Unofficial Soltek SL-K8AN2E-GR thread

[imported_Bucko]

I sent this to Soltek but thought others might be interested. Who knows?
As you can tell I like to play.

It?s Bucko again,
Could you suggest the best setup for my drives?
At the moment I have my optical DVD/CD both WR's on IDE 0
Two 80 gig 7200 Western Digital drives with 8mb cache on IDE 1 using the nvidia raid0 function not the XP software. This is against my better thinking of having stripped drives on the same channel.
But cabling is a problem combining Hdd/master>>DVD/slave...Hdd/master>>CD/slave.
And on the Promise controller I have two 20gig 7200 Max's that where raided with xp software and then moved to the promise and they show as raid 0. All my drives are IDE's. Same problem of two drives being on the same channel. All these drives are up and running OK I guess. The bench testing with the latest Sandra 2004 isn't really very impressive. (I'll send to you if your interested). I just re-found ATTO drive tester and will retest just the drives tonight.
One more thing Sandra keeps saying that my SMBios is wrong or not install. What the heck is Smbios?

My system spec. SL-K8AN2E-GR. PWRCLR|9800SE. 64/3200/1MB. 1GIG 2700/333(wish these where 400)
I was able to softmod my 9800se to make use of all 8 pipes. OC 428/365 with Artic cooler.
I think I should be getting better then 5700 on 3Dmark03 score. Farcry mulit is excellent
Bucko out
atto trace testing


link to atto

 

[DAPUNISHER]

SiSuck is next to useless, do not base anything off of it

 

[imported_mpaulu]

Following Problem:

I am trying to use 2 WD74GB SATA on the NVidia RAID in RAID 0 and parrallel 2 WD36GB SATA on the Promise RAID in RAID 1.

The NVidia Raid works without any problem, but the 2 WD36 SATA are only recognised by the BIOS if I put the Promise in the SATA mode only, if I switch the Promise in RAID mode the system does not recognises the HDD's.

Even more strange if I disable all HDD control function on the NVidia including SATA and ATA the Promise recognises the 2 WD36 SATA in RAID mode letting me set up the array and so on.

But when switching back the NVidia control on, same situation, no recogintion of the 2 WD36 SATA as RAID can only switch back to SATA function than the HDD's are recognised.

Seems to be a Problem with the BIOS, hope they fix this soon otherwise need to set up the RAID 1 at the Promise via WinXP.

Anyone similar experience???

Thx.

Michael

 

[imported_Bucko]

ATTO test results on my RAID0's Nvidia raids
first one is master/slave on IDE1
80gig x2 7200ata100
80gig x2 7200ata100 IDE0 / IDE1
same as above but with slave DVD/rw
will add single drive test later
XP raid0 on the 20 gigs can't make promice raid work yet.. raided on main IDE's then moved to sata/pata controller
20gig x 2 on promice IDE port
will add single drive test later

beat my 3dmark03 scores by OC 64 to 2.2 1.5v
3D-mark
spec. card


Sandra Drive test both Drives on same channel 80 gigs
IDE0
moved to seperate channels
IDE0 / IDE1

 

[LocutusX]

SiSuck may indeed suck, but doesn't it have a fairly reliable memory bandwidth tester?

What scores are you guys getting - at stock - with the latest version of SiSuck's mem bandwidth test?

I'm getting 2750 -2850MB/s on the Asus ... was hoping for at least 3GB/s. :/

 

[imported_Bucko]

Originally posted by: mpaulu
Following Problem:

Anyone similar experience???

Thx.

Michael

I fought the same thing last night thought i'd go crazy getting things to work out.
Give SolTek a try and see what they say.
Bucko

 

[DAPUNISHER]

If the manual didn't have any specific advice about how to use the promise and nV together in RAID setups, e-mailing tech support is the way to go. They are fast to reply and actually have good advice more oft than not.

Back to SiSuck, all the benchies it contains are synthetic and do not translate to real world performance indicators. It has been dropped by this site due to it's being ineffectual. With A64 latencies are far more relevant than bandwidth, A64 has enough already, and Sandra doesn't accurately reflect it's significance IMO.

