Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2

[ojrules]

I tried these settings:

333mhz
flexibility option enabled
Dram voltage Normal


however the frequency in cpuz is shown as 235mhz...

on the other hand the motherboard has given me rather tigh timings, even though they were set to auto:

Cas: 3
Ras-Cas 3
trp 3
tras 9

cr 2

 

[cpmee]

flexibility option enabled

however the frequency in cpuz is shown as 235mhz...


No surprise there with the flexibility option enabled.

 

[ojrules]

Hey.... the settings you advised me a while ago didnt work...

DRAM Frequency [333MHz (DDRII667) ]
Flexibility Option [Disabled]
DRAM CAS# Latency [5]
DRAM Bank Interleave [4-Way]
Precharge to Active (Trp) [5T]
Active to Precharge (Tras) [18T]
Active to CMD (Trcd) [5T]
REF to ACT/REF to REF (Trfc) [Auto]
ACT (0) to ACT (1) (Trrd) [Auto]
Read to Precharge (Trtp) [Auto]
Write to Read CMD (Twtr) [Auto]
Write Recovery Time (Twr) [Auto]
DRAM Bus Selection [Auto]
DRAM Command Rate [2T Command]
> Advanced Memory Configuration [Untouched]
> Advanced Host Configuration [Untouched] Except for Pipeline DRQCTL Enabled

DRAM Voltage [Low]
AGP Voltage [High]



however today i played around and just changed the dram freq to 266... and now in cpuz i have the following specs:

Freq: 313
Ratio: 3/4
Cas: 4
Ras-Cas: 4
trp: 4
tras: 12
cr: 2t

so im pretty pleased... any ideas how i could improve the specs now?..

 

[cpmee]

Originally posted by: ojrules
Hey.... the settings you advised me a while ago didnt work...

DRAM Frequency [333MHz (DDRII667) ]
Flexibility Option [Disabled]
DRAM CAS# Latency [5]
DRAM Bank Interleave [4-Way]
Precharge to Active (Trp) [5T]
Active to Precharge (Tras) [18T]
Active to CMD (Trcd) [5T]
REF to ACT/REF to REF (Trfc) [Auto]
ACT (0) to ACT (1) (Trrd) [Auto]
Read to Precharge (Trtp) [Auto]
Write to Read CMD (Twtr) [Auto]
Write Recovery Time (Twr) [Auto]
DRAM Bus Selection [Auto]
DRAM Command Rate [2T Command]
> Advanced Memory Configuration [Untouched]
> Advanced Host Configuration [Untouched] Except for Pipeline DRQCTL Enabled

DRAM Voltage [Low]
AGP Voltage [High]



however today i played around and just changed the dram freq to 266... and now in cpuz i have the following specs:

Freq: 313
Ratio: 3/4
Cas: 4
Ras-Cas: 4
trp: 4
tras: 12
cr: 2t

so im pretty pleased... any ideas how i could improve the specs now?..

Hey i've tired the settings with no sucess.... It just cold booted... Then i tied 533(?)(the middle one), with all other settings set to default , with no sucess...

The 266 setting is the 533ddr2 setting, so youve tried that one before with cas 4 and you said it didnt work. What else did you change ?

Did you get the coaxil cable to work ?

 

[ojrules]

hmm... good point .. i shall check.. i think i just changed the dram voltage to normal... however im not sure... i'l reboot and check sometime...

well.... i wired the coaxil cable to a 2 pin plug, and have "plumbed it in" , however i cant find my remote to my surround sound system .. so i cant use it atm, however when turning the speakers on, they do flash "coaxial on" however they then go to the default of aux... so yes i expect the connection is working, so thanks for all your help..



o and before i forget.. i actually treid the settings you advised with "normal" voltage , rather than auto... so i dont think its the fact that they are beign underpowered....

the only other thing i can think of.. is the fact that fsb is at 235, rather than 240 ... its a fairly tempremental mobo, as before i could always boot on 240, but after a while of fiddling about with ram speeds, and putting them back to normal it wouldnt boot at 240....

 

[brokencase]

Originally posted by: cpmee
Have you plugged in the power to it ?
Are you using the correct sata port on it , I think one is in and one is out ?

It could just be defective, what kind of build quality/quality control do you expect for $6.65 ?? :laugh:

OK, here is the latest in the IDE/SATA converter saga.
It is not defective.

I could not get it to work with my 200gig WD IDE drive.

However, it does work with an assortment of about 5 different older 2.5" laptop drives I have here.
These are various manufacturers (toshiba, hitachi, 800mb-20gig).
One of the 2.5" drives does not work, but I am pretty sure that particular drive is bad.

I benchmarked the 20 gig laptop drive and it seems to perform about the same as when it was on and IDE cable.

