A7V600 help please

[Mick]

I bought a new computer about 5 weeks ago assembled to spec by a local
dealer - Asus A7V600 board, 1G of 3200 Samsung RAM, Athlon 3000 400FSB
processor, 120G Hitachi IDE drive, XP Home and have had endless problems
which I can now only think to ascribe to the design of the board itself. The
machine just crashes when I am using Photoshop (any version) which really
blasts the processor but also when I've tried it with processor-intensive
games with the same result. I have the auto restart feature turned off in XP
and initally I was getting BSODs but lately it just blanks out without any
memory dump. There were no driver problems showing up in the BSODs. Now when
it crashes I have to unplug the power cable and pump the start button a few
times to get it to restart. It is otherwise perfectly stable when I am using
Office, IE etc. I reinstalled a second XP OS on a different partition and
that hasn't had any effect on stability.

Initially we changed power supplies to a 550w and cooler (not sure what the
second one is but it keeps the temperature down at about 50-55C, about 25C
lower than the cutoff temperature). Then we tried out different memory.
Initially it was Infineon 3200, then some 2700 Micron which really freaked
it out and then Samsung 3200. Both types of memory are among the ones listed
by Asus as compatible on their website. We swapped out the board for a
second A7V600 in case it was a faulty board but this has made no difference.

After putting in the Samsung memory, it seemed to fine for about 9 days
until yesterday when it crashed under Photoshop. Since then I can crash it
at will, simply by running a Photoshop action on a series of files which
runs the processor flat out and crashes the machine after about 5 minutes.
Temps do not go above 60C during this according to Asus Probe. I downloaded
a BIOS update last night plus updated VIA 4in1 drivers and these have made
no difference. The BIOS update was, according to Asus, to improve stability
with some brands of Kingston and Kingmax memory so there must be some known
stability problems with the board. I have been posting on the Adobe site
about this and somebody mentioned that there is a known stability problem
but that is all I have heard.

I would be very grateful if some knowledgeable person could point me in the
right direction. Do I ditch the board and go for a different brand or is
there anything else I can do? I am really fed up having spent quite a lot of
money and time trying to get this machine working. The dealer has been
really good about changing parts and trying to get it working but I don't
think he knows what to do now. If I go for a different board, can anybody
suggest something that is very likely to be reliable.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Paul]

I bought a new computer about 5 weeks ago assembled to spec by a local
dealer - Asus A7V600 board, 1G of 3200 Samsung RAM, Athlon 3000 400FSB
processor, 120G Hitachi IDE drive, XP Home and have had endless problems
which I can now only think to ascribe to the design of the board itself. The
machine just crashes when I am using Photoshop (any version) which really
blasts the processor but also when I've tried it with processor-intensive
games with the same result. I have the auto restart feature turned off in XP
and initally I was getting BSODs but lately it just blanks out without any
memory dump. There were no driver problems showing up in the BSODs. Now when
it crashes I have to unplug the power cable and pump the start button a few
times to get it to restart. It is otherwise perfectly stable when I am using
Office, IE etc. I reinstalled a second XP OS on a different partition and
that hasn't had any effect on stability.

Initially we changed power supplies to a 550w and cooler (not sure what the
second one is but it keeps the temperature down at about 50-55C, about 25C
lower than the cutoff temperature). Then we tried out different memory.
Initially it was Infineon 3200, then some 2700 Micron which really freaked
it out and then Samsung 3200. Both types of memory are among the ones listed
by Asus as compatible on their website. We swapped out the board for a
second A7V600 in case it was a faulty board but this has made no difference.

After putting in the Samsung memory, it seemed to fine for about 9 days
until yesterday when it crashed under Photoshop. Since then I can crash it
at will, simply by running a Photoshop action on a series of files which
runs the processor flat out and crashes the machine after about 5 minutes.
Temps do not go above 60C during this according to Asus Probe. I downloaded
a BIOS update last night plus updated VIA 4in1 drivers and these have made
no difference. The BIOS update was, according to Asus, to improve stability
with some brands of Kingston and Kingmax memory so there must be some known
stability problems with the board. I have been posting on the Adobe site
about this and somebody mentioned that there is a known stability problem
but that is all I have heard.

