I have the (oddest) of luck...
I bought a P4S8x (Asus) mainboard and 2.53 GHz NW last week.
I had all the other parts to assemble it so I dust off my trusty Infinion CL2 PC2100 512MB modules and put all three in the board. I drop in the CPU and HSF. (retail cooler is a foxcon and is quite large) I connect a 1800JB on the Promise controller. (only one connector is present and only one drive can go on here, more on that later) A Pioneer DVD 106/2, Antec True 550, Teac 1.44 Floppy, Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum EX and NEC M500 monitor wrap up the rest of the parts.
I power on to make sure all the case LED connectors are plugged in the right way and hear the beep immediately along with the floppy scan--before my monitor has time to warm up! I hit delete and go into the BIOS and change a few things like disable the onboard sound and 1394.
Everything looks good although the [CPU] voltage looks low at 1.39 volts! I reboot and boot from the XP Pro disk and load XP.
After installing XP and downloading all of the Windows Updates, I install the SiS AGP 1.12 drivers. I installed the Realtek NIC driver but it caused a strange lag when logging into our domain so I rolled back to the MS one.
Time to O/C! My goal was to run at 150 MHz FSB as I recall this ram works perfect at that speed with some headroom on top of that. I boot at 2849 MHz (BIOS) and start loading typical geek carburettor dung like anything with Mad Onion on it, etc.
I ran 3DMark 2001 SE and the machine rebooted on the dragothic test. Damn! I go into BIOS and the CPU temp is 43C and the VCC is 1.38 volts! I changed to manual and selected 1.6 volts. This gave me 1.51 volts measured. (This is default voltage for this cpu I believe!)
I rebooted and started running the benchmarks...
Somewhere around 15K on the 3D Mark. Not bad considering my dual MP2200+ barely breaks 10k with a Quadro. (equiv to a Ti4600 with some fancy drawing features that us engineers use!
)
Just about anything I ran did so with no problem. I even set the BIOS to automatically adjust the CPU fan speed according to temp. The only time you can hear the CPU fan is when it's running 3D Mark. Otherwise, the whine of the 1800JB and the Radeon's fan is noticeable. The only way to get my other worksation even remotely as quiet as this thing is to turn it off! This system is Dell quiet!
I quickly notice that if I raise the FSB to 158 my cpu will be running at just a hair over 3GHz. I try it and it is running but will reboot if I run anything intesnsive. I quick check with Memtest86 reveals errors. I'm sure that FSB is too high for this memory. Not that I should complain after all 150 MHz 222 is pretty damn impressive for three 512 modules!
The onboard Promise controller has two connectors for serial ATA. While the box came with just about everything else, I think ASUS should have included at least one SATA adapter since no SATA only drives exist on the market. The strange thing with this controller is the parallel interface will only see one hard drive. I tried to put two drives on to configure them in a RAID1 array and the Fastrack BIOS didn't see the other drive! It would appear that the only way to use RAID on this board is to use the SATA connectors. Great, just another reason why ASUS should have included the adapters! They do give you a pair of nice bright fire red SATA cables though.
I've settled on 2850 and so far the results have been satisfatory. The first night (last Saturday) I looped 3DMark 2001 (with a GF 4 Ti4600 out of my wife's computer) and Prime 95 Torture test set to use a maximum of 1250 MB of physical memory. No problems from either after 18 hours. I put in the Memtest86 floppy and booted and let that run for 8 hours. Not one single error after 22 passes! Nothing! I thought that was pretty nice considering what I read about this motherboard over at asusboards.com! That's how my luck is. If I buy something that's supposed to be the best I have issues, if I buy something that everyone says is junk, it works great. Well, not always.
That brings me the issue with this 9700. There are a lot of programs that just won't run on this card. I've tried it on three systems with different results. Surprisingly, my wife's system (KX7 abit, KT333) runs fine with the 9700. Even Giants runs! On both this P4S8X and an AMD 761 system I cannot get Giants to work for more than a minute without locking up. The sound will play fine for a good minute after the system freezes. Then the sound will die kind of like the music when Vinny and Lisa walked into the bar to collect from pool!
I like the 9700 but I think they just need to work out some issues with the board. Hopefully driver revisions can fix them. That is all I will say about the 9700 since I don't want to turn this into a thread about the 9700.
I must say at 2850 MHz, the NW is pretty fast. More apps are using SSE2 instructions making this an attactive platform over the Athlon. I must say the FPU on the K7 is very strong and on old apps that don't use SSE of any form it takes a really fast NW to beat a K7.
This chip runs much cooler than the K7 although the retail HS is quite large. The snap mounting beats using a screwdriver to clip on the HS by far. Hopefully the K8 will follow suit.
This sounds like a keeper to me. A nice home system that can even be used next to the bed.