 

[DoobieOnline]

Well I got everything together and the install went smooth as silk. I didn't have to hit F6 to load any drivers with a single SATA drive and it was the fastest XP install I've ever had. With everything at default (3200+ 1MB, BFG Ultra OC, gig of Ballistix PC4000), I'm getting 79.8 FPS in Doom 3 and that's an improvement of 5 FPS over the P4 stuff that was in this same box until tonight (P4P800, 2.8C at 3.5GHz, 250FSB, 1:1).

Now for the heartbreaker - I can't get the Clawhammer 3200+ CG to overclock at all. Maybe I'm not doing it right but I've tried every combination available in bios. Bumped core and mem to max voltage and still couldn't hit even 210 FSB even with 3X HT. I tried lowering the multi to 9 and bumping it to 222 FSB so it would still be posting at 2GHz, but even that was a no go. I even tried the beta bios, but the results were the same.

Here's one I could never figure out - what setting do you adjust to run 1:1 when you're trying to get over the default 200MHz? The only RAM frequency options I see are default, 166, 133, and 100. If you set it to default and adjust the FSB of the system, will it be in 1:1 and go over 200MHz?

I'll get a good laugh out of this if I missed something that will enable me to get any OC at all. I don't see how I could have overlooked anything because I've been messing around in bios for the last couple of hours trying out different things. The only thing I haven't tried is trying to run with only stick of the Ballistix installed. I guess I'll try that and see if anything changes, then call it a night and start up again tomorrow morning.

The system is super-fast at stock settings so I'm not unhappy about it. I just love to OC and it's kind of a bummer that I can't get past default settings.

doobie

 

[DoobieOnline]

Well that didn't take long. It was two sticks causing all the fuss. I took one out, went into bios and bumped it up to 220 and XP loaded no problem. Went back into bios and bumped it to 240 and I'm sitting here typing on it right now. Big bummer that it won't OC with a gig of RAM. I'll have to run some benchies and see how much difference 512MB vs 1GB makes. I have a gig of Geil PC4000 lying around so I'll try that and see if it will work with two sticks (highly unlikely).

doobie

 

[krose]

Originally posted by: DoobieOnline

Here's one I could never figure out - what setting do you adjust to run 1:1 when you're trying to get over the default 200MHz? The only RAM frequency options I see are default, 166, 133, and 100. If you set it to default and adjust the FSB of the system, will it be in 1:1 and go over 200MHz?

doobie

If you set the max memclock to auto it will run 1:1 with whatever FSB you select. That is a bummer on the two sticks not working. I was going to get another stick of Adata PC4000 myself. Guess I'll wait until I hear more. Thanks for the report.

 

[CraigRT]

That's a shame about your OC DoobieOnline... even my 3200 Newcastle runs at 2.4GHz easily on this board.
maybe your CPU is just not an OCer!

 

[DoobieOnline]

Oh man, I stayed up waaaay too late last night. :laugh:

Ok, here's an update. The Ballistix is great RAM but 2 x 512MB is not compatible with this setup at anything over 200MHz. It will do 2-2-2-5 1T no problem at 2.6V and I ran it at 2-2-2-10 based on all the A64 reviews I've seen saying those are the best timings. No matter how relaxed the timings are or using max voltage, it just won't work when OC'ing. Here's the kicker - the Ballistix will run 250 FSB (1:1, 2.65V, 2.5-3-3-6, Turbo Mode, Dual-Channel) with the P4 setup I mentioned a couple of posts back. Weird, huh? Maybe a future bios will solve this, but at this point it's pretty disappointing.

Now for the good news - my gig of Geil Ultra Series PC4000 will run peachy when OC'ing this setup. I ran 240 FSB, 1:1, 4X, 2.5-4-4-7 last night and played some Doom 3 but it crashed due to a memory dump, which leads me to believe that it would work fine if I could bump VDIMM past 2.8V to maybe 2.85-2.9V. I flashed back to original bios because the beta didn't do anything for me with OC'ing. Right now I'm running 220 FSB, 4X, 1:1, 1.55 Vcore, 2.8 VDIMM and it's Prime 95 stable. I'm going to try pushing it to 230 FSB in a moment and see how Prime does.

