ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 - Socket 939 with PCI-E and real AGP and Socket AM2 upgrade path

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Radiohead57

Member
Feb 11, 2006
31
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Well MrX yes indeed it does come "with locks". The ULI chipset is actually quite remarkable in my opinion. The bios is fairly simple and straight forward, no degree is needed to set memory timings etc. Aword of warning the accompanying manual leaves much to be desired but will get you up and running. The manual on the CD and the downloadable PDF are quite comprehensive. Heck mine is running very sweet with the 1.2 bios that I received it with.
 
Mar 19, 2003
18,289
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Originally posted by: MrX8503
after seeing how easy the voltmod is i think i'm going to consider doing it.

http://www.ocworkbench.com/2005/asrock/reviews/939dual-sata2/vcoremodguide-4.jpg

so from extremeoverclocking forums it says after this voltmod, 1.1v in bios comes out to 1.55v?

If you connect VID4 to GND (the connection in red on that pic), it's 1.15V in the BIOS that results in a real Vcore of 1.55V. That's the mod I did, and yes it's pretty easy - the only thing is that everything is really small.

There are a few different variations on the mod (connecting different pins/solder pads) and there's a chart somewhere on the OCW Forums listing them, but I think that first one is the easiest. Modifies 1.15V (and below) to 1.55V (and below). The good thing about that variation is that it still lets you run completely stock if you want to - 1.35V/1.40V in the BIOS are unmodified.
 

Ike0069

Diamond Member
Apr 28, 2003
4,276
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I have no issues with 270x10 on BIOS 1.50 and 1.425 Vcore (1.4 default), but I was thinkg of trying for higher. Of course that would mean OCWB1 or 2 and I have just read too amny issues with them.

SynthDude, is one of these better than the other in your opinion? Also if you are flashing back and forth quite abit, has this caused any problems with stability when you go back to a previous stable set up?

I'd like to maybe try and get close to 3.0GHz just for fun, but then I would probably go back to my current settings for ensured stability.
 

MrX8503

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2005
4,529
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Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

There are a few different variations on the mod (connecting different pins/solder pads) and there's a chart somewhere on the OCW Forums listing them, but I think that first one is the easiest. Modifies 1.15V (and below) to 1.55V (and below). The good thing about that variation is that it still lets you run completely stock if you want to - 1.35V/1.40V in the BIOS are unmodified.

when you say unmodified bios, do you mean if i'm using ocwb bios?
 
Mar 19, 2003
18,289
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Originally posted by: MrX8503
Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

There are a few different variations on the mod (connecting different pins/solder pads) and there's a chart somewhere on the OCW Forums listing them, but I think that first one is the easiest. Modifies 1.15V (and below) to 1.55V (and below). The good thing about that variation is that it still lets you run completely stock if you want to - 1.35V/1.40V in the BIOS are unmodified.

when you say unmodified bios, do you mean if i'm using ocwb bios?

When I say unmodified, I mean that you can set 1.35V or 1.40V in the BIOS and get that actual output voltage. Only the selection ranges of 1.15V and below (which you'd never really use the actual voltages) are modified to higher output voltages.

It does not matter which BIOS you're using - this voltmod produces the same results in every BIOS I've tried.
 
Mar 19, 2003
18,289
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Originally posted by: Ike0069
I have no issues with 270x10 on BIOS 1.50 and 1.425 Vcore (1.4 default), but I was thinkg of trying for higher. Of course that would mean OCWB1 or 2 and I have just read too amny issues with them.

SynthDude, is one of these better than the other in your opinion? Also if you are flashing back and forth quite abit, has this caused any problems with stability when you go back to a previous stable set up?

I'd like to maybe try and get close to 3.0GHz just for fun, but then I would probably go back to my current settings for ensured stability.

Strange...270x10 has refused to work for me every single time I've tried it. As I also mentioned earlier, I have no problems running 2700 as 300x9 (with OCWB1/2), so I have no idea why 270x10 won't boot for me. I do plan to do a bit more experimenting once I have more free time (this weekend), but it is annoying that I can't even get a simple speed that I should be able to get.

