until I can afford a completely new machine.

However, the 4CoreDual does support RAID on the SATA ports... I would like to set up a raid pair for my media drive. I'm assuming this is a hardware based RAID controller.

But the question would be: which one could get the most out of an E4300???
About raid: What is your target with raid? Speed or reliability? The ConRoe Intel 865PE motherboard not supports raid but anyway I don't like these kind of integrated raid controllers, serious raid controllers starts with battery backup against loss of power and way safer operation.
Speed: In a home enviroment maybe a fast sound/video editing hard drive like WD Raptor 10000RPM 36/72GB is a better choice than raid 0.

Motherboard: This mobo has an intel chipset and runs absolutely stable. E4300/E4400 is a good choice because it's cheap / fast, and if you need extra power you just have to set 1066FSB option. :)
If you just need some extra power for your current AGP/DDR1 system it's a good choice for 1-2 year. This mobo costs only 55$ and later you can use the Core 2 E4300/4400 processor in your next configuration.

If money is important and you don't want to buy PCI-E card and DDR2 sticks this is a good cheap and fast solution.

Hardtailed
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:52 am

Re: Any mobo for Core2Duo with AGP & DDR"1"?

Post by Hardtailed » Tue May 08, 2007 4:57 am

Tamas wrote:About raid: What is your target with raid? Speed or reliability? The ConRoe Intel 865PE motherboard not supports raid but anyway I don't like these kind of integrated raid controllers, serious raid controllers starts with battery backup against loss of power and way safer operation.
Speed: In a home enviroment maybe a fast sound/video editing hard drive like WD Raptor 10000RPM 36/72GB is a better choice than raid 0.
My target with raid is to have two copies of everything I record at all times.
When I'm tracking a band, each day of work might take 3-4 DVDs to backup, this takes a long time and doesn't prevent from HD failure WHILE recording.

From what I understand, RAID (sorry, don't know whether it's 0 or 1) will duplicate everything on two drives. If one fails, I can still retrieve the data from the other one.
And when it comes time to read from those drives, supposedly RAID can split the load on the two drives (since everything is duplicated) to increase throughput.

Note that right now I'm using a simple WD 250Gb PATA drive and the performance is enough for my needs. I'm mostly concerned about HD failures and data loss.

When you say "set the FSB1066 option", are you referring to the "pad mod" that turns an E4300 into a pseudo E6600 (with half the cache), or is it possible to force the mobo into FSB1066 operation?

Tamas
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Location: Budapest, Hungary

Re: Any mobo for Core2Duo with AGP & DDR"1"?

Post by Tamas » Tue May 08, 2007 5:27 am

Hardtailed wrote:
Tamas wrote:About raid: What is your target with raid? Speed or reliability? The ConRoe Intel 865PE motherboard not supports raid but anyway I don't like these kind of integrated raid controllers, serious raid controllers starts with battery backup against loss of power and way safer operation.
Speed: In a home enviroment maybe a fast sound/video editing hard drive like WD Raptor 10000RPM 36/72GB is a better choice than raid 0.
My target with raid is to have two copies of everything I record at all times.
When I'm tracking a band, each day of work might take 3-4 DVDs to backup, this takes a long time and doesn't prevent from HD failure WHILE recording.

From what I understand, RAID (sorry, don't know whether it's 0 or 1) will duplicate everything on two drives. If one fails, I can still retrieve the data from the other one.
And when it comes time to read from those drives, supposedly RAID can split the load on the two drives (since everything is duplicated) to increase throughput.

Note that right now I'm using a simple WD 250Gb PATA drive and the performance is enough for my needs. I'm mostly concerned about HD failures and data loss.

When you say "set the FSB1066 option", are you referring to the "pad mod" that turns an E4300 into a pseudo E6600 (with half the cache), or is it possible to force the mobo into FSB1066 operation?
In this case you should use Raid 1 (mirroring). You can buy a raid controller card (don't forget that PCI interface has a bandwidth limit of 133mbyte/sec, this bandwidth is shared between all slots) or you can buy a new motherboard which supports this function (when you choose mobo be carfeful most of them supports raid through SATA->new hdds WD Raid Edition :) ).