The Soltek is a great board. It would be perfect if it had a little higher Vcore and VDIMM available. This is my first Soltek board I am truly impressed with their quality and must say it was the most professional and complete packaging I've ever seen. I'm definitely going to keep it and hope for a better bios down the road (not more voltage options, but hopefully some adjustments that will fix the RAM compatibility issues that seem to effect most of the NF3 250 boards out right now).

The Ballistix will just go in my backup rig along with the P4 setup because that's still a screaming system and I like the tight timings I can get with that setup. I may look around and see what RAM seems to work best at 2.8V and 240 FSB because I know this Clawhammer will do it with 1.55V and it just needs RAM capable of hanging with it that will run at 2.8V. Thanks to everyone for letting me rant & rave a bit.

krose - I tested Prime 95 / Windows shutdown and couldn't reproduce the problem. I've successfully shut down/restarted three times now after running Prime. I hope you get that figured out!

doobie

 

[DoobieOnline]

240 FSB wasn't stable on the 3200+ at 10X multi, even with the RAM set to 166, so this Clawhammer would need more voltage to get any higher. Figured I'd try to tackle from another angle, so I put the Ballistix back in and ran it this way...

250 FSB, 9X multi, 4X HT, RAM at 2-2-2-10-1T (set to 166 in bios, which gives me an 11 divider on mem). So, I'm running 2.25GHZ with the 3200+ 1MB CG and 205MHz with 2 x 512MB Ballistix PC4000. The higher FSB helped a bit, as I scored 83.4 FPS in the Doom 3 timedemo. That's an improvement of a few frames per second from when I was running 2.2GHZ (10x220) with the gig of Geil at 1:1. Die temp never goes above 47C under load, so thanks for suggesting the SLK948U. Paired with a Panaflo 92mm H it works wonders.

It's all Prime 95 stable. It took a lot of tweaking, but I'm completely happy now. One of the best things to come out of all this is that I now understand the A64 tweaking options pretty well. I tried everything before finally settling for the way it's set up now so I definitely know what does/doesn't work. I'm lovin' this board more and more.

Thanks guys!

doobie

 

[krose]

Glad to hear you are running well. This no shutdown continues to plague me. Most of the time it shuts down but on occasion it just keeps running after the shut down message. I left it on all last nite after a shut down and it was still running this morning. This was after recording with WinTV2000. I thought it was CPU related from the Prime95 problem but the TV card has an onboard MPEG encoder and does not use the CPU so much. I also had it happen after using Nero. Tonite when I boooted it lost the nvidia RAID0 but upon reboot it was OK. Guess I should RMA.

 

[krose]

Well I just tested one more thing. When you load the nvidia RAID drivers it loads the nvidia IDE driver (Nvidia CK8S Parallel ATA controller v2.5). So in device manager I changed the IDE driver to the default Windows 2000 driver and the problem appears to be solved.

 

[CraigRT]

Hey everyone, I found a review of the board...

so incase anyone is interested in buying the board, here is a review.

Review of Soltek K8AN2E-GR

 

[mollyelated]

My boyfriend and I bought the makings of a computer yesterday, and although I'd put one together before, neither of us are close to experts. First off this is what we were/are working with:

Athlon 64 3000+
Soltek SL-K8AN2E-GR
2 x Kingston 512MB PC-3200 DDR400 SDRAM
Western Digital 80GB w/ 8MB cache
Sapphire Radeon? 9600XT 256MB DDR
52x32x52 CDRW

We got everything together, it powered up fine, but it won't boot the HD which has WinXP Pro on it. It briefly flashes a message that reads "No device found! No BIOS installed". It won't boot from the Windows CD either, and when I try to boot the cd from a floppy it give a similar message, "File \biosinfo.inf could not be loaded. Error code is 4096. Setup cannot continue." I tried the same thing on a brand new clean identical HD and got the same message. Both the HD and the CDRW are recognised on start-up as primary master and slave respectively.

It seems to have a BIOS, in that on boot, when i hit delete it lets me edit the CMOS settings, but I really don?t know that much about this sort of thing. Is it possible that some of the other hardware is interfering, or that I just haven't configured the BIOS setting properly?

