IC7 Max3...Bios....Help please...Concerned!

dragonV8

Sally has just been reading the instruction manual for our new mobo we bought yesterday. Everything is like we have never seen before as this board is much more advanced than what we are used to.

There is lots more readable data in the book and now we are confused.
Sally is (Right now) about to boot up the system for the first time with this new mobo.

Currently clearing Cmos (as per book instruction). Her ususal proceedure would be to enter bios, change boot order to CD to install Windows XP Pro. (Only ever used XP Home till now).

Save and exit.
Leaving all manufacturer Defaults intact.

Is there any other setting that needs adjustment before leaving the bios.
eg: Onboard audio vs Audigy2 souncard. If so, please help as can't find specifics in book.

If anyone with practical knowledge of this bios can give advise ("Lay Person Type"), please help.

Sally is a bit anxious as when we put the original mobo out of her puter in another case, she had very good cause to yell "FIRE".

ThermalTake Variable fan speed switch shorted and caught fire. NO other damage done. Folding 100% is proof of that.

There will be other questions i'm sure, just haven't started the puter up as yet.

If this is in the wrong section please move, it is just that it is urgent to us!

PS. It has a new Intel 3.2 Proc and 2gig Kingmax pc4000 ram, in case it is relevant.



Thanks in advance

Jon & Sally

TheBaron

well if you want to use an audigy it'd be in your best interest to disable onboard audio, which can be found somewhere under integrated peripherals. other than that it ought to be fine.

madmat

set it to optimized defaults then go to integrated peripherals and disable the onboard as The Baron suggested.
The optimized defaults should set the performance to be a little closer to where you'll need it than fully default settings will be.
Good luk.

dragonV8

Thanks guys. Gives us a bit more understanding of what we are dealing with.

Looks the goods sofar. Bios done, XP Pro on, setting up the network and Sally is now loading up usb drivers, etc. :type:

Best of all, when we cranked it for the first time with the new mobo, proc and ram, There was NO FIRE. :woowoo:

Most of the settings are default. We'll need to know about ram settings next. Showed: 3.8.4.4 (??????)

That will be for another day.

Cheerio

Jon

Straight_Man

Does it have Northwood HT or a Prescott???

When folding, you can use one client per pipe or more. I will now tell you my Prescott runs multiple clients, one per HT pipe. Console is bit faster, actually, and has turned in faster than the graphical (yes, boht are set to same priority).

Console is run from XP console for now, I will write a batch that runs it.

I use these switches, as they get the most out of the assigned pipe:

-local -service -advmethods -forcesse -forceasm -verbosity 9

Now, how do I assign it to one pipe, while the other pipe feeds the graphical client???

In this case, there are several ways to get to the Task Manager, but that is where affinity is assigned. I just CRTL-ALt-DEL to get to Task Manager, but if you like the mouse then right-click in middle empty area of taskbar and choose Task Manager.

My console client got renamed(I did this) to FAH_Consl_1.exe, so when I went to the Task Manager, I chose the Processes tab and then clicked on Precesses tab label, then clicked on the FAH_cnsl_1 process name and then right-clicked. Then I clicked on the entry for Affinity in the context menu thta had popped up. I unchecked the CPU 0 checkbox, and left the CPU 1 checkbox checked.

Then I went to the list again, clicked on the WinFAH.exe process, and proceeded to right click to get the context menu for that process. Again, clikc on affinity, but this time unchecked CPU 0 and left CPU 1 checked.

I used Ok to exit each time, if there was an apply I clicked that first. Then I exited the Task Manager from the menu.

Each client is getting about 48% of total output of whole CPU (both pipes), and XP uses WHOLE CPU as a basis for 100%. Since the processes were configged to use 96% of CPU, each is getting 96% of one pipe this way, not fighting for time slices between the two CPU pipes and having Windows have to manage resource balances between these two pipes with both being switched back and forth in parts of load.

XP Pro runs fine this way on my Prescott 2.8E CPU box. Folding stats have not yet caught up with my output, though-- and depending on what server you use for stats, expect them to be about 2-3 hours behind folding itself as far as stats if you look at time stamps, unless you use Folding@Work and then stats will be 1-2 hours behind your local stats.

The Prescott box (CPU not yet OC'd, want the HS compound to cure in first) is screaming out WUs, about 1.5-1.7 times the production of the non-HT Northwood 2.8 (OC'd to about 3.4 GHz) on the other IC7-Max3 box. I wanted real apples of Northwood un-HT'd versus Prescott, so I stuck a Northwood in first one, and am using a Prescott in other one. Wild thing I ran into, the E was about $40.00 USD less than the D series Prescott I have in the box I am using now to post this. In a couple months, I will sell the Northwood and get another Prescott if this performance holds.

Note that the Prescott only came online YESTERDAY. When it has been up for a couple weeks, will give some idea of pipe output in reality.

John D.

TheBaron

about the ram settings, since you're running pc4000 3-8-4-4 is probably the SPD (default) timings for the ram. what you'll need to do is find the ram timings sections and manually lower them, then see how stable the system is. i'd give 2-7-3-3 a try for awhile, at maybe 2.8 or 2.9v vdimm (2.8v might be max, if so thats fine). if thats fine, 2-6-2-2 would be nice. just keep lowering and watching for stability (if it runs fine and folds for a few days i'd say you're good. a better way of testing would be to set the ram timings and then run memtest86 for a few hours, then lower the ram timings and run memtest again)

Thrax

I would reckon that PC4000 won't do cas2.