I don't know any good board with Core 2 + DDR1+AGP+Raid support.
Core 2 Duo has requirements against the voltage regulators, BIOS upgrade won't provide core 2 support for your current board.

In this Asrock mobo you can set the FSB easily to 266MHz in the bios, this means 2,4GHz for a Core 2 E4300, these processors runs stable at stock voltage approx. till 2,8GHz. My E4400 is working perfectly on 2,66GHz.

JazzJackRabbit
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Post by JazzJackRabbit » Tue May 08, 2007 10:11 am

Hardtailed wrote:
JazzJackRabbit wrote:There aren't any good options for Core2Duo motherboard with AGP and DDR support. Most of those options are based on via chipsets (I have one of those). Via chipsets often have trouble with AGP videocards when gaming (normal working stuff is fine) and they also cannot overclock. There are also motherboards with agp slot on intel chipsets as mentioned in the thread, but those are mainly based on G chipsets with integrated video which also rules out overclocking. Asrock board in Tamas post only supports 1066 FSB via overclocking. So if you want a C2D CPU with 1066 FSB you are already overcloking your rig.
Actually, I've never oc'ed a system in my entire life. I mainly use my computer for digital audio multitracking and stability is what really matters.

If I get the 4CoreDual, I'd probably just get an E4300 which is as you know has a 800MHz FSB.
Now the question is whether this would be an improvement over my 630 P4 that would be worth the added cost (and the "downgrading" from an Asus/Intel mobo). Since what I do uses a lot of parallel processes, I guess so...

The plan is to do that now, then later on when my divorce is settled and I have cash, I will build a Core2Quad system and relegate the Asrock/E4300 to my mobile rig (tracking doesn't use much CPU power, it's the plugins when mixing that do)

I wish Asus would provide a Bios update to run an E4### on my board...
Why not overclock if you can? I'm not talking about taking it to the limit such as 3.6GHz, but something more manageable that won't affect stability at all.

Well if you don't want to overclock, don't. Regarding performance, I did rar archiving testing and 6300 at stock frequeny beat my 3.4GHz P4 Northwood. Not by a lot but it did. I suppose 4300 will be marginally better than 630 when using single core,. Of course you'll get two cores, but in order to take advantage of dual core you gotta have software that uses both of them.

gentonix
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Post by gentonix » Tue May 08, 2007 10:58 am

JazzJackRabbit wrote:There aren't any good options for Core2Duo motherboard with AGP and DDR support. Most of those options are based on via chipsets (I have one of those). Via chipsets often have trouble with AGP videocards when gaming (normal working stuff is fine) and they also cannot overclock.
They certainly can overclock. I'm running E4300 with Asrock 4CoreDual-VSTA @2.16GHz as we speak. Of course motherboards from quality manufacturers (say Asus, Gigabyte etc.) with Intel chipsets tend to overclock better, but even the basic overclock with E4300 (raise FSB to 266MHz) gives a nice performance gain and is quite trivial. Also I haven't heard about any problems with AGP videocards with this board. Maybe you are referring to to PCIe video slot which has incompatibility problems with certain cards?

BTW. This motherboard has also some kind of raid support. I haven't tried it personally, but it should be possible to set up raid 0 or 1 between the drives connected to the two sata connectors.

fractal
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Contact:

Re: Any mobo for Core2Duo with AGP & DDR"1"?

Post by fractal » Tue May 08, 2007 4:32 pm

Hardtailed wrote:Are there any mobo available to run a E6### (or E4### at worse) with regular DDR and AGP 8X?
http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Produc ... 44&LanID=9 does
Something at least as good as my Asus.
Now that's a matter of opinion.

Hardtailed
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:52 am

Post by Hardtailed » Wed May 09, 2007 2:24 pm

Well I took the plunge...

Got the 4CoreDual-VSTA and an E4300.

