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

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: ChillyWilly
New Guy here,


Has anybody done overclocking with the AM2 CPU Board. I was wondering what I can expect, i just picked one up so I can do a cheap upgrade, I noticed that AM2 CPU's are much cheaper now than the comparable 939. I will have to get a New CPU and DDR2 Ram.

Any coments or experience will be great. Thanks,

Welcome to the forums - and my giant thread

I know we have at least one guy here using the AM2 board, and IIRC he was overclocking too. That was several months ago though, so I'd have to search a while to find who it was (and I'm not even sure if he checks this thread regularly anymore).

I briefly considered getting the AM2 board myself in the past - it's only $30, and like you said, AM2 CPU's are ridiculously cheap these days compared to 939's. DDR2 kills it for me though, not necessarily because DDR2 is overpriced but because I'd have to basically throw away 1-2GB of perfectly usable DDR1 RAM.

 

[g0dMAn]

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

Originally posted by: ChillyWilly
New Guy here,


Has anybody done overclocking with the AM2 CPU Board. I was wondering what I can expect, i just picked one up so I can do a cheap upgrade, I noticed that AM2 CPU's are much cheaper now than the comparable 939. I will have to get a New CPU and DDR2 Ram.

Any coments or experience will be great. Thanks,

Welcome to the forums - and my giant thread

I know we have at least one guy here using the AM2 board, and IIRC he was overclocking too. That was several months ago though, so I'd have to search a while to find who it was (and I'm not even sure if he checks this thread regularly anymore).

I briefly considered getting the AM2 board myself in the past - it's only $30, and like you said, AM2 CPU's are ridiculously cheap these days compared to 939's. DDR2 kills it for me though, not necessarily because DDR2 is overpriced but because I'd have to basically throw away 1-2GB of perfectly usable DDR1 RAM.

THROW AWAY ddr1 ram? Come on... you're on Anandtech where you can always find a buyer in the FS/FT section.

Now, I've a question... where can I get this AM2 riser card???

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: g0dMAn

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

Originally posted by: ChillyWilly
New Guy here,


Has anybody done overclocking with the AM2 CPU Board. I was wondering what I can expect, i just picked one up so I can do a cheap upgrade, I noticed that AM2 CPU's are much cheaper now than the comparable 939. I will have to get a New CPU and DDR2 Ram.

Any coments or experience will be great. Thanks,

Welcome to the forums - and my giant thread

I know we have at least one guy here using the AM2 board, and IIRC he was overclocking too. That was several months ago though, so I'd have to search a while to find who it was (and I'm not even sure if he checks this thread regularly anymore).

I briefly considered getting the AM2 board myself in the past - it's only $30, and like you said, AM2 CPU's are ridiculously cheap these days compared to 939's. DDR2 kills it for me though, not necessarily because DDR2 is overpriced but because I'd have to basically throw away 1-2GB of perfectly usable DDR1 RAM.

THROW AWAY ddr1 ram? Come on... you're on Anandtech where you can always find a buyer in the FS/FT section.

Now, I've a question... where can I get this AM2 riser card???

Yeah, but by the time I'm in a position to upgrade my CPU, it'll probably be time to dump AMD completely and go C2D/C2Q

I noticed while looking over my OP yesterday that the link I provided for the AM2 board no longer works (eWiz no longer carries it, it seems). I did manage to find a few hits on Froogle (Google's price/product search engine), the cheapest of which is here.

 

[g0dMAn]

thanks so much for the link, but man this is NOT WORTH IT:
$33.85 + $9.63 UPS Ground = $43.48

i'd almost be better off selling the board for $60+, and then spending $100 on an AM2 mobo.

damn... wish that adapter was cheaper...

I guess it's worth it if I had a good AGP card...

Anyone have any idea how well AM2 OCs with the AM2 Riser card? And the DDR2 as well? If it OCs well, it just may be worth it.

 

[imported_Woody]

My opinion on the M2 upgrade option.....