Straight_Man

That timing is SPD, and is JEDEC standard timings for Dual Channel of that speed. Wired into DIMMs. Dual Channel likes relaxed timings unless the DIMMs themselves are hard-coded for Low Latency. Try it (2.5-7-3-3 if 2-7-3-3 or 2-6-3-3 does not work), but in this case, I think you will get to back it back to SPD after about 12-24 hours. I stepped back in RAM speed to DDR400 (PC3200) and run low latency per the SPD in DIMMs on Dual Channel. Works fine on the Prescott box. On the Northwood box I OC'd standard PC3200 to 200 MHz before the DDR doubling. On that box, the base for RAM is higher than the base for CPU, though the CPU quad-pumps the base. The OC on the CPU, I got by pure multiplier.

John D.

dragonV8

Thanks Baron. Definitely keep that one in mind. As we have better cooling organised and hopefully reasonable quality internals, o/c'ing will follow in the near distant future.

You are correct with the ram timings. That is what showed up in the initial setup.
Sally more than likely wont play around with the timings till i get back from my 2 week stint in the gold-mine where i work. Be flying out monday morning and back monday night 2 weeks later. At least i have a phone line in my room, so i can still keep up with all the latest goss on S-M, using my notebook.

By the time i get back all the parts ordered should be here and i can than fit the new Aerocool HT-101's and the new Papst fans. Once it's been burned in we should be ok to have a go.

We don't have high expectations about o/c'ing, but every little thing helps. The other P4's all have PC 3200 ram so i don't expect too much from them. We will play with Sally's main puter first as a learning curve. Don't want to kill them all now do we, lol.

Thrax, i have no real clue as to the Cas 2 thing. All new to us "Oldies", lol.
Have seen it mentioned in threads along with ram timings, etc. Still, all input is welcome as we will be reading and asking prior to starting the o/c'ing so i'm sure it will make a lot more sense later, lol.

Thanks guys.

Jon A.

madmat

For pc4000 I would suggest going no lower than 2.5-3-3-7 with your latencies at 200fsb as that type of ram really doesn't like running low cas numbers and will spit out errors by the bucket full if you force them on it.
You'd be best served to leave the cas at 3-4-4-8 and just raise the vcore to 1.575 and bump the fsb up to 225 or so and run your folding on it to see if it gets unstable, if not bump it up a bit more. If it is unstable raise the vcore up to 1.6v and retest it, just do all this after you get the new hsf in the case and get all your cooling sorted.

Straight_Man

dragonV8 wrote:

Thanks Baron. Definitely keep that one in mind. As we have better cooling organised and hopefully reasonable quality internals, o/c'ing will follow in the near distant future.

You are correct with the ram timings. That is what showed up in the initial setup.
Sally more than likely wont play around with the timings till i get back from my 2 week stint in the gold-mine where i work. Be flying out monday morning and back monday night 2 weeks later. At least i have a phone line in my room, so i can still keep up with all the latest goss on S-M, using my notebook.

By the time i get back all the parts ordered should be here and i can than fit the new Aerocool HT-101's and the new Papst fans. Once it's been burned in we should be ok to have a go.

We don't have high expectations about o/c'ing, but every little thing helps. The other P4's all have PC 3200 ram so i don't expect too much from them. We will play with Sally's main puter first as a learning curve. Don't want to kill them all now do we, lol.

Thrax, i have no real clue as to the Cas 2 thing. All new to us "Oldies", lol.
Have seen it mentioned in threads along with ram timings, etc. Still, all input is welcome as we will be reading and asking prior to starting the o/c'ing so i'm sure it will make a lot more sense later, lol.

Thanks guys.

Jon A.

For AMD, low latency works better, but the P4 CPUs and most of the chipsets for them do better with tighter ratios. madmat is right and has his reasons straight down the narrow path for the P4 based boxes.

The large 1 MB L2 Cache in the Prescott E, though, combined with the long pipes, lets it use low-latency RAM. And the thing is incredibly temp stable. It was almost at 60 C when day hit 87 F high, did not even blink, just computed itself silly.

I lost 130 folding points to team default, and box did another 150 itself so far today. I will not mention here what it is about to turn in, before Midnight my time.

I will just say the two boxes did gen 410+ points of work throughput in 24 hours, though 130 went to Team DEFAULT before I caught the fact that the silly graphical client had let a console client steal its client.cfg file WHILE it was running-- I now have two console clients running happily on that box, under XP Pro's agaeis (watchful eye and control). Second one got what was left of the now-deceased Graphical's WU work for a first WU.

dragonV8

Thanks again guys. Gives us an idea which way to go.........very small steps,hehe.
Better safe than sorry.

Downloaded CPU Burn-in V1.01 and gave Sally's puter a run for it's money. Did a 15 min trial run first, watched the temp go down for a bit and then ran it for 1/2 an hour. Abit EQ monitor showed CPU high of 64c, mostly on 63c. That was after it had been running for most of the time.

When we put the cpu on the new mobo, i did clean all the muck of it and did a lapping job on the heatsink. Then used a thin layer of Arctic silver 5. Log checks failed to find any errors, so we're happy with that. System temp maxed @ 38c, PWM got to 50.5c max.

Anyhow, got to get some sleep shortly as we have been up for nearly 24 hrs. Too busy playing around setting up Sally's puter and modding a case. Now got a nice 80mm fan in the top.

Jon A.

TheBaron

im assuming thats using the stock heatsink, if so thats about right. those temps are rather high though, so if you have any stability problems i'd say thats the first thing you need to look at