Will write back after I get a chance to put it in...
If all goes well, I've justed extended my computer life another 2-3 years for a minimal investment :D

JazzJackRabbit
Posts: 1386
Joined: Fri Jun 18, 2004 6:53 pm

Post by JazzJackRabbit » Wed May 09, 2007 6:49 pm

gentonix wrote:
JazzJackRabbit wrote:There aren't any good options for Core2Duo motherboard with AGP and DDR support. Most of those options are based on via chipsets (I have one of those). Via chipsets often have trouble with AGP videocards when gaming (normal working stuff is fine) and they also cannot overclock.
They certainly can overclock. I'm running E4300 with Asrock 4CoreDual-VSTA @2.16GHz as we speak. Of course motherboards from quality manufacturers (say Asus, Gigabyte etc.) with Intel chipsets tend to overclock better, but even the basic overclock with E4300 (raise FSB to 266MHz) gives a nice performance gain and is quite trivial. Also I haven't heard about any problems with AGP videocards with this board. Maybe you are referring to to PCIe video slot which has incompatibility problems with certain cards?

BTW. This motherboard has also some kind of raid support. I haven't tried it personally, but it should be possible to set up raid 0 or 1 between the drives connected to the two sata connectors.
Did a google search, seems 4CoreDual-VSTA can run can run FSB async. Previous version 775Dual-VSTA (I believe) as well as many of the VIA motherboards have locked FSB so if you were to overclock using FSB you would also raise PCI and AGP/PCIe frequency which instantly caused stability issues.

In any case, motherboards on VIA chipsets are luck of draw. The thing about them is, they either work fine, or they don't. And if they don't there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Here's a page at AT forums.
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview ... TMP=Linear

Kind of scary, isn't it?

I can't find specific page for AGP problem I was referring to (was long time ago) but here are some similar threads. Basic symptoms is via motherboards with VT8237 south bridge have AGP slot fucked up. It works fine in windows but in games you see FPS drop downs if you're lucky, if you're not you'll see lots and lots of artifacts running full screen.
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=1029
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=5519
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:rA ... cd=1&gl=us
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:63 ... cd=1&gl=us
http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview. ... rd1=p4m800
http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview. ... adid=74305


Me, I have VIA motherboard and I'm experiencing FPS dropdowns. The only reason I got via motherboard was because I was low on money and needed to upgrade the system. Suffice to say, the second intel releases 45nm CPUs along with bearlake chipset I will be upgrading.

Hardtailed
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:52 am

Post by Hardtailed » Wed May 09, 2007 7:48 pm

Well there it is! E4300 running at 2.4GHz with good old DDR400 ram and cheap silent AGP card!!!

Didn't get to do any testing yet. Will report tomorrow.

I forgot to buy thermal paste, I thought it was pre-applied on the CPU... dumbass that I am, it is pre-applied on the HSF, not the CPU!
Stock Intel cooler is still not too bad once you slow down the fan with SpeedFan. Still, can't wait to slap my Scythe on it...

Hardtailed
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Post by Hardtailed » Wed May 09, 2007 8:56 pm

Hmmm, played a bit of Need For Speed Most Wanted and didn't see much difference. But this game probably use only one core and my GPU is not exactly the best for games...

However, my real reason for upgrading was to run most plugins in Cakewalk Sonar... and damn does it deliver. I loaded a project that was causing dropdowns with the P4, it barely hovered above 20% CPU usage...
Sonar does use multi-cores

Hardtailed
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Post by Hardtailed » Thu May 10, 2007 4:39 am

Encoded a 1h15 DVD for kicks... took about 45 minutes.
This is better than the 2h00-2h30 it took with the P4...

But I'm guessing a newer encoder (this was done using Nero...7 or 8) optimized for multi-cores would be even better.

And this is a HUGE increase from my Celeron 1GHz (which took 12 hours!)

kaange
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Post by kaange » Thu May 10, 2007 8:08 pm

If you check the performance monitor, you will see that NeroVision is pretty good at using both of the CPU cores. A quad core CPU might be wasted, though.

Hardtailed
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Post by Hardtailed » Fri May 11, 2007 4:36 am

kaange wrote:If you check the performance monitor, you will see that NeroVision is pretty good at using both of the CPU cores. A quad core CPU might be wasted, though.
I was looking at Speedfan actually (was monitoring temperature to fine tune the CPU fan), I noticed it has two meters, are these for the two cores?
It only used about 60% processing power...

Is 45 minutes to transcode a 1h15 AVI good?
(It certainly is better than the 12 hours it took with my Celeron 1GHz!)