When the board first came out there were no AM2 CPUs and no one knew what kind of performance they would offer. It was assumed there would be a significant boost so adding the future CPU upgrade slot seemed like a big deal at the time offering an upgrade path not available on any other board. The reality turned out to be that the AM2 CPU paired with DDR2 was more of a lateral upgrade for the benefit of using modern DDR2 memory which had come down in price but without offering a significant performance advantage. There was no real benefit to tossing out your perfectly good DDR400 to go with AM2 but if you are starting from scratch it makes perfect sense to get DDR2 with AM2 since it's cheaper.

So as far as I can see the only reason to get the expansion card with this motherboard is if you absolutely don't want to toss out your legacy AGP graphics card. AMD can still compete with C2D from Intel from a price performance standpoint because they are so inexpensive these days and the performance, while not as good overall as C2D, is very competitive financially.
___________________________________________________

On the Opteron 165.......

I still haven't pushed mine past 280x9 but it's been running very well for the past month at 2.5GHz using only stock voltage of 1.35. I've already tested the board at 300MHz with the CPU downclocked for stability so I'm optimistic I can reach 2.7GHz with my Opteron 165 with a minor voltage increase. My RAM, currently running at around 230MHz seems to max out around 240-245 so I may have to introduce another divider to run the board at 300MHz. I'll have to weigh the benefits of such a compromise.

I told myself I would stop at 2.5GHz for a while at least to allow the thermal paste to properly settle in and to ensure long term stability but I think after a month it's time to push further. I'll let you all know how it goes.
____________________________________________________

On Vista and stability............

I'm dual booting from separate physical drives. I already had to trash my Vista install once and start over after some reckless experiments and due to the fact that XP kills all your restore points in Vista. I've solved that problem by simply removing the drive Vista resides on from the device manager in XP so that XP no longer sees the Vista drive and therefore can't f*&% it up anymore. I understand it's also possible to use MS powertoys "tweakUI" tool to hide just a partition from XP if you don't use a separate physical drive or if you simply don't want to hide the entire drive from XP. Sometimes you don't take the time to solve a problem until after it's bitten you in the ass. LOL

The system has been mostly stable with occasional problems that I'm certain are more a result of software and driver issues than hardware stability. I've played BF2 with both XP and Vista and it's better in XP. It crashes occasionally in Vista although very rarely. Mostly it's punkbuster compatibility issues in Vista when using mods such as Desert Conflict. My biggest complaint is actually that my Logitech mouse works smoother in XP and the Logitech Setpoint drivers are completely incompatible with BF2 in Vista causing strange things to happen. Games are complex system hogs that will probably work much better in Vista when they are written from the start to work with Vista. For now I'll just do most of my gaming in XP....it's less hassle.

I've had one USB issue that caused hard freezes or reboots in Vista when trying to connect an HP Photosmart 7350 printer. I used the front and rear USB ports with the same result. I've always had legacy USB support disabled in BIOS so maybe that has something to do with it. My front USB ports don't seem to work as well as my rear ports and some devices won't function from the front ports at all. This is true in XP or Vista so it's a hardware problem with the ASRock board I suspect. I'm using BIOS 1.80. I wouldn't be surprised at all if using external USB devices with readyboost may cause stability issues with this motherboard.

I'm using Vista drivers from a different ASRock board as I described in an earlier post in this thread.

 

[teiresias]

Hey guys, saw this was bumped and thought I'd pose a question. I'm about to wipe my harddrive by restoring a backup image of a clean WindowsXP install since it's getting to that time where I can tell the PC needs it.

In any case, I was wondering what people now consider the best course of action? Should I use the drivers on the Asrock website or is it better just to use the integrated 2.20 ULI driver from the Nvidia site?

Is there any consensus on what is the best combination of drivers to use nowadays? I have an AGP video card so I need to install the AGP drivers.

 

[imported_Woody]

I use the ASRock drivers but the NVidia drivers would probably work, I've never tried them. You can always experiment with the different drivers and see how they work out. DriverCleaner Pro is an excellent application for ensuring you've completely removed unwanted drivers.

