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Trevor Schell gave me a brand new Asus A7N8X Deluxe mother board, and I had been a bit tardy in getting it up and running as I was collecting parts for this system. It was a bit of a surprize to me to receive this as I really didn't need a new system, Still it was very much appreciated Trevor... Thank You!
Anyway I was going to build an entirely new system just for gaming and mucking around. Something that was not mission critical and could have the OS turfed at a moments notice if need be... Alas, the timing was all wrong. I was having some stability problems with my current primary system. It was doing the odd random lock up and some times windows file explorer would open in small, barely noitced window. There were some other minor wonky stuff happening, nothing critical but annoying none the less. I'm not sure what created this state, suffice to say "That's just how Windows is".
I seen a new Bios was available for my current system (Asus A7V333-RAID) that supports newer processors. Seeing as I had a Athlon XP+ 2800 Barton sitting around in it's package yet to be opened, I decided to flash to the newer BIOS and see if the A7V333-R could run the Barton. I wasn't looking for an OS-reinstall, the A7N8X-Deluxe would have required this, and flashing the BIOS of the A7V333-R seemed like a logical thing to do. I wanted to see if it would support the processor and maybe fix some of the wierdness going on with my system.
Well, things just got ugly from there... After flashing the BIOS from AV33316.awd to AV33317.awd, the systemn would not post. After a few attempts at starting the system, it seemed it would get further along in the process of loading before it died or returned a BSOD "IRQ not Equal to or Less". Eventually after trying to start the PC a few times windows would load and run. This only takes about 4-9 restart times before it will start. Sometimes it would start right away with out any conflicts, but most times it took up to 9 times before windows would load. Once loaded, it seemd pretty stable so I was at a total loss knowing that I would require an OS re-install. I even tried flashing back to the old BIOS, but that didn't solve anything and actually hosed it more.
Which brings me here... Seeing as I had to re-install the OS I decided to just swap out the mother board and use the A7N8X Deluxe Trevor gave me, so far so good. It is light on the available IDE channels as it only has 2 Parrallel IDE channels. I had 4x drives plus a CDRW & DVD in my old system. The A7N8X-DLX has 2 Serial ATA channels that can be set up for RAID 0+1, however I don't own SATA drives at the moment so I'm down some capacity for now.
Anyway the board and processor seems relatively fast and stable thus far. I even flashed the Bios on it as soon as I got the OS up. I used the Windows based Asus update proigram for flashing the BIOS. the new BIOS supports higher multipliers and is said to fix the large data transfer corruption in the SATA controller, so I may try som SATA drives or maybe some SATA adapters for the multitude of PATA drives I own..
Surprizingly after I ran 3D marks the system scored slower than my old system. I can't remember the exact number but it was somewhere around 13600. Which was 300 marks slower than my 2300XP. I'll have to get to the bottom of this as it is perplexing and puzzling.
I ran Super Pi and scored 50 seconds to crunch to 1M digits.
I'm am running in DUAL channel DDR mode with a faster processor so it should be by all accounts faster than my old system.
Anyway, I'll post more as I move along, I just wanted to ramble for a bit..
I guess my old Asus A7V333-RAID will be relegated to the mucking around, test mule PC.
Thanks again for the motherboard Trevor :T ;x( I love the built in 3COM & nVidia (using the nVidia one) LAN network card, and the fact that I'm now using the 9700 Radeon at 8X AGP (even though it's slower
ops: ) I was even debating weither I should use the Onboard Nvidia Sound or my SBLive 5.1 Platinum. I hear the onboard sound is real nice.
It's Awesome so far!
PS. Trev, you had asked once if you could dissable the RAID seek fuction during posting... It is disabled by moving the jumper on the mother board. It is set to enabled by default and I set it to disabled for now. Now the SATA RAID does not go looking for the drives so now it boots faster.
Bing
Anyway I was going to build an entirely new system just for gaming and mucking around. Something that was not mission critical and could have the OS turfed at a moments notice if need be... Alas, the timing was all wrong. I was having some stability problems with my current primary system. It was doing the odd random lock up and some times windows file explorer would open in small, barely noitced window. There were some other minor wonky stuff happening, nothing critical but annoying none the less. I'm not sure what created this state, suffice to say "That's just how Windows is".
I seen a new Bios was available for my current system (Asus A7V333-RAID) that supports newer processors. Seeing as I had a Athlon XP+ 2800 Barton sitting around in it's package yet to be opened, I decided to flash to the newer BIOS and see if the A7V333-R could run the Barton. I wasn't looking for an OS-reinstall, the A7N8X-Deluxe would have required this, and flashing the BIOS of the A7V333-R seemed like a logical thing to do. I wanted to see if it would support the processor and maybe fix some of the wierdness going on with my system.
Well, things just got ugly from there... After flashing the BIOS from AV33316.awd to AV33317.awd, the systemn would not post. After a few attempts at starting the system, it seemed it would get further along in the process of loading before it died or returned a BSOD "IRQ not Equal to or Less". Eventually after trying to start the PC a few times windows would load and run. This only takes about 4-9 restart times before it will start. Sometimes it would start right away with out any conflicts, but most times it took up to 9 times before windows would load. Once loaded, it seemd pretty stable so I was at a total loss knowing that I would require an OS re-install. I even tried flashing back to the old BIOS, but that didn't solve anything and actually hosed it more.
Which brings me here... Seeing as I had to re-install the OS I decided to just swap out the mother board and use the A7N8X Deluxe Trevor gave me, so far so good. It is light on the available IDE channels as it only has 2 Parrallel IDE channels. I had 4x drives plus a CDRW & DVD in my old system. The A7N8X-DLX has 2 Serial ATA channels that can be set up for RAID 0+1, however I don't own SATA drives at the moment so I'm down some capacity for now.
Anyway the board and processor seems relatively fast and stable thus far. I even flashed the Bios on it as soon as I got the OS up. I used the Windows based Asus update proigram for flashing the BIOS. the new BIOS supports higher multipliers and is said to fix the large data transfer corruption in the SATA controller, so I may try som SATA drives or maybe some SATA adapters for the multitude of PATA drives I own..
Surprizingly after I ran 3D marks the system scored slower than my old system. I can't remember the exact number but it was somewhere around 13600. Which was 300 marks slower than my 2300XP. I'll have to get to the bottom of this as it is perplexing and puzzling.
I ran Super Pi and scored 50 seconds to crunch to 1M digits.
I'm am running in DUAL channel DDR mode with a faster processor so it should be by all accounts faster than my old system.
Anyway, I'll post more as I move along, I just wanted to ramble for a bit..
I guess my old Asus A7V333-RAID will be relegated to the mucking around, test mule PC.
Thanks again for the motherboard Trevor :T ;x( I love the built in 3COM & nVidia (using the nVidia one) LAN network card, and the fact that I'm now using the 9700 Radeon at 8X AGP (even though it's slower
ops: ) I was even debating weither I should use the Onboard Nvidia Sound or my SBLive 5.1 Platinum. I hear the onboard sound is real nice.It's Awesome so far!
PS. Trev, you had asked once if you could dissable the RAID seek fuction during posting... It is disabled by moving the jumper on the mother board. It is set to enabled by default and I set it to disabled for now. Now the SATA RAID does not go looking for the drives so now it boots faster.
Bing
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