I'm thinking that maybe it's just the way the 200 gig drive was previously identified by the bios and then the asrock mb is unhappy when it changes.
In which case a full bios rest might resolve things.

I don't know, maybe it's just a compatability issue.

I'm going to do some more tests, I have some other 3.5" drives here as well.

Whats wrong with $6.55? I guarantee you they are all made in China.
That dealextreme place has some pretty good prices. How they manage low cost shipping from Hongkong to US i'll never figure out.
When I ordered this converter board I ordered a bunch of other stuff. It came in multiple envelopes spread out over several weeks.

 

[cpmee]

Originally posted by: ojrules
hmm... good point .. i shall check.. i think i just changed the dram voltage to normal... however im not sure... i'l reboot and check sometime...

well.... i wired the coaxil cable to a 2 pin plug, and have "plumbed it in" , however i cant find my remote to my surround sound system .. so i cant use it atm, however when turning the speakers on, they do flash "coaxial on" however they then go to the default of aux... so yes i expect the connection is working, so thanks for all your help..



o and before i forget.. i actually treid the settings you advised with "normal" voltage , rather than auto... so i dont think its the fact that they are beign underpowered....

the only other thing i can think of.. is the fact that fsb is at 235, rather than 240 ... its a fairly tempremental mobo, as before i could always boot on 240, but after a while of fiddling about with ram speeds, and putting them back to normal it wouldnt boot at 240....

Auto isnt necessarily a low voltage. With my vapg voltage, Auto is the same as high. But with an "Auto" setting, you never really know what youll get.

That a weird ram divider with ddr2. Do you by chance have "Flexibiltiy Option" Enabled ?


Your HT receiver sounds like mine. I would be screwed if I ever lost the remote. :laugh:
Why cant all the controls be on the unit itself too ? :roll:

 

[cpmee]

@brokencase


I looked at that site and it looks like some very good deals. And they have some very unusual stuff.

Yeah, most of the converters are made in China anyway.

 

[ojrules]

nope i dont have flexibility option enabled.. however tomoro i will check al the bios settings.... ive been through all the remotes in my house trying to find a remote that gives the right signal... with no sucess.. so its costing me a tenner to buy another remote which i;l probably loose again ..


.. o and why in those ram settings that you advise me, do you advise that i up the vapg ?.. what benefit does that have?..

 

[cpmee]

Vagp is also the voltage to the northbridge. By raising it, you can get a higher fsb.

On the other hand, Auto may be the same as High anyway. It was in my case.

 

[Dynomike]

Hey cpmee. Those setting you gave me worked ok at first. Everything booted up just fine but when I tried to play COD 4 I get a blue screen. Its mainly two different errors. One is PAGE_FAULT_IN_UNPAGED_AREA and the other has to do with the POOL. Dont remember exactly but the at fault driver is my graphics driver, ATI3duag.dll, I backed down the FSB, agp voltage back to auto, disabled fast write, and turned down the apteture size to 128MB but none of that worked. Any thoughts?

 

[Dynomike]

Oh yeah also I tried reinstalling the driver but that did not work either. The computer works untill I try just about anything 3D.

On another note. What is better...... A pentium D 930 @ 3.7Ghz or a Core 2 Duo @ 2.5Ghz

If the Pentium D is better how far would you have to go for the Core 2 Duo to over take it?

 

[cpmee]

Originally posted by: Dynomike
Oh yeah also I tried reinstalling the driver but that did not work either. The computer works untill I try just about anything 3D.

On another note. What is better...... A pentium D 930 @ 3.7Ghz or a Core 2 Duo @ 2.5Ghz

If the Pentium D is better how far would you have to go for the Core 2 Duo to over take it?

Page faults etc, could be a memory fault. Run memtest86 at the settings you had before for at least a few passes/hours to test.


The Core2 Dual is going to be faster at most things that require floating point intensive.
The higher mhz D 930 will be faster at programs that need the higher cycles.

So it depends on which program.

 

[PrTv]

I've just bought this Mobo yesterday. IMO it doesn't deserve any editor choice award, especially from Anandtech!

After fiddling with it quite a lot, I found that it's not a good MB at all, especially if you want to O/C
Actually before I bought this board, I already owned 4Core-1333 Full HD, which is very nice since it can take my E4400 very far w/o necessity of increasing the voltage. But the situation is upside down with 4CoreDual since I locked up (not posting) everytime I made any adjustment in FSB (even slightly).

FYI: I use this board with my secondary setup (a lowly Celeron E1200+an ancient Geforece 5900).

 

[ojrules]

Originally posted by: cpmee
Vagp is also the voltage to the northbridge. By raising it, you can get a higher fsb.