I tried to upgrade the BIOS using the files supplied earlier in the thread but it didn't seem to change anything.

Has anyone else had this problem? Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix it? Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[DoobieOnline]

Hey Molly,
Welcome to AT Forums! I'm not sure this will fix your problem but it may. For the HD and CDRW, you're using the two IDE ports (1 & 2) that are near the middle of the board, right? In bios, find the page that has the Promise setting and change that to disabled. I'm pretty sure I saw the same error msg you quoted when I had to clear CMOS with the jumper and forgot to disable the Promise controller in bios when I reset everything. Hope that helps.

krose,
Glad you got that worked out. I've read of some problems with using the NV IDE drivers, but I've been lucky so far. I decided to use them but I haven't tried to burn with Nero yet. Hopefully it won't give me any headaches, but if it does I'll know to use Windows IDE driver.

doobie

 

[mollyelated]

At the moment I'm just using IDE1. I disabled the Promise setting before, still getting the same message.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: mollyelated
At the moment I'm just using IDE1. I disabled the Promise setting before, still getting the same message.

Put the CD-RW on IDE2 and make certain both are jumpered correctly for master/single. It's never a good idea to have ATAPI drives on the same cable as HDDs if you can avoid it. Set the CD as the first boot device and HDD as second, that should get you going.

 

[Fuzn]

Hi. Well, I'm sorta having a problem with this board. The system i'm going on here is:

Athlon 64 3400+
Soltek SL-K8AN2E-GR
Corsair Value Select 1G(512MBx2) DDR PC-3200
2 Seagate 200GB 7200RPM Barracuda's on SATA 1 and 2 in a RAID 0
IBM 120GB on the IDE1 channel
Sony DVD-RW DRU-501A on the IDE2 channel
BFG 6800 GT Overclocked


I'm having sort of the same problem that some other people are. I have windows on the SATA RAID 0 setup and the only way I could make it boot was to make the IBM HD a slave drive. It would say NTLDR is missing. Yeah. The only way I could boot without it being set as slave was to hit esc and choose the thing. I wish I could just specify I want to boot from the SATA setup but it's not even selectable in the bios at all. It just shows the harddrive on the IDE channel. Any ways to work around this? It's nothing important but I find it a tad annoying.

 

[krose]

Here's what I did. I am assuming you are using the nvidia RAID and not the Promise. Go to Integrated Peripherals. Under IDE Function Setup, enable IDE RAID. Then enable SATA Primary Master RAID and SATA Secondary Master RAID. Leave the others disabled. Then go to Advanced BIOS features and select Hard Disk Boot Priority. You will not see your RAID array because the RAID BIOS must detect it *after* the mobo does. What you will see is Bootable Add-in Cards. Move that to the top of the boot order with the + key. The onboad RAID is treated as an add-in card. Oh and make sure you have disabled the Promise controller by the jumper and in the BIOS if you are not using it.

 

[Fuzn]

Originally posted by: krose
Here's what I did. I am assuming you are using the nvidia RAID and not the Promise. Go to Integrated Peripherals. Under IDE Function Setup, enable IDE RAID. Then enable SATA Primary Master RAID and SATA Secondary Master RAID. Leave the others disabled. Then go to Advanced BIOS features and select Hard Disk Boot Priority. You will not see your RAID array because the RAID BIOS must detect it *after* the mobo does. What you will see is Bootable Add-in Cards. Move that to the top of the boot order with the + key. The onboad RAID is treated as an add-in card. Oh and make sure you have disabled the Promise controller by the jumper and in the BIOS if you are not using it.

I tried it and it worked. Thank you sir.

 

[krose]

You are most welcome!:thumbsup:

 

[NathanM]

ok guyz, im new to the forums and i have a HUGE dilemma,

im in need of a new a64 mobo and i was contemplating between the soltek and the gigabyte K8NS-PRO....

i will b using a a64 3000+ (CG core) and 1x512mb stick of bh5

i am planning to overclock and i am limited by vcore with the soltek (1.55max) and the gigabyte only has 2.7vdimm.....

so is it possible for the soltek to have a bios update that will up the vcore? if not then could you guyz plz tell me wat i should choose...i really appreciate this

cheers,

Nathan