"Rene" <(E-Mail Removed)> schreef in bericht
news:MbaLj.90829$(E-Mail Removed)2...
> Hello everybody,

Hello again ;-). As my post did not get any replies in the original ng, I
have taken the liberty to post a fu to two other groups. I hope someone will
know an answer to my questions.

Thank You very much, this is my original post:

> I am the very happy owner of an A7V8X motherboard with an Athlon XP3000.
> To
> the onboard Promise Fasttrak sata controller, one 200 GB drive is
> connected.
> I use a pata drive as system disk. Now I am considering buying one of
> those
> very fast Samsung F1 drives of 1000 GB and use that as the system drive
> (XP > and Linux).
> My questions are:
>
> - Can You connect two drives to the onboard sata-connectors without using
> them in a RAID setup? I mean, just use them as two seperate drives.
>
> - Has anybody every connected one of those particular drives to the
> controller and does it work OK? The drives are much newer than the
> controller which is iirc one
> of the first consumer sata controllers and apart from that, the drives are
> sata 3 Gb/s and the controller 1,5 Gb/s. I know the drive has a jumper but
> still...
>
> - I am also considering buying a seperate controller, this has to be a pci
> one as the mobo does not have pcie or pci-x or whatever is modern nowadays
> ;-). That way I would still have the best speed possible (though I don't
> believe the mechanical speed of the disk reads will be limited by the 1,5
> Gb/s interface, maybe cached stuff will be faster but I don't believe the
> heads can actually read faster than 1,5/8 GB/s. Nevertheless, having a
> real 3Gb/s controller would be the finishing touch. I was thinking about
> this one:
> http://www.promise.com/marketing/dat...TX4_040605.pdf.
> It
> does however say that it is PCI 2.3 compliant and
> http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1...26&modelmenu=2
> says that the mobo is pci 2.2. It also says the card works at 66 MHz, this
> however should be included in the 2.2 standard (it says so on
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periphe...t_Interconnect). Will the
> card work on the mobo? I can't find out for sure whether it is possible to
> put a pci 2.3 card in a 2.2 slot so I was hoping someone over here might
> know. By the way, this controller looks interesting as well.
>
> I hope someone can help me out with those questions. I love this
> mobo/proc, am very satisfied and do not intend to buy a new computer very
> soon (last year I bought a Geforce 7950 so I can play relatively new games
> on it as well ;-)). Having this new and very fast harddisk would be a big
> upgrade for me!
>
> Thank You very much in advance.
> Yours sincerely,
> Rene

"kony" <(E-Mail Removed)> schreef in bericht
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:27:26 +0200, "Rene"
> <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>>"Rene" <(E-Mail Removed)> schreef in bericht
>>news:MbaLj.90829$(E-Mail Removed)2...
>>> Hello everybody,
>>
>>Hello again ;-). As my post did not get any replies in the original ng, I
>>have taken the liberty to post a fu to two other groups. I hope someone
>>will
>>know an answer to my questions.
>>
>>Thank You very much, this is my original post:
>>
>>> I am the very happy owner of an A7V8X motherboard with an Athlon XP3000.
>>> To
>>> the onboard Promise Fasttrak sata controller, one 200 GB drive is
>>> connected.
>>> I use a pata drive as system disk. Now I am considering buying one of
>>> those
>>> very fast Samsung F1 drives of 1000 GB and use that as the system drive
>>> (XP > and Linux).
>>> My questions are:
>>>
>>> - Can You connect two drives to the onboard sata-connectors without
>>> using
>>> them in a RAID setup? I mean, just use them as two seperate drives.
>
> Yes you can. Logically they would be considered single
> drive spans, but you don't need to set anything for this to
> happen, it is a default mode when a drive is added.

Hello Kony,

First of all, thank You very much for Your extensive explanations, they
helped me a great deal forward in my understanding of things that were
previously unclear to me.

The first thing You mention (above) is good news to me.