I would be very grateful if some knowledgeable person could point me in the
right direction. Do I ditch the board and go for a different brand or is
there anything else I can do? I am really fed up having spent quite a lot of
money and time trying to get this machine working. The dealer has been
really good about changing parts and trying to get it working but I don't
think he knows what to do now. If I go for a different board, can anybody
suggest something that is very likely to be reliable.

Thanks in advance for any help.

When shopping for a Photoshop machine, I would emphasize the ability to
have lots of memory. A P4C800/P4P800 solution gives room for four sticks
of memory, which easily gives you 2GB of memory running at DDR400, using
readily available 512MB unbuffered DIMMs. If you want dual processors,
there is even the Asus PC-DL dual board, which uses the same 875
Northbridge as the P4C800.

If you want to continue with the Athlon as your processor, the A7N8X has
room for 3 sticks of memory, and by placing one stick on each of the
dual channels, that should reduce any electrical loading problems with
multiple sticks running at DDR400. Since the dual channel feature doesn't
add too much to memory bandwidth performance, you could use three 512MB
sticks at DDR400. (The original reviews of the A7N8X and other Nforce2
boards were able to do this. Anandtech has the initial review and
comparison of various Nforce2 solutions. Try "Nforce2" in the Anandtech
search engine.)

For more info about A7N8X and similar boards from other manufacturers,
visit the forums at http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/ . The people over
there know a lot more about which brands of memory are the right ones
to buy.

The problem with any board that has three slots and a single channel
for memory data, is it is difficult to get multiple sticks to run stable
at DDR400. You might find instant relief, for example, by setting the
memory to DDR333. Or, by raising Trcd to 3, you might also find stability.
Tuning memory on a single channel board consists of innumerable tests
of timing parameters and slot combinations, to find the right combination.
For example, you might have better luck by trying slot 1 and slot 3 for
your two memory sticks on the A7V600.

Depending on how much money you have to pour into hardware, you should
also review the new 64 bit Athlon offerings. Not so much for the 64 bit
aspect, as for the fact that the boards are now using DDR400 registered
DIMMs. I would expect these DIMMs to be expensive, due to the newness of
this registered DIMM technology, but the new Athlons should help increase
the volumes and drop the prices of this stuff. Registered memory can
be a lot more stable than unbuffered memory, and in the case of server
boards equipped as well with ECC, that stuff is bulletproof. So, maybe on
your next buying cycle, look for a design that uses DDR400
registered memory.

The cheapest solution is just to find a version of the A7N8X family you
can live with. (Not the -X, because it only supports single channel mode.)
There is one model, -E, which is brand new and untested. It hasn't even
appeared in the master motherboard list on the Asus website yet.

ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/socka/nforce2/a7n8x-e/e1322_a7n8x-e_deluxe.pdf

HTH,
Paul

 

[Pief]

I bought a new computer about 5 weeks ago assembled to spec by a local
dealer - Asus A7V600 board, 1G of 3200 Samsung RAM, Athlon 3000 400FSB
processor, 120G Hitachi IDE drive, XP Home and have had endless problems
which I can now only think to ascribe to the design of the board itself.

The CPU is running much too hot so just turn the cpu multiplier down to
-about 10x in the bios, under 'advance configuration' option. Or refit the
heatsink or replace with a copper based version. (Not good to have the cpu
idling at much above 40C)

Its pretty impressive that the board is running a whole gig of ram at
ddr400/fsb -if it actualy is doing that. Dropping the whole rig in at a
capable computer shop might be benificial to get it properly configured and
checked.