On the other hand, Auto may be the same as High anyway. It was in my case.

fsb for ram, or cpu?... o and ive found that i've changed absolutely nothing, everything is on auto, with flex disabled, and 266 still works..

 

[ojrules]

Originally posted by: Dynomike
Oh yeah also I tried reinstalling the driver but that did not work either. The computer works untill I try just about anything 3D.

On another note. What is better...... A pentium D 930 @ 3.7Ghz or a Core 2 Duo @ 2.5Ghz

If the Pentium D is better how far would you have to go for the Core 2 Duo to over take it?

ive done the same thing, move from a 3.7 to a 2.4... in 3d mark, the processor scores higher... however in crysis i think i might have lost a few fps..

 

[cpmee]

Originally posted by: ojrules

Originally posted by: cpmee
Vagp is also the voltage to the northbridge. By raising it, you can get a higher fsb.

On the other hand, Auto may be the same as High anyway. It was in my case.

fsb for ram, or cpu?... o and ive found that i've changed absolutely nothing, everything is on auto, with flex disabled, and 266 still works..

The northbridge controls the fsb for both, thats why youre up to 313fsb. But with your divider in your case, the memory is at 266 and the cpu is at 313fsb, which is still OK. A 1:1 ratio is best on conroe cpus, but the performance hit is very small at other ratios.



As for the 2nd post, which 3d mark version did you use ? 3Dmark01se is different from the rest and favors a high fsb and mhz.

 

[cpmee]

Originally posted by: PrTv
I've just bought this Mobo yesterday. IMO it doesn't deserve any editor choice award, especially from Anandtech!

After fiddling with it quite a lot, I found that it's not a good MB at all, especially if you want to O/C
Actually before I bought this board, I already owned 4Core-1333 Full HD, which is very nice since it can take my E4400 very far w/o necessity of increasing the voltage. But the situation is upside down with 4CoreDual since I locked up (not posting) everytime I made any adjustment in FSB (even slightly).

FYI: I use this board with my secondary setup (a lowly Celeron E1200+an ancient Geforece 5900).

It certainly didnt get an editors choice award for overclocking. Overclocking on this board is an extreme challenge. :laugh: The bsel mod is really a necessity for any stable overclocking.

But what this board excels at is being a solid crossover board. You can still use agp and have a slot to upgrade to pcie. And 6 months back when ddr2 was still pricey, you could use your old ddr1.

If you want an overclocking board, then you have to bite the whole bullet and get a pcie video card and something like the Abit IP35-E. DDR2 prices are so low that ram doesnt really matter much anymore.

 

[Dynomike]

I ran memtest86+ for a long time. I went through 100%of the passes twice and no errors were reported. I dont know what the heck the problem is.

I was just contemplating keeping my pentium D or going to a Core 2. Would there be a huge difference or would it just be slight.

 

[Dynomike]

I loaded the optimal defaults in the Bios and everything works fine. If I overclock the FSB past 246 (3.7Ghz) it will not boot up Windows but gives me a REGISTRY_FAULT blue screen error, if I overclock past 240 (3.61Ghz) none of my 3d games work and my graphic driver fails. What the crap? Any thoughts anyone about going faster.

 

[fritzfield]

Well. I.m waving bye-bye to Asrock4coreDual-SATA2. I 've upgraded to CHEAP PDDR2. I already jumped to DDR2. The PCIe2.0 card is very close. What do you people think about the Foxconn p35a mobo?

 

[cpmee]

The Foxconn P35 Mars mobo ?

 

[Sl4yer]

New BIOS out as Asrock's website:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/downl...el=4CoreDual-SATA2&s=n

 

[RonaldWan]

So here's a question: Does this board use the Pro or the Ultra? I'm here thinking they're the same chip, who in the right mind whould make two chips that does the same thing targeting this AGP/PCIe crowd. (it seems like they're mixed, is there a way to identify the Ultra from the box?)

If its the pro, then isn't this a DOWNGRADE from the 4CoreDual-VSTA?

*confused*

 

[Kosmatik]

Hi,

Seems like this is the best place to ask my question.
I'm running an x1950pro agp card and I want to upgrade to c2d. Seems like the best cpu for the board is the e4600. I have 2x1gb kit of kingston hyperx ddr 400 ram and a 400W antec power supply. Since money doesn't grow on trees I can't afford a whole overhaul so thats why I decided on the 4coredual board. Do I need a bigger psu to upgrade? If not then should I either get an arctic freezer 7 or a 2gb ram kit? If it's a 2gb ram kit then something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820145034 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820231098 ? Feel free to suggest different ram, but this motherboard is going to be just a transition until I can afford the pci-e vid card.

Thank you