If I could design a motherboard...
...or, what I'm especially shopping for at this moment. It seems like there's an overabundance of choices, and while this could be a good thing, it seems that whenever I look at one board, it has almost everything I want. So, I look at another board, and it has that one feature the first board lacked, but then it's missing something else. Case in point:
I was running a P4 2.66 on a Soyo P4 Dragon Ultra Platinum board and I wanted a suitable upgrade that would stay current for at least a year. I decided to go back to AMD, and it was with great interest I started to read up on the various chipsets/form factors.
I wanted three things for sure: the ability to RAID-0 at least three drives (ATA because I have three nice ATA's and I don't have the desire to upgrade to SATA yet), the ability to house 3-4 DIMMs, and AGP (can't find PCI-X cards yet). I decided the 754 pin Athlon 64 3200 was the way to go, long story short.
The board I finally selected is the Gigabyte K8NS Pro based on the nforce2 chipset. Then the "fun" started.
I installed the board and jammed in my two sticks of 512. Result? A continuous long beep on boot. Wtf? Couldn't even get into the bios. So, I swapped the sticks around thinking maybe I had a bad one. I finally got it to boot with one stick installed (tried both with same result) and that got me into the BIOS at least. Found out that I had to access the "secret" bios and change the mem timing from "Auto" to "Manual". I then learned that I had to change it from 200 to 166 before I could boot with my two sticks. Then I went back into the bios and changed the timing back to 200 and it booted fine. Again, wtf? Tried three sticks. No joy. Seeing as how all my ramm is DDR400, I didn't want to clock it all down just so I could install and use it. Seemed kinda wrong to have to do that jsut to get it working.
So I did some more reading. Some boards will support 3 sticks at 400, some don't, and some you can get to work if you up the dram volts. The gigabyte board dram volts only go up to 2.7, and most reviews say that this is on the low side in terms of adjustability (DFI's latest nforce 2 board lets you go up to 3.1v). So, just because of this one little feature this board is not perfect, but it is the only board I've found that meets my criteria.
Basically, if anyone has any suggestions for me I'd appreciate it, and those of you who are not aware of this please take it as a warning. BTW, I've got the latest bios (F4) and my memory is Corsair Value edition. I haven't played with the deeper ramm settings (cas, precas, etc.) but I will as soon as I get home.
Point is, I didn't know that most of the current crop of 754 boards won't let you run your DDR400 at 400 if you fill three or four dimm slots without some tweaking. (Some will as reported on Anandtech.com.)
Thanks for your comments.
I was running a P4 2.66 on a Soyo P4 Dragon Ultra Platinum board and I wanted a suitable upgrade that would stay current for at least a year. I decided to go back to AMD, and it was with great interest I started to read up on the various chipsets/form factors.
I wanted three things for sure: the ability to RAID-0 at least three drives (ATA because I have three nice ATA's and I don't have the desire to upgrade to SATA yet), the ability to house 3-4 DIMMs, and AGP (can't find PCI-X cards yet). I decided the 754 pin Athlon 64 3200 was the way to go, long story short.
The board I finally selected is the Gigabyte K8NS Pro based on the nforce2 chipset. Then the "fun" started.
I installed the board and jammed in my two sticks of 512. Result? A continuous long beep on boot. Wtf? Couldn't even get into the bios. So, I swapped the sticks around thinking maybe I had a bad one. I finally got it to boot with one stick installed (tried both with same result) and that got me into the BIOS at least. Found out that I had to access the "secret" bios and change the mem timing from "Auto" to "Manual". I then learned that I had to change it from 200 to 166 before I could boot with my two sticks. Then I went back into the bios and changed the timing back to 200 and it booted fine. Again, wtf? Tried three sticks. No joy. Seeing as how all my ramm is DDR400, I didn't want to clock it all down just so I could install and use it. Seemed kinda wrong to have to do that jsut to get it working.
So I did some more reading. Some boards will support 3 sticks at 400, some don't, and some you can get to work if you up the dram volts. The gigabyte board dram volts only go up to 2.7, and most reviews say that this is on the low side in terms of adjustability (DFI's latest nforce 2 board lets you go up to 3.1v). So, just because of this one little feature this board is not perfect, but it is the only board I've found that meets my criteria.
Basically, if anyone has any suggestions for me I'd appreciate it, and those of you who are not aware of this please take it as a warning. BTW, I've got the latest bios (F4) and my memory is Corsair Value edition. I haven't played with the deeper ramm settings (cas, precas, etc.) but I will as soon as I get home.
Point is, I didn't know that most of the current crop of 754 boards won't let you run your DDR400 at 400 if you fill three or four dimm slots without some tweaking. (Some will as reported on Anandtech.com.)
Thanks for your comments.
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Comments
Next Nforce 2 is Athlon XP only not Athlon 64, that would be the Nforce 3 (150 or 250)
A limitation of DDR Sdram is that at DDR400 speeds most single channel boards can only support only 2 DIMMS (4 banks or sides) at 200mhz. Add more ram and the memory bus can become unstable. usually the manual will state that only DDR33 is supported for 3 DIMMS. Dual Channel mobos (Pentium4 or AMD A64/Opteron Socket 939,940) can support 2 pairs but only at the "2T" setting
Top Athlon 64 (Socket 754) mobos are the Abit KV8 Pro (K8T800 Pro), Epox 8KDA3+ (NF3-250gb) DFI Lanparty UT (NF3-250gb), & MSI K8N Neo Platinum (NF3-250gb)
My KV8 Pro 3400+ combo is current running 2x512MB HyperX PC3500 @ 220mhz
You can place PATA drives on SATA ports with the proper adapters (Such as the Abit Serillel SATA adapter)
As for Raid-0 support with 3 drives I suggest you buy a raid card (Promise, 3ware etc). So that when you change motherboards your raid array will be portable.
Anyhow. Yeah, I meant to say nforce3. The 250gb (gb=giga-lan, not gigabyte lol) chipset.
Well, as luck would have it, I did go out and get an Abit AS8 with a P4 540. I can now run not just three sticks of DDR at 400mhz, but four! This system doesnt' seem quite as "snappy" as the Athlon board/chippy did but I'll take it for it's supposed upgradeability and the afore-mentioned ramm capabilities.
On to the other stuff- I did get a SATA-PATA converter ($30, yeouch!) but the more I thought about it, the more I realized what I really needed was a Raptor. Oh yeah, baby, SATA and 10K rpm. I'm planning on buying another one to run direct RAID vs non-RAID comparisons but that's a topic for a future post.
Thx for the replies, everyone (you two lol) and I plan to keep this thread alive while I go through what I now know as UPGRADE HELL.
Later.