Just sounds like a case of the build not getting the attention it requires
-its pretty involved, takes plenty of googling etc to get a feel -you could
start scanning the threads in this forum now to get started..or for now,
just drop that cpu multiplier, or to be more certain of data integrety drop
the fsb/mem speed to 333 instead of 400 (should check memory otherwise with
memtest86 bootdisk to make sure you wont be getting the odd corrupted file
and crashing program)

Nice equipment anyway
good luck,

 

[Mick]

Many thanks for the reply Paul. It gives me some food for thought in terms
of what I might do. When I bought the machine, I never realised that the
whole thing would be so sensitive. I didn't realise that the board would
only take 2 sticks of DDR400 until it arrived in the shop as I originally
wanted 1.5 G for Photoshop knowing how memory hungry it is but I can
generally get by on 1 G. I did try 3 sticks of DDR333 memory a few weeks
back and it worked fine for a few hours and then the machine started
crashing worse than with any of the DDR400.

At the moment I want to find a reasonably cheap solution so I may go for the
A7N8X although if I thought a Pentium would give me real stability I guess I
could splash out on it. I'll check out the links you mention befoe going any
further. What is trcd? I might find out when I go back into the BIOS but I
can't figure it from the manual. I have just followed Pief's suggestion and
dropped the speed to 333 and the multiplier to 10 which does seem to have
improved stability and it is not running a lot slower.

 

[Mick]

Thanks for the reply Pief. I've just done what you suggested and it has
certainly improved the stability. I'm confused about the CPU temp because I
have seen on the AMD website that 60-65C is normal and that is what it was
doing before I got the new cooler which i think is copper. It's down about
10C from the previous one. The crashes don't seem to be directly
temperature-related although obviously the temp rises when the cpu is
belting out at 100 under Photoshop.

I wish I had done some better research before buying the machine,
particularly the fact that you consider it impressive that it is running a
gig of RAM. I never thought there would be any problems with this and the
guy in the shop didn't seem to think so either. It's definitely been running
on the two sticks as I've been checking the memory allocations in Photoshop
and Task Manager as I've been using it. What I find strange is that after
changing to the Samsung memory, it ran perfectly for 9 days and I really
thought my troubles were over when suddenly it went bang. Cheers.

I bought a new computer about 5 weeks ago assembled to spec by a local
dealer - Asus A7V600 board, 1G of 3200 Samsung RAM, Athlon 3000 400FSB
processor, 120G Hitachi IDE drive, XP Home and have had endless problems
which I can now only think to ascribe to the design of the board itself.

The CPU is running much too hot so just turn the cpu multiplier down to
-about 10x in the bios, under 'advance configuration' option. Or refit the
heatsink or replace with a copper based version. (Not good to have the cpu
idling at much above 40C)

Its pretty impressive that the board is running a whole gig of ram at
ddr400/fsb -if it actualy is doing that. Dropping the whole rig in at a
capable computer shop might be benificial to get it properly configured and
checked.

Just sounds like a case of the build not getting the attention it requires
-its pretty involved, takes plenty of googling etc to get a feel -you could
start scanning the threads in this forum now to get started..or for now,
just drop that cpu multiplier, or to be more certain of data integrety drop
the fsb/mem speed to 333 instead of 400 (should check memory otherwise with
memtest86 bootdisk to make sure you wont be getting the odd corrupted file
and crashing program)

Nice equipment anyway
good luck,

 

[RonK]

Try runnit it with the side cover off and a table fan blowing into the
computer- just to make sure that heat is not the problem.

 

[BoB]

I bought a new computer about 5 weeks ago assembled to spec by a local
dealer - Asus A7V600 board, 1G of 3200 Samsung RAM, Athlon 3000 400FSB
processor, 120G Hitachi IDE drive, XP Home and have had endless problems
which I can now only think to ascribe to the design of the board itself. The
machine just crashes when I am using Photoshop (any version) which really
blasts the processor but also when I've tried it with processor-intensive
games with the same result. I have the auto restart feature turned off in XP
and initally I was getting BSODs but lately it just blanks out without any
memory dump. There were no driver problems showing up in the BSODs. Now when
it crashes I have to unplug the power cable and pump the start button a few
times to get it to restart. It is otherwise perfectly stable when I am using
Office, IE etc. I reinstalled a second XP OS on a different partition and
that hasn't had any effect on stability.

