Anyone try this Jetway ATI board yet?

[Hacp]

Please tell us if it does. I would like to see how far it can oc.

 

[cheesehead]

The A200 looks like a great little home theater board; just add a Sempron 3100+ and 512mb-1GB of RAM, and you've got a cheap HT system.
Does anyone know if the included X300 graphics can drive a HDTV (1280x768, I believe) under low load?

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: hans007
i emailed jetway about the hypertransport and ram divider problem. they responded 30 minutes later witha bios that fixes it.

wow.

its not on their website though, but for some reason they have a bios for the socket 754 version on their site. oh well, hopefully it works.

Hmm, let us know about how this affects adjustments. One other thing, how's the build quality of the board? I've read that Jetway is a rather low-end manufacturer, and I want to know how the build quality is since longevity of boards is important to me (I go 3, 4, or 5 years without upgrading usually).

 

[hans007]

i tried the new bios. it doesnt seem to have fixed anything. the date is different thats about it. that and i can now hold down insert on power up to bypass the clock settings set. but memory frequency and hypertransport frequency control still dont work.


i suppose this is the irony. i'm a software qa engineer, basically qaing jetway's bios for them.


on the bright side the board has been rock stable and seems to have very clean signal output. the power levels are very solid, the sound output free of any crackles of buzzing (i'd say its as good as a real soundblaster card) and the analog vga out is really sharp at 1600x1200 @ 60hz on my 20" lcd panel. cant tell the difference between this and dvi.

also integrated video should easily be able to support tv out on a hdtv signal cleanly. its just 2d video , any card can do that. and the radeon is hardware accelerated dvd playback as well. i think this is basically the only rs480 on the market planned or otherwise that can have the 32mb 64bit on board video ram which is nice. its probably the only thing keeping my bf2 framerates playable.

 

[Hacp]

Dammit, I had high hopes too. Semi-decent onboard sound/video and overclocking features all on a matx board. Too bad oc doesn't work as it's suppsoed to.

 

[Hacp]

Also, maybe you should give them a link to this topic, since if they see interest, they might fix the bios.

 

[crucibelle]

hans,

When you say that the memory timings don't work, does that mean that 1T command rate doesn't work either?

 

[hans007]

Originally posted by: Hacp
Also, maybe you should give them a link to this topic, since if they see interest, they might fix the bios.

they actually already have been reading this post from what i'm told. when i meant the memory timing thing doesnt work, i mean that

you cant set the memory to run at 100, 133, or 166 mhz. it is always stuck at 200. i actually have ddr400 ram , but when i o/c my ram can only do about 440 and then it dies. so if i want to try 250bus, i cant because my ram cant do ddr500 speeds. with it set to 166 it would run at 216 or so mhz. the guy i emailed also said that the raid disk is on the cd, but you have to make the floppy yourself by copying it off the cd. so you dont have to get it from shuttle.

 

[crucibelle]

hans,

Thank you I do hope they fix the ram issue you have described.

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: hans007
i tried the new bios. it doesnt seem to have fixed anything. the date is different thats about it. that and i can now hold down insert on power up to bypass the clock settings set. but memory frequency and hypertransport frequency control still dont work.


i suppose this is the irony. i'm a software qa engineer, basically qaing jetway's bios for them.


on the bright side the board has been rock stable and seems to have very clean signal output. the power levels are very solid, the sound output free of any crackles of buzzing (i'd say its as good as a real soundblaster card) and the analog vga out is really sharp at 1600x1200 @ 60hz on my 20" lcd panel. cant tell the difference between this and dvi.

also integrated video should easily be able to support tv out on a hdtv signal cleanly. its just 2d video , any card can do that. and the radeon is hardware accelerated dvd playback as well. i think this is basically the only rs480 on the market planned or otherwise that can have the 32mb 64bit on board video ram which is nice. its probably the only thing keeping my bf2 framerates playable.

So the real thing holding you back is the lack of RAM divider? Is there a PCI/PCI-E lock on this board? If I get some DDR 500 I want to be able to OC my proc to 250FSB territory... that'd be sweet. If Jetway can fix the BIOS and iron out some of the driver issues this board might become VERY popular among the mATX OCing crowd. (There are plenty who want to be mATX OC'ers, but the lack of good boards is holding us back ).

 

[IEC]

Update: It looks like if you do a search for A210GDMS +review on Google, this thread is now about 5th from the top! Looks like it's getting pretty popular

 

[hans007]

if i werent so busy, maybe i'd write up a real review of this board. and yes, i think its just the ram divider killing its chance at o/cing. live i've said i've had 3 different brands of rs480 board and this is the best one. its th eonly one with onboard video ram and azalia and the best bios (well if it all worked.. though potentially its by far the best)

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: hans007
if i werent so busy, maybe i'd write up a real review of this board. and yes, i think its just the ram divider killing its chance at o/cing. live i've said i've had 3 different brands of rs480 board and this is the best one. its th eonly one with onboard video ram and azalia and the best bios (well if it all worked.. though potentially its by far the best)

So if we used DDR 500 RAM it may overclock better... hmm, may be worth checking out.