>>> - Has anybody every connected one of those particular drives to the
>>> controller and does it work OK? The drives are much newer than the
>>> controller which is iirc one
>>> of the first consumer sata controllers and apart from that, the drives
>>> are
>>> sata 3 Gb/s and the controller 1,5 Gb/s. I know the drive has a jumper
>>> but
>>> still...
>
> It should make no difference that the drive is newer, just
> jumper to 1.5GB/s and you'd be fine.

That was the major uncertainty, I was afraid that, because this controller
is that old (one of the first sata controllers), later on maybe some small
imperfections (bugs) might have come to the surface rendering it not 100%
compatible. In the past I owned an Asus A7V and there the ATA100 controller,
also a brand new standard when that mobo came out, was not perfect either. I
have tried to locate that problem by means of a search engine (to be able to
give You a link, just to show which problem I mean, it wasn't solvable
anyway) but I can't find it anymore, too many recent finds show up, this
problem is already quite old.

> Actually that's not
> entirely correct, the motherboard will bottleneck the hard
> drive performance because that SATA controller chip is
> sitting on the PCI bus so there will be bus traffic
> contention and at most you'd approach about 125MB/s burst,
> not even 1.5GB/s that the drive would run at in a board with
> southbridge intergral raid or at least SATA controller.

Yesterday very late when riding my bicycle I realized this as well, thinking
about the pci-bus being 32 bit and 33 MHz (4*33 being only 132).

> Even so, it may stil be a good performance upgrade without
> having to change the motherboard... depending on your use.

My use is really nothing special, the usual things. The most important one,
at least the acitivity where I think the invention of the computer has been
the greatest blessing, is still word processing ;-). Sometimes a game and
maybe some cad and emulation stuff that in the past might have been
considered "heavy" but that runs fine on this computer. And programming.

It's just that I like this system very much and I want it, within the limits
the basic components of it set, to be as "slick" as possible. May sound a
bit silly but I want to make as long use of it as possible and I must say,
apart from the very slow boot (due to the extremely old installation of XP,
I have to do a clean install soon, probably on the new hard drive), the
speed of it is still amazing to me. I have always been slow in upgrading,
still used a 486 (AMD model at 166 MHz, was a great machine, I still have it
in the attic) when everybody else had PII's and even PIII's. I then upgraded
to an Ahtlon 700, a big jump for me.

>>> - I am also considering buying a seperate controller, this has to be a
>>> pci
>>> one as the mobo does not have pcie or pci-x or whatever is modern
>>> nowadays
>>> ;-). That way I would still have the best speed possible (though I don't
>>> believe the mechanical speed of the disk reads will be limited by the
>>> 1,5
>>> Gb/s interface, maybe cached stuff will be faster but I don't believe
>>> the
>>> heads can actually read faster than 1,5/8 GB/s. Nevertheless, having a
>>> real 3Gb/s controller would be the finishing touch.
>
> No, it would not be the finishing touch, it would be
> redundant and pointless because of issues mentioned above.

I understand what You mean.

> IF you were instead using this as a fileserver to a lot of
> concurrent users, maybe then the SATA300 NCQ feature would
> boost performance a little, but in that case a more
> expensive caching controller would help.

I am not using the pc as a server.

> For your desire to boost performance, after replacing the
> drive the next thing you need to replace is the motherboard
> itself, which of course also means upgrading other parts to
> support the new board. If you don't want to replace the
> motherboard you might even think about getting a PATA drive
> instead of SATA because A7V8X uses a Via southbridge and Via
> never did very well at maximizing the PCI bus performance.
> Especially if you had other PCI cards like Gigabit ethernet

I have an integrated network interface on the mobo, it is capable of 1Gb/s
but my network works at 100 Mb/s.

> or a Creative Labs sound card

I do.

> , you would do well to use the
> PCI bus and/or the onboard SATA as little (otherwise) as
> possible.

Look, I was looking for confirmation, not someone telling me that my plans
are not good... (just kidding, I am gratefull for Your advice!)