Initially we changed power supplies to a 550w and cooler (not sure what the
second one is but it keeps the temperature down at about 50-55C, about 25C
lower than the cutoff temperature). Then we tried out different memory.
Initially it was Infineon 3200, then some 2700 Micron which really freaked
it out and then Samsung 3200. Both types of memory are among the ones listed
by Asus as compatible on their website. We swapped out the board for a
second A7V600 in case it was a faulty board but this has made no difference.

After putting in the Samsung memory, it seemed to fine for about 9 days
until yesterday when it crashed under Photoshop. Since then I can crash it
at will, simply by running a Photoshop action on a series of files which
runs the processor flat out and crashes the machine after about 5 minutes.
Temps do not go above 60C during this according to Asus Probe. I downloaded
a BIOS update last night plus updated VIA 4in1 drivers and these have made
no difference. The BIOS update was, according to Asus, to improve stability
with some brands of Kingston and Kingmax memory so there must be some known
stability problems with the board. I have been posting on the Adobe site
about this and somebody mentioned that there is a known stability problem
but that is all I have heard.

I would be very grateful if some knowledgeable person could point me in the
right direction. Do I ditch the board and go for a different brand or is
there anything else I can do? I am really fed up having spent quite a lot of
money and time trying to get this machine working. The dealer has been
really good about changing parts and trying to get it working but I don't
think he knows what to do now. If I go for a different board, can anybody
suggest something that is very likely to be reliable.

Thanks in advance for any help.

We built a high dollar adobe box some months back,
amd 3200/400 asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mushkin level1 dual pack
2x512 meg pc3200 stripped raptors
The clent does vinyl graphics, scanning 8x10 images at 1200dpi
then blowing the adobe file up to either 6'x8'? It takes a long
time(45min),
the file size gets up to 800MB. He's ready to scrape his P4 dell(2 hrs)
and wants another box.
What's the vid card? And how do you have the scratch disk setup?
Are you using premium memory??????????

 

[Aardvark F. Bandersnatch, Esq.]

I bought a new computer about 5 weeks ago assembled to spec by a local
dealer - Asus A7V600 board, 1G of 3200 Samsung RAM, Athlon 3000 400FSB
processor, 120G Hitachi IDE drive, XP Home and have had endless problems

[snippage]

Then we tried out different memory.
Initially it was Infineon 3200, then some 2700 Micron which really freaked
it out and then Samsung 3200. Both types of memory are among the ones listed
by Asus as compatible on their website. We swapped out the board for a
second A7V600 in case it was a faulty board but this has made no difference.

After putting in the Samsung memory, it seemed to fine for about 9 days
until yesterday when it crashed under Photoshop. Since then I can crash it
at will....

Not to make things more difficult than necessary, but the suggestion of
dropping the memory setting to 333 sounds best. Whoever set the machine up
for you might want to do some checking on the memory stix you've been using.
Over the past month I've RMA'd six shipments of memory because they were NOT
Samsung, Micron, Infineon (or whatever), but were generic ("off-brand") and
not worth the time it would take to throw away. There seems to be a lot of
that going on these days-- cheap junk being passed off as name brand memory.
Most of the quality memory producers now have sections of their web sites
devoted to ways in which to determine whether or not specific stix of memory
ARE genuine.
This has turned into a racket with some of the on-line dealers (not going to
mention any names for obvious reasons) who are advertising Corsair, Samsung,
whatever, and then shipping generic junk. If you RMA it, you suffer the
re-stock and S&H fees. They then re-sell the junk to some other fool (like
me). Sell it twice they've made their profit; sell it four times, they've
recouped all their costs. A lesson hard learned: I no longer buy anything
on-line unless it simply cannot be had locally, and I never buy from an
on-line dealer with a re-stock fee.

Who me, bitter? Naaaaaaah.

 

[Pief]

Thanks for the reply Pief. I've just done what you suggested and it has
certainly improved the stability. I'm confused about the CPU temp because I
have seen on the AMD website that 60-65C is normal and that is what it was
doing before I got the new cooler which i think is copper. It's down about
10C from the previous one. The crashes don't seem to be directly
temperature-related although obviously the temp rises when the cpu is
belting out at 100 under Photoshop.