Why do you feel you need to reinstall? I rarely, if every have to reinstall XP on my systems, it's very stable over the long term. The only times I create a clean install are when I build a new system. Unless you've caught a nasty virus you should be able to just clean out some junk and get XP back to it's original state.

You say you're going to use a backup image of a clean install? Does that mean you already installed the drivers and your software when you made that image?

 

[teiresias]

No, the HDD image is just XP with the service packs and whatever security patches were available at the time installed.

I'm also trying to hunt down an odd random crashing bug that happens on Oblivion and occasionally Guild Wars, but mainly Oblivion that I haven't been able to resolve. So I'm hoping this helps. I also keep stuff pretty minimal on this machine, so aside from having to backup and copy my iTunes library over, the amount of trouble it takes to wipe this machine is minimal - my laptop on the other hand, haha!!

Oh, one more question. Just in preparation I finally installed the Jmicron drivers and moved my existing harddrive over to the SATA2 connector last night just to experiment, since I'd never used it. Always had it on the regular SATA connector. However, I realized when I did that it left my DVD burner all alone on the second SATA header, and the machine wouldn't even boot until I disconnected it or moved it to the first SATA header. The machine boots and sees my HDD on the SATA2 connector fine, but it doesn't see my DVD burner (which is actually an PATA drive with a SATA adapter, just to clean up the cabling). Is there any way I can have the burner all by itself on the SATA connectors or do I need to always pair it with a HDD like I had it before? Otherwise, if I want to move the HDD to SATA2 I may have to move the burner back to PATA IDE2.

I guess I won't bother if I won't really see any performance boost out of using SATA2 versus SATA, but the reason I thought about doing that is because the random crashes (to the desktop, with an occasional complete PC freeze) I'm trying to solve always seem to happen when the games access the HDD, so I was thinking maybe moving it to the SATA2 might help, since it is a SATA2 HDD.

 

[teiresias]

Ugh, I knew I should have left well enough alone. Well, after I successfully moved the HDD over to the SATA2 connector I got to investigating whey my DVD burner wasn't showing up on the SATA #1 connector or #2 connector anymore. Turns out it wasn't even powering on, so I thought maybe it was dead, but when I plug it into IDE2 it runs and is detected by the motherboard fine.

Now, though, when I try and plug the HDD back into SATA #1 the mobo doesn't detect the harddrive anymore and asks me to select a valid boot device. It still boots up fine if I reattach the HDD to the SATA2 connector. So I thought maybe my SATA was dead, but when I boot into windows (after re-attaching the HDD to the SATA2 connector) it still shows up as working correctly under the hardware manager, and since the SATA is part of the southbridge(? maybe northbridge, I can't remember), you'd think that IC was dead alot more would be affected than just the SATA.

Perhaps after plugging in my HDD to the SATA2 header it's now in some kind of SATA2 mode and isn't negotiating with the vanilla SATA correctly anymore? But that wouldn't explain the optical drive. Ugh, anyone have any ideas?

 

[imported_Woody]

To be honest you kind of lost me there with all that troubleshooting. LOL I think I'd need to sit and create a flow chart to follow it all.

Have you tried emulating IDE for the SATA drive in BIOS? Or maybe it's set to IDE and you need it set to SATA mode. You won't see any performance advantage from running an optical drive in SATA vs IDE and by running the converter head you are only adding complexity to the issue. There are easier ways to clean up your cabling imo.

Running your drive from the SATA1 or the SATA2 also should show no performance difference unless it's a SATA2 drive and certain features but you won't likely see a performance difference since SATA1 still offers more than enough bandwidth for modern drives.