>>>I was thinking about
>>> this one:
>>> http://www.promise.com/marketing/dat...TX4_040605.pdf.
>>> It
>>> does however say that it is PCI 2.3 compliant and
>>> http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1...26&modelmenu=2
>>> says that the mobo is pci 2.2. It also says the card works at 66 MHz,
>>> this
>>> however should be included in the 2.2 standard (it says so on
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periphe...t_Interconnect). Will
>>> the
>>> card work on the mobo? I can't find out for sure whether it is possible
>>> to
>>> put a pci 2.3 card in a 2.2 slot so I was hoping someone over here might
>>> know. By the way, this controller looks interesting as well.
>
> It's fairly irrelevant whether it would work or not, your
> board has 33MHz PCI bus that in best case tops out at about
> 125MB/s as mentioned above, and that only in a benchmark
> where there's isolation. In real uses it will be even more
> detrimental.

That was something I was unsure about. It is a PCI 2.2 compliant board and
the 2.2 standard says that 66 MHz was introduced with it (on wikipedia). So
I was unsure whether this board would maybe support that higher speed. In
that case I could have gained something. From what You wrote, I draw the
conclusion that it doesn't.

>>> I hope someone can help me out with those questions. I love this
>>> mobo/proc, am very satisfied and do not intend to buy a new computer
>>> very
>>> soon (last year I bought a Geforce 7950 so I can play relatively new
>>> games
>>> on it as well ;-)). Having this new and very fast harddisk would be a
>>> big
>>> upgrade for me!
>
> I hate to say it but I would not have bought the 7950,

You do not have to feel bad about saying it, almost everybody would have
said that.

> your board and CPU are bottlenecks to gaming

I think You would be highly surprised if You would see what the GPU is able
of doing in my computer without being hindered by the "old" CPU, at least I
was. I am also the happy owner of a 22" CRT (yes, I am quite conservative
;-)) that supports very high resolutions and for that, the CPU is not
important, neither is it for high levels of AA and AF. But apart from that,
the bottlenecking by the CPU is not that strong as often is read, well, off
course it very much depends on the game one wants to play. I know there are
many RTS games nowadays (which I find terribly boring) that support many
highly detailed little men running around having complicated movements and
having very detailed activities the calculation of which requires a fast
processor and also advanced physics support is out of the question for me,
but a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. can be played at very high settings. I used
to own a GF6800GT with only 128 MB RAM (at the time I bought it, more RAM
was not used by any game and this model was within my budget, the one with
256 MB wasn't and for the rest, it was exactly the same so I thought it
would be a good choice) and that was a major disappointment to me, though
when looking at the technology itself, that one should have been more "on
par" with the rest of the system than the one I have now. When I had bought
stalker, I could only play it as a slide show, between 2 or 3 FPS and when I
went to the outside in the beginning of that game, it fell back to 2 or 3
seconds needed for one frame! It got a little better when completely turning
down the quality of the grahpics but it remained unplayable. I do not know
how many fps I have now but they are more than sufficient, and the graphics
are almost at the highest quality. I decided to buy this card when AGP cards
became more scarce (except from the very simple ones which are not suitable
for gaming), it was the best that I could still buy at that moment and the
price was very reasonable. I have not regretted it for one moment and hope
to enjoy it for a long time.

> and your board to a
> hard drive upgrade. If you really really want to keep using
> the board I'd get a cheap PATA hard drive, something like a
> 500GB size and put the rest of the money in the bank to
> upgrade the other parts sooner. Get SATA drive instead if
> you wanted to carry it over to a newer system since current
> generation boards have more SATA than PATA ports.

Hmmm, difficult choice. I think I am going to keep my money in the bank for
a while.