With my own machine, Ive tried many different configurations and I get
problems running hotter than 60C -full load. The hotter the cpu gets, the
more voltage it requires to run stable -but the more voltage you set in the
bios the even hotter it gets~ Also its resistance increases as it gets
hotter, so it draws more power X its speed. The max temps quoted for
automatic shutdown are for damage protection not stability.

There is a practice called overvolting which some people suggest for
'burning in' new cpus which involves running them very hot with high
voltage for a few weeks, according to some theories this wears them out in
the long run, but conditions the cpu in the medium term to run more stable
when knocked down again.

I wish I had done some better research before buying the machine,
particularly the fact that you consider it impressive that it is running a
gig of RAM. I never thought there would be any problems with this and the
guy in the shop didn't seem to think so either. It's definitely been running
on the two sticks as I've been checking the memory allocations in Photoshop
and Task Manager as I've been using it.

It could be normal for a7v600 to run that much at that speed, Ive just read
that different boards have different capabilities to run large & fast
memory, the more dimms used at higher speed, the more likely it will be
unstable, the situation can be helped by using better quality memory or
running it at lower speed or using just one stick of memory.

I run two sticks of drr333 and ddr400 -mixed, and they run much better
plugged in slots 1 & 3 -one particular way around. You can optimise the
setup using www.memtest86.com bootdisk which rigourously checks stability
straight after boot allowing quick checking of config changes.

What I find strange is that after
changing to the Samsung memory, it ran perfectly for 9 days and I really
thought my troubles were over when suddenly it went bang. Cheers.

I know the feeling, ive made changes and neglected to test stability
thoroughly, then had the same thing happen days later *crack* its horrible!
like something just fused (data history rushes before eyes -worse is
that while running like that, files could have gotten corrupted invisibly.
Id recommend doing a good few hours check at least before trusting a config
enough to work on.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=215
-Thats a really good tester, if a machine withstands a couple of hours of
its abuse, its pretty darn solid

Id say you got plenty of time to tweak the rig up, after coming across a
few articles. Odds are it will run even faster than specified with the
right attention.

Im running a7v8x-x -predecessor to a7v600 and its doing great at 360fsb
with low latency timings, 2 256dimms of cheapish memory, 2000xp running as
~2700 odd.

I dont think you made a mistake with your order, the new nforce boards are
an alternative, but they get often talked beyond their specification.

Enjoy having built one of the fastest rigs there is

 

[Pief]

We built a high dollar adobe box some months back,
amd 3200/400 asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mushkin level1 dual pack
2x512 meg pc3200 stripped raptors
The clent does vinyl graphics, scanning 8x10 images at 1200dpi
then blowing the adobe file up to either 6'x8'? It takes a long
time(45min),
the file size gets up to 800MB.

If you want to go really fast then, get even more memory and create a
ramdrive to use as a scratch disk and pagefile. Might need to lower memory
speed to support more memory but since even at pc2100 speed 800megs would
take just a couple of seconds to stream through the processors cache, the
bottleneck must be disk usage. If you can take hard disk transfers out of
the operation, might find that resizing operation takes just a couple of
minutes.

He's ready to scrape his P4 dell(2 hrs)
and wants another box.
What's the vid card?

Counter intuitively the Vid card has little or no effect on photoshop
performance, its acceleration features are only useful to the OS and games.

 

[BoB]

We built a high dollar adobe box some months back,
amd 3200/400 asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mushkin level1 dual pack
2x512 meg pc3200 stripped raptors
The clent does vinyl graphics, scanning 8x10 images at 1200dpi
then blowing the adobe file up to either 6'x8'? It takes a long
time(45min),
the file size gets up to 800MB.

If you want to go really fast then, get even more memory and create a
ramdrive to use as a scratch disk and pagefile. Might need to lower memory
speed to support more memory but since even at pc2100 speed 800megs would
take just a couple of seconds to stream through the processors cache, the
bottleneck must be disk usage. If you can take hard disk transfers out of
the operation, might find that resizing operation takes just a couple of
minutes.

He's ready to scrape his P4 dell(2 hrs)
and wants another box.
What's the vid card?