I bought a P4S8x (Asus) mainboard and 2.53 GHz NW last week.
I had all the other parts to assemble it so I dust off my trusty Infinion CL2 PC2100 512MB modules and put all three in the board. I drop in the CPU and HSF. (retail cooler is a foxcon and is quite large) I connect a 1800JB on the Promise controller. (only one connector is present and only one drive can go on here, more on that later) A Pioneer DVD 106/2, Antec True 550, Teac 1.44 Floppy, Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum EX and NEC M500 monitor wrap up the rest of the parts.
I power on to make sure all the case LED connectors are plugged in the right way and hear the beep immediately along with the floppy scan--before my monitor has time to warm up! I hit delete and go into the BIOS and change a few things like disable the onboard sound and 1394.
Everything looks good although the [CPU] voltage looks low at 1.39 volts! I reboot and boot from the XP Pro disk and load XP.
After installing XP and downloading all of the Windows Updates, I install the SiS AGP 1.12 drivers. I installed the Realtek NIC driver but it caused a strange lag when logging into our domain so I rolled back to the MS one.
Time to O/C! My goal was to run at 150 MHz FSB as I recall this ram works perfect at that speed with some headroom on top of that. I boot at 2849 MHz (BIOS) and start loading typical geek carburettor dung like anything with Mad Onion on it, etc.
I ran 3DMark 2001 SE and the machine rebooted on the dragothic test. Damn! I go into BIOS and the CPU temp is 43C and the VCC is 1.38 volts! I changed to manual and selected 1.6 volts. This gave me 1.51 volts measured. (This is default voltage for this cpu I believe!)
I rebooted and started running the benchmarks...
Somewhere around 15K on the 3D Mark. Not bad considering my dual MP2200+ barely breaks 10k with a Quadro. (equiv to a Ti4600 with some fancy drawing features that us engineers use!
)Just about anything I ran did so with no problem. I even set the BIOS to automatically adjust the CPU fan speed according to temp. The only time you can hear the CPU fan is when it's running 3D Mark. Otherwise, the whine of the 1800JB and the Radeon's fan is noticeable. The only way to get my other worksation even remotely as quiet as this thing is to turn it off!
This system is Dell quiet!I quickly notice that if I raise the FSB to 158 my cpu will be running at just a hair over 3GHz. I try it and it is running but will reboot if I run anything intesnsive. I quick check with Memtest86 reveals errors. I'm sure that FSB is too high for this memory. Not that I should complain after all 150 MHz 222 is pretty damn impressive for three 512 modules!
The onboard Promise controller has two connectors for serial ATA. While the box came with just about everything else, I think ASUS should have included at least one SATA adapter since no SATA only drives exist on the market. The strange thing with this controller is the parallel interface will only see one hard drive. I tried to put two drives on to configure them in a RAID1 array and the Fastrack BIOS didn't see the other drive! It would appear that the only way to use RAID on this board is to use the SATA connectors. Great, just another reason why ASUS should have included the adapters! They do give you a pair of nice bright fire red SATA cables though.
I've settled on 2850 and so far the results have been satisfatory. The first night (last Saturday) I looped 3DMark 2001 (with a GF 4 Ti4600 out of my wife's computer) and Prime 95 Torture test set to use a maximum of 1250 MB of physical memory. No problems from either after 18 hours. I put in the Memtest86 floppy and booted and let that run for 8 hours. Not one single error after 22 passes! Nothing! I thought that was pretty nice considering what I read about this motherboard over at asusboards.com! That's how my luck is. If I buy something that's supposed to be the best I have issues, if I buy something that everyone says is junk, it works great. Well, not always.
That brings me the issue with this 9700. There are a lot of programs that just won't run on this card. I've tried it on three systems with different results. Surprisingly, my wife's system (KX7 abit, KT333) runs fine with the 9700. Even Giants runs! On both this P4S8X and an AMD 761 system I cannot get Giants to work for more than a minute without locking up. The sound will play fine for a good minute after the system freezes. Then the sound will die kind of like the music when Vinny and Lisa walked into the bar to collect from pool!
I like the 9700 but I think they just need to work out some issues with the board. Hopefully driver revisions can fix them. That is all I will say about the 9700 since I don't want to turn this into a thread about the 9700.
I must say at 2850 MHz, the NW is pretty fast. More apps are using SSE2 instructions making this an attactive platform over the Athlon. I must say the FPU on the K7 is very strong and on old apps that don't use SSE of any form it takes a really fast NW to beat a K7.
This chip runs much cooler than the K7 although the retail HS is quite large. The snap mounting beats using a screwdriver to clip on the HS by far. Hopefully the K8 will follow suit.
This sounds like a keeper to me. A nice home system that can even be used next to the bed.
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