On my system I boot with a SATA2 drive off the SATA2 interface and have a RAID0 connected to the two SATA1 interfaces. In VISTA I boot with a nice Seagate 320MB 7200.10 PATA drive I picked up cheap for the sole purpose of running Vista. It broke my heart that I had to buy the PATA version of the drive but I was all out of SATA ports. Who would have thought 3 wouldn't be enough for this board ever right? LOL. Besides, this drive is fast and it still screams even when connected to the PATA interface.

It could also be a driver issue in your case. If you are having trouble booting from the SATA drive try setting IDE mode in the BIOS. Make sure you have the proper chipset drivers installed. You could try uninstalling and reinstalling the other chipset drivers from NVidia you discussed yesterday.

Another interesting thing I've noticed about this board. Even though the manual says the SATA ports don't support hot plug SATA, I get a "safely remove hardware" icon on my taskbar for my SATA2 drive as if it's a plug in USB drive. This is my boot drive in XP and I don't see this at all in Vista. Obviously I don't want to "safely remove" my boot drive in XP while running and I've never tried doing it.

 

[teiresias]

I fixed it. I had to set a jumper on the HDD to revert it back to SATA 1.5Gbps speed. That is a bit odd since I didn't have that jumper set before when it was on the SATA interface, but I suppose when I moved it over the SATA2 connector it auto-negotiated with the SATA2 interface and set it to 3.0Gbps and when I moved it back to the SATA interface perhaps it doesn't auto-negotiate correctly (either the ULi's or the HDD's fault) and I had to use the jumper to force it back to 1.5Gbps so that it would work.

I also went ahead and just pulled out an old rounded IDE cable and stuck the optical drive back on the IDE2 header, since I didn't want to deal with the headache. After restoring the XP image I went ahead and installed the Jmicron driver (since it wasn't installed in the image I had, which is why i needed to move the HDD back to the SATA temporarily) and moved the HDD back to SATA2.

Everything is working fine now.

I also haven't experienced any game crashes like I was before, so that's also a plus. Whether fixing the crashes was a result of the clean XP install or the move of the HDD from the SATA to the SATA2 header I can't tell though.

 

[hhoffmanlv]

I took the plunge and ordered the AM2CPU board with an X2 5600+ .. I know its not " officially " supported .. But I will post my results both good and bad.. The ram I have to use with it is ddr2 667 .. The multiplier on the cpu is 14 so my question is , with a buss speed of 200 mhz what will the ram be running at ? Anyone able to enlighten me ? Thanks in advance

 

[scgt1]

Is there anywhere to still purchase this board? I have a X2 4200 939 sitting in a sealed box from tiger. I looked at newegg. The mobo was in stock jumped over to tiger ordered the proc for 138 shipped. Went back to newegg to order the mobo. Low and behold sold out.

 

[imported_Woody]

Originally posted by: hhoffmanlvThe ram I have to use with it is ddr2 667 .. The multiplier on the cpu is 14 so my question is , with a buss speed of 200 mhz what will the ram be running at ? Anyone able to enlighten me ? Thanks in advance

I don't have any experience overclocking DDR2 systems but I'm going to guess that if you run the CPU at the default settings the memory will run at default speeds also. In this case 667MHz.

If you were to set the bus speed at 220MHz, for example, which is a 10% overclock the CPU would run at 220MHzx14=3.08GHz and the RAM would run at approximately 734MHz (default 667 plus 10%). Assuming of course that the parts are actually able to handle a 10% overclock without melting.

Or it could be that the memory will attempt to run at 4x200 or 800MHz and you really should invest in DDR2 800 type memory for this CPU. I'm assuming you can stick a memory divider in there like with A64 setups to reduce the speed of the RAM when running at high bus speeds if necessary. The default memory bus speed for DDR2 667 is 333MHz so you may be able to manually set that separately from the CPU bus speed.

Someone please step in and correct me if my assumptions about overclocking with DDR2 are incorrect.

 

[hhoffmanlv]

I don't have any experience overclocking DDR2 systems but I'm going to guess that if you run the CPU at the default settings the memory will run at default speeds also. In this case 667MHz.