Anyways, are you asking which BIOS I think is the best overall? OCWB1/2 work well if you need a speed over 274HTT, though in my experience, I had a cold/warm boot problem every single time (that is, a soft reset would NEVER work - always had to power off and back on to reboot). Another annoying issue with OCWB1/2, though less important, is that it doesn't display CPU speed correctly on boot - it just displays your multiplier times 200, regardless of what your actual set HTT speed it. (It always showed 2.00GHz when I had my multiplier at its default 10, showed 1.80GHz when I was running 300x9, etc.).

If you need the really high HTT speeds, OCWB1/2 is pretty much the only way to go. However, with the issues that they have, and the fact that I can do 260x10 on BIOS 1.50/1.60 with absolutely no issues (no warm boot problems, speed is displayed correctly), I'm sticking with 1.50 as my preferred one for right now. If I can get 2700MHz working in OCWB1, I'll go with that, but for now...the official ones are fine for me.

I did flash back and forth several times last weekend, and I have no problems now that I'm back with my original 260x10 BIOS 1.50 setting.
 

MrX8503

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2005
4,529
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thanx synth dude for clearing up alot of things. I was wondering about the whole stock voltage thing, if 1.15v was the max. Now i understand its only 1.15v and below.
 

Spatulator

Member
Oct 13, 2004
32
0
0
I got to setting up this board last night. My board came with the 1.5 bios loaded.

I can't seem to find the 1t/2t command rate option. The bios is a little weird, is the "gated" option refering to the command rate? And then there is a memory setting for enabling memory compatibility mode or something. I havent had much time to play with overclocking options yet because I spent a long time last night installing my hard drive.

The jmicron sataII controller performs very well once its setup right but it was a real pain to get everything working. One major thing that probably often gets overlooked is that if you have a sataII HD it usually doesnt come from the factory with sata 3g enabled. My hitachi drive required downloading a dos boot disk and enabling it from there. Many other drives have a jumper setting to enable this feature.

Another problem with getting things running is that the f6 driver for the jmicron controller seems to be corrupted or something, or maybe it will only work with a sp2 version of xp during the install. For whatever reason I had to run the jmicron driver in IDE mode, and also set the IDE controller to only have the secondary port enabled for cd/dvd drive in order to install XP without an f6 driver.

After windows installed I installed the jmicron driver without a hitch, flipped sata mode on (with strong driving?) in the bios, and got very impressive results from my hitachi sata 3g 250gb drive. Better sustained and burst transfer rates than Ive seen on any benchmarks for this drive on the web! 5% cpu load (Ive seen many claims that this controller loads the cpu 20-40% I have to assume that their setup isnt ideal)

Does anyone know what the "strong driving" option does?
Do I want "Gated" memory for 1t command rate?
Do I want memory compatibility mode on?
Where are my memory timings, I only saw cas 2, 2.5, 3....I didnt see the other memory timings. I like that my memory is set to 2-2-2-5 but for overclocking I like to run at 2-3-2-5.

Maybe I need to flash back to 1.2 bios or something

...another thought, what is with the new bios with "AGP P2P Deep Fifo" support? Does anyone know what this is? Im beginning to think alot of stuff in the bios is just badly translated and dumbed down for oem types. The only bios support that I could find was in chinese, so if anyone has a document in english please pm me.
 

professor1942

Senior member
Dec 22, 2005
509
0
0
I'm getting some weird and intermittent stability issues now with this system. Initially, everything was running really well with the exception of a BSOD that would appear about once a week average (sometimes more, sometimes less)... well, the situation has deteriorated to the point where it happens every day, sometimes multiple times. Yesterday it crashed seven times in a five hour period. The strange thing is that it never happens with intensive and stressful applications; I can game till the cows come home, run Prime95 all night (it is currently in hour 12 with no errors) but this stupid crash will pop up in one of the two circumstances:

1. I am browsing the web with Firefox
2. I was just browsing the web with Firefox

I haven't tried IE yet (echh) to see if it really is specific to Firefox, but I'll add that to my troubleshooting list.

The error is a stop 0x0000009C (MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION) and upon googling I found that there is rarely an easy answer for this one. Last night I yanked out 3 of 4 DIMMs, my TV card and my sound card and I'll play around with Firefox some more today to see if it still happens. I'm thinking maybe the onboard NIC with this board is flaky.

Anyway, if anyone has had this problem and figured out what is causing it, let me know... otherwise I'll post back in a couple days with an update.

[edit] I see others are getting the 0x0000009c as well, so I'll keep my eye on that thread. SATA problem perhaps?