 

[hans007]

im goign to try one other remedy that support suggested to me, hopefully it works as they seem to indicate that it should.

 

[ND40oz]

Well, I got my board today, I still have to pick up ram and a processor for it, hopefully I can hit a show up this weekend and pick some up. I'll try to get a venice and some DDR500 ram to see how it overclocks. If I can't, I'll pull a stick of pdp from my shuttle and see how high I can get the ht bus.

Cheesehead: I'm going to hook this up to my sammy dlp via the vga and see how it does with 720p, if I can find a vga to hdmi adaptor, I'll check it out on the sony to see if it supports 1366 by 788, though I'm probably one of the few with that native resolution. I'm going to install the mce drivers for this, so hopefully they have the non-standard resolutions.

 

[Hacp]

Ok, i'm a little confused here. Can the LTD multiplier be set lower? You said the only thing preventing you from higher speeds was the inability to change RAM timings and the inability to use the divider. But you also mentioned in your first post that you couldn't underclock the Hypertransport Bus.
Btw, someone should confirm this here
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=900405

 

[Rock Hydra]

When are they going to make an ATX board based on this chipset.

 

[hans007]

well... i tried something new.

i flashed the bios again with the same bios, but this time i used the clear cmos, DMI , ecsd switches. it was /cd/cp/cc

my ram is fairly high quality i supposes samsung originals 2x512mb PC3200 CL3 on samsung pcb.
not "overclocker" ram....

so i decided to try it at ddr500. i jacked up the ram voltage to 2.85 volts and set the timings to the aboslute slowest which is cl3, 11-7-7-2t. anyhow, i didnt change my cpu's core voltage and i'm at 1.4 volts at 250x9 = 2250.

its not prime95 stable, but that could be the ram. anyhow, i guess this means that everything works at this point except the ram divider. now i am assuming the pci divider works, but the only expansion card i have is a pci wireless g card. i have no video card, and my hard drive is on sata. my cdrom is on ide. the 800mhz hypertransport speed works great and is properly detected by sandra.

i have run this at 1125mhz hypertransport bus, at 225x5 so i think there is still some headroom at 4x hypertransport.

anyhow.... i am hoping now for a ram divider update someday, so i can get like 265bus running. that or i'm just going to buy some new ram.

 

[Hacp]

Ok just to confirm, you can change the LTD multiplier to 4x, change ram timings, but can't use the ram divider? Is that it?

 

[hans007]

yup. there is a setting there for ram divider but it doesnt work. hopefully in the future itll work.

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: hans007
well... i tried something new.

i flashed the bios again with the same bios, but this time i used the clear cmos, DMI , ecsd switches. it was /cd/cp/cc

my ram is fairly high quality i supposes samsung originals 2x512mb PC3200 CL3 on samsung pcb.
not "overclocker" ram....

so i decided to try it at ddr500. i jacked up the ram voltage to 2.85 volts and set the timings to the aboslute slowest which is cl3, 11-7-7-2t. anyhow, i didnt change my cpu's core voltage and i'm at 1.4 volts at 250x9 = 2250.

its not prime95 stable, but that could be the ram. anyhow, i guess this means that everything works at this point except the ram divider. now i am assuming the pci divider works, but the only expansion card i have is a pci wireless g card. i have no video card, and my hard drive is on sata. my cdrom is on ide. the 800mhz hypertransport speed works great and is properly detected by sandra.

i have run this at 1125mhz hypertransport bus, at 225x5 so i think there is still some headroom at 4x hypertransport.

anyhow.... i am hoping now for a ram divider update someday, so i can get like 265bus running. that or i'm just going to buy some new ram.

Now that seems like a respectable overclock!

 

[hans007]

i actually have 2 sticks of 256mb pc2700 kingston value ram, perhaps i will try it out to see if it will run at 166 memory bus.

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: hans007
i actually have 2 sticks of 256mb pc2700 kingston value ram, perhaps i will try it out to see if it will run at 166 memory bus.

That would probably be helpful to see if the memory bus settings are working.

 

[ND40oz]

Wow, June motherboard guide comes out and even after 40 some posts about this board, it doesn't even get a mention in the guide...

 

[hans007]

ok i figured this out. if you use pc2700 ram, with pc2700 programmed into its SPD it will run ram at 166mhz. if you rum pc3200 ram it will run it at 200mhz. so the divider does work if your ram is SPD programmed. the setting to manually force the frequencydoesnt work though. so no setting pc3200 to run at 166mhz (4/5 mem bus divider like other boards). so i guess for now until they fix it, it will have to be reburning pc3200 spd's to say pc2700 or no go.