If you were to set the bus speed at 220MHz, for example, which is a 10% overclock the CPU would run at 220MHzx14=3.08GHz and the RAM would run at approximately 734MHz (default 667 plus 10%). Assuming of course that the parts are actually able to handle a 10% overclock without melting.

Or it could be that the memory will attempt to run at 4x200 or 800MHz and you really should invest in DDR2 800 type memory for this CPU. I'm assuming you can stick a memory divider in there like with A64 setups to reduce the speed of the RAM when running at high bus speeds if necessary. The default memory bus speed for DDR2 667 is 333MHz so you may be able to manually set that separately from the CPU bus speed.

Someone please step in and correct me if my assumptions about overclocking with DDR2 are incorrect.[/quote]

Ok Thankyou for the input .. That is what I figured would happen .. Got my board and cpu in the mail yesterday ... should be installing today ... will post my results... the Ram Upgrade is a good suggestion ... but is actually how I got to this point .. To Explain .. I was planning on moving to C2D so saw the deal on SuperTalent DDR2 ram and bought 4 gigs ... but soon realised that my purchase was a bit " rash " as talk of DDR2 1000 ram started .. also " bearlake " chipsets , new 1333 C2D chips.. ARGH ... [ha ha] so decide to take advantage of this boards upgrade path , and AMD's new price-point and do an " interim " bump .. Total for ram , cpu , and am2cpu board $430 and its a decent jump from my X2 3800 , and pc3200 ram .. Should hold me till end of year ..

 

[kmmatney]

I bought one of these boards as a refurb from NewEgg about 2 months ago - it was $24.99 shipped, with just the bare board, no back panel or anything else.

The problem I'm having is that it will not boot up from my 320 GB Seagate SATA drive. I can run Ubuntu from a Sata DVD, and I can hook up the SATA DVD drive to both channels, and they both work fine. However it just will not boot from my SATA hard drive. For now, I installed Win 2K on a spare IDE 40 GB hard drive I had lying around, and that is running fine at 2.66 Ghz. ANyone else had similar issues with this MB.

I think this is the perfect board to combine with an E4XXX cpu, since it overclocks so easily. I had DDR memory when I bought this board, but was able to trade up for some DDR2 since, so I didn't really need to buy this board. However I'd be pretty happy with it if it was just able to boot from my SATA hard drive.

Edit: Damn - I just realized this thread is for the Socket 939 version of this board... Why the hell don't they make an AM2 board that takes DDR? I would have boughten that instead, if I had the option.

 

[hhoffmanlv]

Ok .. so here is the udate .. Got the X2 5600 windsor core and the AM2CPU board on my 939 dualsataII .. Running fine ... running the bus at 210 right now and voltage is at 1.35v .. Ram is Super Talent 667 so cpuz shows the core at 2941.0 the ht at 840.3 [800 in bios] and Ram at 326.8 with auto setting resulting in cas 5 , ras to cas 5 , ras precharge 5 , tras 13 , trc 19 , and 2T ..
When I first booted I tried the Ram as 800 ddr2 and ran a memtest from dos .. and got some errors. Don't see anyway to play with memory voltage ... so dont think I can go there ..

So thats about it ... Happy so far , upgrade was from an X2 3800 and DDR400 ram

Any Input for further Tweaking would be very much appreciated !! Thanks in advance

Update : Bumped bus to 220 and still running fine .. mem @ 342 , CPU @3081

 

[WT]

Thread revival !! Just like hhoffmanlv I am interested in dropped an upgrade board and 5200+ into this board along with some cheap Super Talent 667 RAM. Currently running an Opteron 144 @ 2.7 so its no slouch on that end, but its either the above upgrade or toss it in the closet and go with a C2D 4300/Asrock VSTA setup. I love this board and I just can't retire it. So I'll probably end up buying both .. the newer Asrock board with a 4300 and the 5200+. Geez, I hafta stop buying so much hardware ... looking for the AM2 riser card currently.