BTW my system:
3700+ San Diego (currently @ stock speed )
Asrock 939Dual (duh)
4x512 Kingston Value (tried various combinations already)
6800 vanilla 128 MB
SB Audigy
2 SATA HDD's
 

hclarkjr

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
11,375
0
0
sounds like bad stick of memory, you were overclocking judging by what you have listed in signature. try testing the sticks 2 at a time till you find the pair that is causing errors
 

professor1942

Senior member
Dec 22, 2005
509
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nope, 4 is fine (except for the crashing) and I'm going to try it at lower speed (157 Mhz) to see if maybe 200 was just too much for the cpu to handle.

BTW I tried it with a single pair which passed memtest for 2 hours so I don't think any 1 DIMM is defective.
 

Ike0069

Diamond Member
Apr 28, 2003
4,276
2
76
Originally posted by: BlingBlingArsch
@professor: did u have any problems with 4 memory sticks? mine wont let me run 3x512 without a blue screen :/

It not your board, S939 does not like 3 sticks. You need 1,2, or 4. It has to do with the on-die CPU dual channel memory controller. S754 has similar limitations as to the number of total sides of RAM.

As for you problem professor, I had a very similar issue where I would get random BSOD's, and they started getting more and more frequent. It turned out to be a stick of RAM going bad.

When you ran memtest, did you have everything at the same speeds that you normally run at, or did you go back to stock speeds?
 

professor1942

Senior member
Dec 22, 2005
509
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Actually I haven't given the whole history :D

Originally, I had it running with 2 Kingston Values (Infineon) and 2 Samsung cheapos (TCCC) at 186 Mhz, 3-3-3-8, CPU at 2.6 Ghz. After a couple BSOD's I decided to run memtest86+ overnight and sure enough it revealed errors. I then tested each one and it turned out to be a bad Samsung - I confirmed this by testing it in another system at the DIMM's proper CAS rating and speed. I took the DIMM back to the PC shop and they kindly gave me a replacement. I then got the bright idea to just use 4 Kingstons and swap the Samsung into my other system (because it had two Kingstons)...

That seemed to be OK except the BSOD's still happened on occasion. Memtest was fine with the 4 though ( I didn't test them overnight however)... Two days ago I yanked 1 GB out and just used 2x512 and the problem was actually worse with just two. Today I put the Samsung TCCC's in and am running it all at 157 Mhz, 2.5-4-4-8 (these settings all were determined by the board). I'll see how that goes and I'll run memtest overnight tonight with this new config.

[edit] just rebooted again...

And with the other pair installed in the other banks, it crashed again. RAM is clearly not the issue here...
 

imported_Imp

Diamond Member
Dec 20, 2005
9,148
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I'd welcome you to my world, but things are crazy as is and it's a bit full. You've probably checked the main ASRock booting error thread about the SATA stuff, but I don't know anymore. Thought I had it fixed by moving my one SATA drive to the SATA2 channel, and a fresh windows install, but just got another 0x0000009c error. However, I just did a windows update of over 30 files after a fresh format.

It's not screwing up too bad (I was up to 15+ BSODs), so did you happen to update windows lately or change drivers? It started for me after reinstalling an IDE channel. Don't forget Eventviewer, and if you can barely last a minute in windows without BSOD, don't bother with repair install (I tried system restore and a repair, no dice:(). You don't want to hear it, but a fresh format reinstall of windows might work, did for me (kinda).

Also, you probably know 0x0000009c implies a hardware problem/error, but could just be windows. By the way, does your CPU usage jump up and down while idle before crashing?

Good luck.
 

professor1942

Senior member
Dec 22, 2005
509
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0
That's the other thing that I forgot to mention: Eventviewer shows no record of the crashes, and even though the BSOD says "writing minidump" or whatever, no minidump ever gets written. I do have this stuff enabled, and with other crashes like when I update my Audigy drivers (crashes first time, everytime), the minidump does appear. This weirdness is what makes me think maybe the main HDD is crapping out when the crash occurs.
 

carstea

Member
Jan 19, 2006
28
0
0
professor1942 seems you;re getting this too. i get it too and let me tell you when that thing happens. you know about my freezing, hang when starting windows right ? it happes somewhere around the log on screen, sometimes before and after. the hd led stays on solid and i can still move the mouse but no command is taken. well if i don't reset it when that thing happens i get that BSOD. i dont know what it is and i havent figured it out. but i'm pretty sure is from the sata2 controller. or it could be some settings in bios about the FSB being set to auto to another value than the normal one.