TonyB.
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Post by TonyB. » Sun May 20, 2007 9:42 am

FWIW (late to the party, again!)-

I had the same drop-outs using the 533FSB ASUS P4B533E and a P4 2.53GHz 512MB L2. When C2D came out I was in the same financial state as you were, Hardtail, so opted for the ASUS P5PE-VM mATX board in the interim because the only other DDR/AGP/PATA mobos supporting socket 775 and C2D were VIA based. VIA had a terrible reputation for multi-track audio, so I wouldn't even consider one.

The P5PE-VM is natively an 800MHz FSB board, but OCs itself to 1066MHz FSB when an AGP card is installed. You can see in my sig that I use an Audigy2ZS and Presonus Firebox, which on the P5PE-VM performed flawlessly. I also used (in limited expiraments) a VIA based 1394a PCI card which I have to say worked flawlessly as well. It enabled me to return to computer-based processing from my stand-alone Korg D1200MKII.

You can see from my sig I have since almost finished the transition to contemporary technology and MAN! the joy! Still haven't gone in for SATA, nor RAID of any kind, but that's my next $200 increment.

Wish I could buy equipment for a song!

TonyB.
_____________________________________________________
P6N SLI Platinum, MSI, MS-7350 Ver. 100
AMI BIOS v. 1.0, 01/02/2007 (a7350nms.100)
E6400 @ 2666.7MHz (8x333.35), usually
w/Sythe Ninja plus Rev. B SNJ1100B
2GB Patriot PC-6400/DDR2-800 PDC22G6400LLK
XFX Fatal1ty GeForce 7600GT
2x HDD WDC WD800BB-00CAA1
1x LITE-ON DVDRW SHW-160P6S rev. PS09
Antec TP-430 PSU
Audigy2ZS
Presonus Firebox
M-Audio O2

2666.4 MHz (333.3x8) 1:1 ok 5:6 DRAM@400MHz- better!
2932.8 MHz (366.6x8) 1:1 ok
3000.0 MHz (375.0x8) 1:1 Alright!
3200.0 MHz (400.0x8) oopso! So far!
:wink:

Hardtailed
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Post by Hardtailed » Mon May 21, 2007 7:15 pm

TonyB. wrote:I had the same drop-outs using the 533FSB ASUS P4B533E and a P4 2.53GHz 512MB L2. When C2D came out I was in the same financial state as you were, Hardtail, so opted for the ASUS P5PE-VM mATX board in the interim because the only other DDR/AGP/PATA mobos supporting socket 775 and C2D were VIA based. VIA had a terrible reputation for multi-track audio, so I wouldn't even consider one.
Hi TonyB, thanks for the info.

So far it's rock solid in Cakewalk Sonar Pro 4. I'm doing stuff that would send my P4 crying for mercy and it stays solid as a rock.

Still, can't wait to upgrade to a P965 based mobo... although I'm wondering if I should wait for DDR3 to be mainstream, so I don't paint myself in a corner yet again.
Anyway... it's stable enough right now, the only reason to upgrade would be to get a 16X PCI-E port and a 8800GTS so I could play some more games... which has nothing to do with multi-track audio 8)

ojg
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Post by ojg » Wed Jun 06, 2007 3:28 am

Hi Hardtailed and others,

I'm running a very similar setup to yours, [email protected] + stock hsf + 4core-vsta + ddr400 +9600xt.

Speedfan works very well at reducing the noise of the stock cooler.

But I am disappointed with EIST. This motherboard does not seem to support it properly, the multiplier switches between 6 and 9, but the core voltage does not change. Do you have the same experience?

Also I was expecting the processor to stay at the lowest multiplier while surfing the web etc. but it doesn't. It constantly switches between 6 and 9 even if the processor load is constantly below 10%. Is this the way it's supposed to work?

ACook
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Post by ACook » Thu Jun 07, 2007 9:06 pm

I just noticed this as a possible intermediate option should my mb/cpu be toast..

My ram (if that is good at least) is PC3200/DDR400, so should run fine for a while. I also already have a PCI-E vga card, 2 now in fact.