Found the Ewiz link is now valid, I'm in for one at $31 !!! Don't stop me now, I know what I am doing ... *evil laugh* muhahahahaaaa

Edit II: Damn ... the 5200+ costs as much as the 4300 AND an Asrock board, which makes this a much less attractive deal. AMD seems to be keeping the AM2 prices just a bit too high.

 

[nemesismk2]

Do any of you guys have any experience with running Vista with the Asrock 939 Dual Sata2?
How is the stability and performance?

 

[Dragonfly47]

Originally posted by: nemesismk2
Do any of you guys have any experience with running Vista with the Asrock 939 Dual Sata2?
How is the stability and performance?

I've been running Vista Ultimate on my test box on an Asrock 939 Dual Sata2 (1 GB OCZ RAM, Radeon 9550 AGP, AMD Athlon 64 4000+). It's as stable on that box as XP Pro or Ubuntu (triple booting). I haven't pushed it real hard (not a gamer), but it seems as snappy as XP Pro on this configuration. I'm sure it would benefit from another GB of RAM but, for the use i give it, a single GB seems adequate. Runs Aero and Vista Media Center just fine, too.

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: nemesismk2
Do any of you guys have any experience with running Vista with the Asrock 939 Dual Sata2?
How is the stability and performance?

I've run both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista Ultimate on my machine here, actually I've been using Vista as my primary OS since RC2 was released last fall. Right now my specs are very basic (A64 3200+ @2.6GHz, 9700 Pro, 2GB PC3200), but generally it runs very well.

I bought an HDTV tuner last month to use with Media Center, and other than some issues with sleep/wake for scheduled recordings, I'm very pleased with it. Obviously I'm quite limited by my video card in what kind of gaming I can do, but for the older stuff I play (even up to and including UT2004, as long as I turn off AF entirely) - it's as fast as I remember XP being.

I haven't had any stability problems that I don't suspect to be caused by my weak (330W) power supply; that is, no BSOD's etc. The main piece of advice I can give if you're thinking about running Vista is, upgrade to 2GB of RAM if you haven't already. It's certainly possible to run the OS with 1GB, but 2GB makes a huge speed difference, especially if you usually have a lot of open applications like I do. (This probably applies even more so if you have a fast enough video card to play new, and therefore larger, games.)

 

[nemesismk2]

Thanks Dragonfly47 and SynthDude2001,if I decide to get Vista I will certainly upgrade my memory.

 

[logicmaster2003]

hi im back.. sorry for my long absense.. been very busy mingling with linux alot !! in addition to skateboarding / playing counterstrike / battlefield 2 / summer school and such.

Anywayz.. I think my 939 DUAL SATA2 mobo BIOS is still around v1.6 but its ok. I still have the AMD opteron-148 running winXP on SATA-1 250GB harddrive, and recently upgraded Video card from ATI9800 agp to Nvidia 7950 GT pcie. And very very recently I've added a 500GB SATA-II (3GB/sec) drive to replace my 250GB SATA-1 (1.5GB/sec).

Speaking of the newly added SATA-II 3GB/sec drive (using the official SATA-II cable)... I use Acronis True Image to clone my existing 250GB SATA-1 into this new 500GB SATA-II. However it won't boot when I connect this to the mobo's SATA-II port, although it shows up on BIOS correctly, it gives me BSOD with some text. It boots OK when I connnect it to the SATA-1 port !!

Anyone know why ? Thanks in advance.

 

[Dragonfly47]

I'm guessing the original install doesn't like the fact that you've changed SATA ports. Will your original SATA-I drive boot from your SATA-II port? I'm supposing not.

Run a non destructive System Repair from your Windows install disks on the newly cloned drive, and everything should sort itself out.

 

[fustercluck]

I remember one of the reasons I got this motherboard is it would be able to handle some future upgrades, but now I don't remember what those are - By the time I upgrade I'm likely going to need a new mother board anyhow...quad core will probably be my next upgrade. This motherboard has done me good though, and it was uber cheap...best motherboard value ever.