My trip to the darkside

Zardon

Well most of you will have read my startling thread yesterday detailing my changing over to INTEL again after 2 years, primarily pushed by the recent drop of the 3 ghz chip to £129 on OCUK I decided to go for the ABIT IC7 Max 3 with OTES....

Yeah I know those of you on intel for a while will be laughing at this post but just bare with me from the perspective of an AMD fanboy as I post my early findings to this point after moving from my highly overclocked barton at 2.5ghz to this P4 northwood.

Putting the rig together didnt take long but my concerns over the stock P4 cooler where quite high, its made like turd to be honest, and coming from my thermalright SLK900 was like dating cameron diaz and then deciding to dump her for the local hag who works in the chipshop. Anyway enough ranting, once my dealer gets in the thermalright SP94 ill be on it like a rash.

Firing the machine up, resulted in a normal (good) post beep but no video signal..... straight away my hand goes to my head. what now. the 9800 XT die? so I fire in my bros 9600 same thing. ok something else wrong here. after much reseating, swearing and all round kicking of the chairs. I put in some muskin DDR3000, wham right up she comes. the old corsair story with abit I experienced all so long ago with my first Nf7s rearing its ugly head. One phone call to my mate to get some OCZ3500 platinium from him, put that in, excellent, here we go ready for action.

One new os later (hey did that really just install in 10minutes? damn).... into windows, drivers, updates on. ATI beta drivers. overclocking tool for the card. back into bios. upped FSB, tested, increased etc etc.

this is what ive settled on for this crapo cooler.




Now id like to stress my ram is running in sync with this, and 235 fsb for DDR3500 aint too bad, just had to lower the CAS to 2.5 but im not sure if I can manage to squeeze 2 CAS from it, time for 3 volts I think......... so far 7-3-3-2.5

ill follow up later. right now im real excited at seeing, 8800 scores in pcmark up from 7600 on the barton, 10450 ram scores up from 7400 ish. and massive bandwidth and float scores of 38k+ in sandra.

And might I just say guys, in windows everyone said P4s are much slower. trust me at 3500mhz, everything opens before you ask...... seriously.

zerodamage

The Emperor now has a full hold on my friend here. There is no turning back now.

WildChild

lol very cool

Zardon

I feel dirty though, intel

Renegade[CSR]

Yes, the dark side has a firm grip upon his life now. I shall resist the dark sides grasp as long as possible, but the light sides ties with me begin to grow weak after seeing this

zerodamage

You should feel dirty you bad bad boy.

But you seriously have me interested again in Intel.

Zardon

the abit motherboard is great too, after my crap experiences with the AN7 and the NF7s, this board oozes sex appeal. 6 sata ports, 2 SATA raid controller options (yes 2), 1 on the southbridge and one via the Sis controller 4 dimm slots. the awesome (and quiet) northbridge cooler, and the pretty and effective OTES, it appears ABIT have their priorities firmly in the intel camp.

Renegade[CSR]

Which is surprising to see from Abit, seeing as the home user market, and even the enthusiast market, is split nearly 50/50 between intel and AMD. Support should be evenly spread accross both platforms. Very interesting indeed.

wertret

Just remember those you left behind with his loyal bartons , i hope the dark side won't corrupt you, may the bandwidth be with you

Falstaff

I just took a 2.6 to 2.82 on an intel board, and it is stable, if I could have got a better deal on an AMD product here I would have, but they are so popular retailers are not lowering their prices, Intels are actually cheaper here, and it does what I want it to do....but then I dont game and never will, I have nothing but practical use for my PC...LOL

Logla

I was going to get a 2.8 but seeing as Zardon managed an extra 500Mhz on stock cooling I might just go with the 3.0

Zardon

i really recommend this abit IC7 Max 3, its expensive I know, but the bios is the best ive seen, its rock solid, great cooling with the OTES - which was much less gimmicky than I imagined (quietish too), and overclocking is really simple. its also loaded to the gills with ports and extras. I mean ive never seen a company give you 4 sata cables in the package, along with an abit badge, 2 IDE rounded cables., and all the usual extras. 6 sata connections - dual sata raid, I mean ........... !

just a matter of upping the fsb, easy as pie. 500mhz for nothing !

Logla

thing is - I've got Corsair RAM.
I really wouldn't fancy shelling out for a new board when I might have to buy new RAM as well.

Having said that, it might not be a problem as the office are despositing an EXTRA (woohoo!) 1250quid in my account next month in late expenses. Her indoors is under the impression that I'm buying fitter wardrobes but I feel she may be bitterly disapointed.

I haven't heard of the Corsair issues before mind - what are they?