Thanks again for Your reply, taught me a lot!
Yours sincerely,
Rene

"Rene" <(E-Mail Removed)> schreef in bericht
news:4QFMj.14269$(E-Mail Removed)2...
>> I hate to say it but I would not have bought the 7950,
>
> You do not have to feel bad about saying it, almost everybody would have
> said that.
>
>> your board and CPU are bottlenecks to gaming
>
> I think You would be highly surprised if You would see what the GPU is
> able of doing in my computer without being hindered by the "old" CPU, at
> least I was. I am also the happy owner of a 22" CRT (yes, I am quite
> conservative ;-)) that supports very high resolutions and for that, the
> CPU is not important, neither is it for high levels of AA and AF. But
> apart from that, the bottlenecking by the CPU is not that strong as often
> is read, well, off course it very much depends on the game one wants to
> play. I know there are many RTS games nowadays (which I find terribly
> boring) that support many highly detailed little men running around having
> complicated movements and having very detailed activities the calculation
> of which requires a fast processor and also advanced physics support is
> out of the question for me, but a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. can be played
> at very high settings. I used to own a GF6800GT with only 128 MB RAM (at
> the time I bought it, more RAM was not used by any game and this model was
> within my budget, the one with 256 MB wasn't and for the rest, it was
> exactly the same so I thought it would be a good choice) and that was a
> major disappointment to me, though when looking at the technology itself,
> that one should have been more "on par" with the rest of the system than
> the one I have now. When I had bought stalker, I could only play it as a
> slide show, between 2 or 3 FPS and when I went to the outside in the
> beginning of that game, it fell back to 2 or 3 seconds needed for one
> frame! It got a little better when completely turning down the quality of
> the grahpics but it remained unplayable. I do not know how many fps I have
> now but they are more than sufficient, and the graphics are almost at the
> highest quality. I decided to buy this card when AGP cards became more
> scarce (except from the very simple ones which are not suitable for
> gaming), it was the best that I could still buy at that moment and the
> price was very reasonable. I have not regretted it for one moment and hope
> to enjoy it for a long time.

I wanted to but forgot to insert the link to
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/...form-analysis/ , it is about
this matter, I thought it was interesting reading (though I did not read it
before buying my card, I already had it when I stumbled across this info).

Rene

"kony" <(E-Mail Removed)> schreef in bericht
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>>> I think You would be highly surprised if You would see what the GPU is
>>> able of doing in my computer without being hindered by the "old" CPU, at
>>> least I was. I am also the happy owner of a 22" CRT (yes, I am quite
>>> conservative ;-)) that supports very high resolutions and for that, the
>>> CPU is not important, neither is it for high levels of AA and AF.
>
> Well that explains it, I had assumed you were playing at
> lower resolutions.
>
>>> But
>>> apart from that, the bottlenecking by the CPU is not that strong as
>>> often
>>> is read, well, off course it very much depends on the game one wants to
>>> play.
>
> That is true, but even in situations where it seems like the
> higher resolution or eyecandy is effected by video card the
> most, CPU and memory can still account for a few FPS one way
> or the other. Plus, looking forward you will still play at
> same resolution till the monitor is replaced but games will
> become more and more CPU intensive, including the effects
> newer games have which aren't so well handled in hardware by
> the older 7xxx series cards, like stuff that's shader
> intensive.

I agree.

> Since you had a CRT and could pick resolution without
> suffering a lost dropping out of native resolution as one
> would with an LCD, I would have still replaced the
> motherboard and CPU before getting the video card. That
> doesn't mean it's the only way, you seem to be right that
> for your use it was right to get the card when you did.

Now _that_ is what someone who is looking for confirmation wants to read
;-).

>>I wanted to but forgot to insert the link to
>>http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/...form-analysis/ , it is
>>about
>>this matter, I thought it was interesting reading (though I did not read
>>it
>>before buying my card, I already had it when I stumbled across this info).
>
> It is interesting, though now a bit dated and gaming
> requirements went up again. Now a 8600GT PCIe video card
> that can be had for about $55 after rebate can hit scores
> about double what the 7600GT did in those 3DMark charts...
> providing a little faster system to put it in. Having a CRT
> you can drop resolution to get FPS as needed, but you can't
> do much when CPU is the bottleneck on a game which puts a
> bit of a cap on how long the combo will be viable before it
> all has to be replaced at once.