IT's not the HD, mine is brand new, i get no hangs on operating on it and the test i did win WD tools showed no errors.
it's not the memory also. i've tested it in another system. in my case the video card works well, no freezing in games nothing.

we have diffret hd, memory video and more. the only thing we have in common is this damn MB. if you can fix this please let us know.
 

Dweekie

Member
Nov 8, 2004
111
0
0
Originally posted by: professor1942
I'm getting some weird and intermittent stability issues now with this system. Initially, everything was running really well with the exception of a BSOD that would appear about once a week average (sometimes more, sometimes less)... well, the situation has deteriorated to the point where it happens every day, sometimes multiple times. Yesterday it crashed seven times in a five hour period. The strange thing is that it never happens with intensive and stressful applications; I can game till the cows come home, run Prime95 all night (it is currently in hour 12 with no errors) but this stupid crash will pop up in one of the two circumstances:

1. I am browsing the web with Firefox
2. I was just browsing the web with Firefox

I haven't tried IE yet (echh) to see if it really is specific to Firefox, but I'll add that to my troubleshooting list.

The error is a stop 0x0000009C (MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION) and upon googling I found that there is rarely an easy answer for this one. Last night I yanked out 3 of 4 DIMMs, my TV card and my sound card and I'll play around with Firefox some more today to see if it still happens. I'm thinking maybe the onboard NIC with this board is flaky.

Anyway, if anyone has had this problem and figured out what is causing it, let me know... otherwise I'll post back in a couple days with an update.

[edit] I see others are getting the 0x0000009c as well, so I'll keep my eye on that thread. SATA problem perhaps?

BTW my system:
3700+ San Diego (currently @ stock speed )
Asrock 939Dual (duh)
4x512 Kingston Value (tried various combinations already)
6800 vanilla 128 MB
SB Audigy
2 SATA HDD's

Change your memory to 2t settings. There's a funny issue with the 1t on this board that makes it crash in flash (hence firefox causing crashes), opening up word, and memtest test #8. Also, there's a sata 2 (2nd port, not sata II) issue for people booting harddrives attached to that port. And a few other quirks..........
 

professor1942

Senior member
Dec 22, 2005
509
0
0
Yes it's already at 2t...

@carstea - it boots Windows just fine, in fact the system usually runs without a hitch for 12-24 hours before the instability starts to occur. Temperatures seem fine however. One thing I realized last night is that I have a stereo speaker placed pretty close to the side of the case where the mobo is and I wonder if magnetic interference is causing this. I've moved the speaker and I'll report back later.
 

imported_Imp

Diamond Member
Dec 20, 2005
9,148
0
0
professor1942,

Yeah, I crash with the BSOD and it never gets logged in Eventviewer either, but it does in others from what I've seen. Also, seems like we have very similar problems now as I boot perfectly, it just 0x0000009c's on me. Just a note though, I posted this in the other thread. My DVD drive was making a really weird irregular cackling noise during the blue line XP booting screen. Shortly after, it BSODs and after reboot same thing. I take DVD out, no problem. Weird thing is that disc(movie) ran fine for hours yesterday. I'm using a different disk no problem now too. But I once had a mouse work for a while and then lock up the system (confirmed it was mouse since no problem after swapping). I've also had weird behaviour from my drive before, and this particular BSOD does suggest a hardware problem, maybe I found it. So try checking your optical (take discs out, unplug it, etc.), it may be the problem.

What sucks is that my optical drive, if it is failing, it isn't doing it often enough for me to confirm it as a problem.
 

fustercluck

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2002
7,402
0
71
Sorry for not reading the thread much, but will ASrock ever release a bios that allowed for higher voltage? I wanna get this thing past 3 ghz and i'm too lazy/shaky handed to do the volt mod.
 

hclarkjr

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
11,375
0
0
well i jsut installed an asrock with a 3700 sandy and love it so far. i bought it from newegg and it come with bios 1.50 installed, i must credit this thread for giving me the pointers i needed to get it up and running as the manual is pretty bad for it. in reading this thread i was able to zip through all the pages based on my past experience and had it up and running in 40 minutes. seems to be pretty stable and is pretty fast based on my last build. thanks to all that make anandtech what it is today