Zardon

well I wouldnt like to say its ALL corsair ram that does it. ive just had a few incidents in the past, I had corsair ram on my first Nf7s which wouldnt even let the mobo boot. even with bios flashes and the well known corsair bios patch. nadda. this was corsair DDR3200 at the time.

the corsair ram I was using for this was DDR3700 XMS matched pairs, and it was tried in all slots, both single and pairs, I even updated the bios when I got this board to make sure it wasnt a bios issue (the bios was octobers). even with the new bios it didnt work.

Im lucky in the fact ive quite a few mates who are alot richer than me, who are willing to trade hardware when needed so im lucky there, but you can imagine my horror when I got a post beep and no video signal, my immediate reaction was, either the card had died or the mobo agp port was damaged in some way.

Once the OCZ ram went in, wham immediate boot, and this is the exact same thing that happened on the NF7s a year or more ago. So I dont know whether im unlucky or there is some genuine issue with corsair ram and abit. or something else. if anyone knows anything about this id love to hear. It is a possible it might have been those particular sticks, but really they were matched pairs and should work with almost anything. im not really into ram and who buys what modules from who so it could be one of the brands corsair buy.

This is one of the reasons I never buy corsair, good reputation and all as they have. and this has reinforced it. the corsair ram I actually bought for a friend from kakarot here on the forum at an incredible price, but my friend didnt want it and took something else instead leaving me with it. It worked fine mind you on the 4th nf7s board I got. so im at a loss.

in future stick with OCZ. they cost alot I know but really they work with any board ive tried.

Crash Override

heh I plan on getting me some 3700 just so I can give my little theory about 330x11 a test and see how stable I can run it and with what temps once summer hits.

then again I also do plan on upgrading my secondary machine.

Right now its got a Celeron 1.7GHz sitting in it that I got for free from Intel for filling out a survey.

Although its really crappy since the memory I put into it is PC3200 and its only getting half its effective bandwidth because of the 400MHz FSB on that P4.

Although since its an ATi board with Dual Channel on it I should be able to get full bandwidth with another stick in it.

The only bad thing about ATi Intel boards.

No overclocking features at all *sighs*

Its not an expensive board really either so.

But I want to have 1 Intel Machine and one AMD Machine at all times now.

At least until AMD starts pumping out the scores like Intel for media encoding.

Zardon

just watch the DDR3700 rated ram bud, its usually rated at 3 CAS, good DDR3500 can hit 330 at 2CAS. worthwhile looking into.

BiGBrOwNPimpsta

err zero... does zardon swing that way? lol

hes swinging the ways of intel though

Zardon

ok this is for zerodamage.

HT screenshot taken with general usage in photoshop and dreamweaver.

zerodamage

That is just so friggin cool. I want one. We will now be starting a ZeroDamage to buy a P4 fund.

Zardon

Well im meant to be going to work in the morning, but ive got this bug atm, where I have to overclock and optimise this bios, and im finally getting the hang of it. After scouring the ABIT forums and the mobo forums, ive been at pains to work out the "game accelerator" settings in the bios. This information was sourced from the abit forums but im sure they wont mind me posting it here.

---------------------------------------------------

Right here.

In BIOS,

SoftMenu Setup
AGP Ratio (CPU:AGP:PCI) Fixed
Fixed AGP/PCI Frequency 66/33

Advanced Chipset Features
Game Accelerator Auto
-Refresh Cycle Time Auto
-Read Delay(tRD) Auto
-Read Delay Adjust(tRDA) Auto
Command Per Clock(CPC) Auto

Under Game Accelerator there is Auto, Turbo, Street Racer, and F1.

When you use BySPD with Game Accelerator set to anything other than Auto GA will override the settings BySPD has set. BIOS will always display what BySPD has set, CPU-Z will display what GA has overridden them to. Turbo tightens then up a little, Street Racer is much more aggressive, F1 is just a little more. I get:

2.5, 7, 4, 4 BySPD GA set to Auto
2.0, 7, 3, 3 BySPD GA set to Turbo
2.0, 5, 3, 2 BySPD GA set to Street Racer
2.0, 5, 2, 2 BySPD GA set to F1

There is a 100-400 point increase in Sandra memory scores with the different settings.

If you use User Defined for memory timings and use GA the timings don’t change but GA does do something that increases memory scores in Sandra. I got a 100 point increase in Sandra going from Auto to Turbo but the timings stayed the same.

A quick way to determine what you memory will run is to use BySPD and adjust Game Accelerator. There is Auto, Turbo, Street Racer and F1. The last four should be set to Auto for this.

Try BySPD and GA set to Auto. Run a few loops of memtest86+, Check timings with CPU-Z, run the Sandra memory Benchmark.