Well, another important thing I forgot to mention is that lately my
interest in new games has been declining rapidly. First of all, this card
will not
allow me to play DX10 games, maybe some games can switch off DX10 features
to be DX9 compatible (don't know if that is possible, I know there were
games that supported DX9 but that could "down tune" themselves to support
DX8.1 cards, an example is NFSU iirc, you could race the races but the
"babes" in the beginning were just not there, they were DX9 babes) but those
games will with great probability be too demanding towards my GPU and, as
You have correctly stated, my CPU. But another reason is that DX10 is Vista
only and that crappy piece of bloatware is not allowed the entrance to my
house. For serious stuff I am swithching to Linux and for games and things
that are not possible in Linux (I mean programs I definitely do not wish to
do without but that do not run under Linux) I will use XP which I like.
There is little risk I will run out of games for a long time because first
of all I do not play games often and second because I have a rather big
collection of games that are still waiting to be played. Add to that the
latest games that I will be able to run on my current hardware that I am
interested in and that I will buy when they have been transformed into
budget games (I hardly ever buy games when they are brand new, only when I
am very interested in them, like I was in S.T.A.L.K.E.R or in World racing
because I definitely wanted to "drive" those beautifull Mercedeses at least
once in
my life) and there is a huge pile of fun waiting to be enjoyed by me. I
think
that the majority of the games I still have lying around would even be
playable on my Radeon 8500 ;-). The only relatively modern title I would
like to
be able to play but am afraid not to be able to is Oblivion. I have a cousin
who is very fond of that game and owns it, so luckily I can first try it
before spending a lot of money on it with the risk that it would be wasted.
They do list the minimum system requirements on
http://www.elderscrolls.com/games/oblivion_faq.htm but this definitely is a
game that should be rendered in all of its glory. Hmmm, I suddenly
remembered I could check out gamespot, on
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/theel...tech_info.html it
says that the recommended specs are more or less compatible with my system,
though I have read in several places that the rating of 3000 of my processor
is a bit of an exageration. I would be great to have that *pretty* game on
my computer. I love forests and landscapes with a lot of nature in them (for
that reason I enjoyed Far Cry very much as well (hated the shooting though),
btw that ran very well on my GF6800, that made me even more amazed that
stalker ran so extremely crappy, I think it had to with the lightning in the
game).

So though I do agree with You that the upgrade could be considered
unwise and I would have not recommended to anyone of my friends myself
but I still am very happy for having done it and am quite sure that, at
least when it comes to the things I want to do with my computer in a
relatively far future (I mean, I could have a traffic accident as well), I
will be able to enjoy this hardware for a long time. Like I said, when it
comes to gaming, I feel no need to play the latest or "not having been
written yet" games and for the rest, well, another cousin of mine is a
professional programmer (I am studying to become one) and he still uses a
PIII-900 to his full satisfaction so for my serious stuff I even more do not
feel any urge for upgrading. Perhaps it will make understanding us easier
when I tell You
we're Dutch, I am sure You are aware of our reputation, even though I can
sincerely tell You that saving money has nothing to do with this - we both
just like using something completely "to the max" and I think my current
system is, though indeed not very modern, really a beautifull collection of
sophistaticated hardware. The word "beautifull" may seem strange when it
comes to computer hardware but when one has an interest in this matter that
enables one to see beyond the superficial looks of a pcb, it can really be
beautifull. Heck, I even sometimes still enjoy playing an old game on my MSX
and that is definitely obsolete hardware but in those days it was state of
the art and I still like looking at the inside of one of those computers,
silly as many people may consider it/me.

Yours sincerely,
Rene

P.S. I looked at
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/ch...t400/index.jsp where I
saw that indeed You are right (not that I doubted it, I just wanted to learn
a bit more about my chipset after having read Your advice), the PATA
interface is in the south bridge and the SATA is in the external PCI bus. I
can imagine that when playing a game (taking that as an example because it
is, among the things I use my computer for, the thing which puts the most
strain on it) that needs to read things from the hd during play (I mean not
when there is a loading screen, in that case it would probably not make that
big a difference) reading from a sata drive would slow the entire system
down more than reading from a pata drive. A big sata drive would be useful
for storing big things I do not need often but You are definitely right that
for a drive that is very frequently accessed, a pata type would be a better
choice.