This seems like a great option to hold me over for a few months while I scrape some more cash together. just the board and a E4300 now: <€200, then in 3/4 months, get some decent ddr2, then a few months later, the new intel chipset should be a bit better and more mb-reviews willl be out, can get one of them.

will research this some more. Seems a pcie x16 will work fine on a x4 slot (this one is x16 long, but just works at x4).

Hardtailed
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Post by Hardtailed » Fri Jun 08, 2007 4:58 am

ACook wrote:I just noticed this as a possible intermediate option should my mb/cpu be toast..

My ram (if that is good at least) is PC3200/DDR400, so should run fine for a while. I also already have a PCI-E vga card, 2 now in fact.

This seems like a great option to hold me over for a few months while I scrape some more cash together. just the board and a E4300 now: <€200, then in 3/4 months, get some decent ddr2, then a few months later, the new intel chipset should be a bit better and more mb-reviews willl be out, can get one of them.

will research this some more. Seems a pcie x16 will work fine on a x4 slot (this one is x16 long, but just works at x4).
But DDR2 RAM is at an historical low right now!

DDR400 runs perfectly fine on this board, but DD2 is just freaking cheap at the moment! Which is why I just bought a pair of DDR2-667 1Gb sticks (just your basic Kingston Value Ram) for 83$CDN.
The only reason for running this board at the moment is I still have an AGP card (a passive 9600SE which is perfect for what I do).

My plan is to upgrade to a board that supports 1333FSB easily so I can run the memory at 1:1 and push my E4300 to 3GHz.
Waiting for the ATI 2600 to come out first
It seems it works better than the Geforce 8600 in passive configuration (thanks to the 65nm process)

ACook
Posts: 282
Joined: Sat Apr 21, 2007 5:35 pm
Location: In the Palace

Post by ACook » Fri Jun 08, 2007 5:46 am

it's still €60 I don't really have right now.
And that ddr400 was and still is bloody expensive, and would be wasted elseway. plus, it gives me time to do more research in c2d boards and chipsets, and will eventually leave me with a board/vga/ram and probable cpu combo that is either sellable or usable.
reuse, recycle, renew and all that..

speedlever
Posts: 128
Joined: Sat Sep 30, 2006 1:39 pm
Location: NC, USA

ASRock 4coredual VSTA

Post by speedlever » Fri Jun 08, 2007 11:15 pm

I just built this board tonight with an E4300 and 2 Gigs of DDR2-667 Kingston ram for ~$250 shipped. I brought over my 6600GT/AGP card but ditched my PC2700 ram for the inexpensive DDR2.

Running stock, I'm seeing about 38-40*C in BIOS (HW monitor) using the stock cooler and AS Ceramique.

SpeedFan 4.32 says the temps are 35*C with the cores showing 30/28. TAT says temps are 49/46 *C. What to believe?

I have to say I'm not real crazy about the stock cooler. It's a bit noisier than I like.

I had to reload Vista Home Premium due to the hardware changes. But it seems to be running just fine.

One thing I didn't like about this board is that I only have 2 fan headers (one for the CPU and one case fan).

ojg
Friend of SPCR
Posts: 34
Joined: Thu Aug 07, 2003 8:08 pm
Location: Norway

Post by ojg » Thu Aug 16, 2007 10:23 am

Yay!

I managed to get EIST working on the 4coredual-vsta. There is a modded unofficial bios here: http://www.pc-treiber.net/datei_download_1275.html

I have been running it for a few weeks now without any problems.

Joe Public
Posts: 92
Joined: Tue May 29, 2007 9:25 am
Location: Norway

Post by Joe Public » Thu Aug 16, 2007 11:53 am

I have a spare rig with a 4Core Dual VSTA and a Celeron 440 2 GHz running at 3 GHz. I'm surprised I got to 300 MHz FSB, as most seem to hit a wall at about 290. My wall seems to be 304 MHz, so I stepped back a few notches.

I'm running an X1950 Pro AGP which I had leftover from my old rig and 2GB of PC3200 memory (which also was a leftover from the old one).

Benches pretty well, it outruns my old main rig by quite a bit, which was a Pentium 4 clocked to 3.5 GHz.

Maybe I'll replace the CPU sometime, but I'm using the Celly for now as I got it for free.

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