If everything is OK try BySPD and GA set to Turbo. Run a few loops of memtest86+, Check timings with CPU-Z, run the Sandra memory Benchmark.

If everything is OK try BySPD and GA set to Street Racer. Run a few loops of memtest86+, Check timings with CPU-Z, run the Sandra memory Benchmark.

If everything is OK try BySPD and GA set to F1. Run a few loops of memtest86+, Check timings with CPU-Z, run the Sandra memory Benchmark.

Setting the last two to Disabled offers a minor improvement in stability. I was getting 1 BSOD once every 12-24 hours. Setting the last two to Disabled eliminated that.

Below is what I got. Look at the timings BySPD has set and what GA has overridden then to. Notice the memory scores and how much I had to overclock to make up for the looser timings.


BIOS 20, P4 3.0

200FSB, BySPD, GA = Auto, A, A, A, A = 2.5, 4, 4, 7 = 4658/4654

200FSB, BySPD, GA =Turbo, A, A, A, A =2.5, 3, 3, 7 =4795/4798

200FSB, BySPD, GA = Street Racer, A, A, A, A = 2.0, 3, 2, 5 = 4858/4897

200FSB, BySPD, GA = F1, A, A, A, A = 2.0, 2, 2, 5 = 4929/4896

210FSB, BySPD, GA = Auto, A, A, D, D = 2.5, 4, 4, 7 = 4925/4893

210FSB, BySPD, GA = Auto, A, A, A, A = 2.5, 4, 4, 7 = 4918/4927

210FSB, BySPD, GA = Turbo, A, A, A, A = 2.5, 3, 3, 7 = 5079/5062

215FSB, BySPD, GA = Auto, A, A, A, A = 2.5, 4, 4, 7 = 4969/5022

215FSB, BySPD, GA = Turbo, A, A, A, A = 2.5, 3, 3, 7 = 5159/5140

215FSB, BySPD, GA = Street Racer, A, A, A, A = 2.0, 3, 2, 5 = 5262/5283

215FSB, BySPD, GA = Street Racer, A, A, D, D = 2.0, 3, 2, 5 = 5225/5223


Memtest86 is a memory checking program. You download it, make a bootable floppy, and then boot with it. It does not need an OS installed. Let it run several passes, the more the better. You don’t want any errors at all, if you get any you can try more voltage and/or each stick by itself.

http://www.memtest86.com/


CPU-Z gives you info on your system, including memory timings.

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php


SiSoftware Sandra also gives you system info, you can test memory bandwidth and other things.

http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/

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So basically ive been playing with settings going on my first day with P4, and ive been testing, rebooting and retesting ram settings. Basically as you can see from above there are three main in bios settings, turbo, street racer and F1. It all defaults to AUTO, so im guessing this is turbo to err on the safe side.

With street racer settings and the rest on auto and 2.9 volts on the ram, I was able to run stable at around 3400mhz turning to F1 settings, and half expecting the already overclocked OCZ 3500 at 233 7-3-3-2 to take a heart attack. it posted, booted but stress testing made it reboot. tried relaxing settings. same deal.

so upping the ram to 3.0 volts and going to my settings of 233 with F1 and 7-3-3-2. I booted into windows. wham, everything stable. but i play safe, feeling that 3 volts is a little on the high side even for the wonderful platinium heatspeaders on this ram (the abit bios warns you as well once you go over 2.9 volts, a nice touch for newbies getting carried away - full marks to abit for this touch).

Taking out the zalman arm again from storage along with the 120 mm fan and using one of the few aux fan sockets on the board, I put the zalman arm on the 3 and 4 sockets of the PCI slots. and moved the fan to the far right of the arm positioning, right over the ram and next to the drives. this will aid the ram to cool. I think OCZ3500 at 233/466 7-3-3-2CAS, with F1 aggressive top settings stable is pretty impressive !

Sandra memory scores with F1 settings, rose 350 points to 5,850. Pcmark02 just under 11,000.

Impressive and just goes to show if you really try there are more gains. Cant wait until sunday now to tweak some more !

Judas

I think Abit really paved the way with there MAX line motherboards..... the initial max flopped though because of lack of legacy ports such as PS/2 .... there trying to produce a completely futureset of motherboard standards.... removing all the old.. and going new.... when i say the MAX 2 line come out... i had to grab one.... got 2 actually... but.... compared to the NF7-S Rev 2.... it's nearly $150 more for the MAX.... but well worth it.. when this board came out... it klobbered everything... and i've still pushing some better numbers then those with there FSB at 200 on NF7-S's....

Necrosis

I know exactly what you mean...took me awhile to get used to it.

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