Counter intuitively the Vid card has little or no effect on photoshop
performance, its acceleration features are only useful to the OS and games.

If you could take a few seconds and just think about what's going on
with these adobe processes, you would realize that nothing is streaming
anywhere! Disk i/o with striped raptors is pretty fast, the free ram is
more than enough to handle the task, the cpu is the bottleneck!
800megs is a huge jpeg!

 

[Pief]

We built a high dollar adobe box some months back,
amd 3200/400 asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mushkin level1 dual pack
2x512 meg pc3200 stripped raptors
The clent does vinyl graphics, scanning 8x10 images at 1200dpi
then blowing the adobe file up to either 6'x8'? It takes a long
time(45min),
the file size gets up to 800MB.

If you want to go really fast then, get even more memory and create a
ramdrive to use as a scratch disk and pagefile. Might need to lower memory
speed to support more memory but since even at pc2100 speed 800megs would
take just a couple of seconds to stream through the processors cache, the
bottleneck must be disk usage. If you can take hard disk transfers out of
the operation, might find that resizing operation takes just a couple of
minutes.

He's ready to scrape his P4 dell(2 hrs)
and wants another box.
What's the vid card?

Counter intuitively the Vid card has little or no effect on photoshop
performance, its acceleration features are only useful to the OS and games.

If you could take a few seconds and just think about what's going on
with these adobe processes, you would realize that nothing is streaming
anywhere! Disk i/o with striped raptors is pretty fast, the free ram is
more than enough to handle the task, the cpu is the bottleneck!
800megs is a huge jpeg!

You dont have to believe me but I do have a deep understanding of what is
going on, been studying for many years -ex straight 'a' grade comp sci
student actualy.. corrected exam papers..finished assignments no one else
could.. -this is my specialist subject

Irfanview has 5 different resampling algorithms of differing qualities (&
superior to pShop's), my athlon~2500 takes a blink of an eye to resample
the usual 4meg bitmaps using the slowest 'lanczos', such operations are
based on streaming - the process doesnt require random access to memory or
suffer from latency delays when optimised.

Compressing the resampled image -back to jpeg format, is probably what
takes up most of the time (the resampling will always be performed on a
bitmap type array) To generate a jpeg from the same array though, the whole
array needs read many, many times. If that array is bloating windows
pagefile or pshops scratchdisk that will be a great slowdown.

Id use the raptor array to store source material in lossless, mildly
compressed tif formats, its main advantage being its size, but a ramdisk
will give 100's or 1000's times better performance than that, with reduced
capacity, for use as a primary scratch disk and pagefile if possible.

Im just a nerd giving an unproven tip, take it or leave it ;]

 

[Wazza]

For what it`s worth, I think you should seriously look at your ram and I
would certainly try the help you were offered in taking the side off the
case and pushing a bit of extra fresh air in there as I think your temps are
a bit high. Ram will cause your problem but so will excessive heat.

We built a high dollar adobe box some months back,
amd 3200/400 asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mushkin level1 dual pack
2x512 meg pc3200 stripped raptors
The clent does vinyl graphics, scanning 8x10 images at 1200dpi
then blowing the adobe file up to either 6'x8'? It takes a long
time(45min),
the file size gets up to 800MB.

If you want to go really fast then, get even more memory and create a
ramdrive to use as a scratch disk and pagefile. Might need to lower memory
speed to support more memory but since even at pc2100 speed 800megs would
take just a couple of seconds to stream through the processors cache, the
bottleneck must be disk usage. If you can take hard disk transfers out of
the operation, might find that resizing operation takes just a couple of
minutes.

He's ready to scrape his P4 dell(2 hrs)
and wants another box.
What's the vid card?

Counter intuitively the Vid card has little or no effect on photoshop
performance, its acceleration features are only useful to the OS and games.

 

[Mick]

Pief
Thanks again for all this info. I think I'm going to try out the NForce Asus
board. The dealer is happy to give it a go and it won't cost me anything but
the difference in price between the two if any. I'm stuck on a gig with this
board anyway as it can only use two slots (1&3) for 400DDR whereas I can up
to 1.5 with the NForce (I wanted 1.5 in the first place). In the meantime
I've had to drop it to 1.8 Ghz and 266 for the memory speed to get it really
stable (I think). It's about 25% slower than it was at full speed but I can
live with this for now. I'll download the memtest and give it a go but I'll
wait a bit to really torture it I think. I'm learning a lot here so again
many thanks.

Thanks for the reply Pief. I've just done what you suggested and it has
certainly improved the stability. I'm confused about the CPU temp because I
have seen on the AMD website that 60-65C is normal and that is what it was
doing before I got the new cooler which i think is copper. It's down about
10C from the previous one. The crashes don't seem to be directly
temperature-related although obviously the temp rises when the cpu is
belting out at 100 under Photoshop.

With my own machine, Ive tried many different configurations and I get
problems running hotter than 60C -full load. The hotter the cpu gets, the
more voltage it requires to run stable -but the more voltage you set in the
bios the even hotter it gets~ Also its resistance increases as it gets
hotter, so it draws more power X its speed. The max temps quoted for
automatic shutdown are for damage protection not stability.

There is a practice called overvolting which some people suggest for
'burning in' new cpus which involves running them very hot with high
voltage for a few weeks, according to some theories this wears them out in
the long run, but conditions the cpu in the medium term to run more stable
when knocked down again.

I wish I had done some better research before buying the machine,
particularly the fact that you consider it impressive that it is running a
gig of RAM. I never thought there would be any problems with this and the
guy in the shop didn't seem to think so either. It's definitely been running
on the two sticks as I've been checking the memory allocations in Photoshop
and Task Manager as I've been using it.

It could be normal for a7v600 to run that much at that speed, Ive just read
that different boards have different capabilities to run large & fast
memory, the more dimms used at higher speed, the more likely it will be
unstable, the situation can be helped by using better quality memory or
running it at lower speed or using just one stick of memory.

I run two sticks of drr333 and ddr400 -mixed, and they run much better
plugged in slots 1 & 3 -one particular way around. You can optimise the
setup using www.memtest86.com bootdisk which rigourously checks stability
straight after boot allowing quick checking of config changes.

What I find strange is that after
changing to the Samsung memory, it ran perfectly for 9 days and I really
thought my troubles were over when suddenly it went bang. Cheers.

I know the feeling, ive made changes and neglected to test stability
thoroughly, then had the same thing happen days later *crack* its horrible!
like something just fused (data history rushes before eyes -worse is
that while running like that, files could have gotten corrupted invisibly.
Id recommend doing a good few hours check at least before trusting a config
enough to work on.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=215
-Thats a really good tester, if a machine withstands a couple of hours of
its abuse, its pretty darn solid

Id say you got plenty of time to tweak the rig up, after coming across a
few articles. Odds are it will run even faster than specified with the
right attention.

Im running a7v8x-x -predecessor to a7v600 and its doing great at 360fsb
with low latency timings, 2 256dimms of cheapish memory, 2000xp running as
~2700 odd.

I dont think you made a mistake with your order, the new nforce boards are
an alternative, but they get often talked beyond their specification.

Enjoy having built one of the fastest rigs there is

 

[Mick]

I tried it today with the side off (not blowing cold air in except for the
numerous f words when it crashed) and it didn't make any difference.
Blasting the processor 100% is what does it as far as I can see and not
temperature alone. When I first got it, the first cooler was pretty
low-power and it was getting well into the 60s and working ok. I'll run this
memcheck that Pief has suggested but I ran a different software memory
checker before on the Infineon memory and it didn't show anything as bad.

For what it`s worth, I think you should seriously look at your ram and I
would certainly try the help you were offered in taking the side off the
case and pushing a bit of extra fresh air in there as I think your temps are
a bit high. Ram will cause your problem but so will excessive heat.

We built a high dollar adobe box some months back,
amd 3200/400 asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mushkin level1 dual pack
2x512 meg pc3200 stripped raptors
The clent does vinyl graphics, scanning 8x10 images at 1200dpi
then blowing the adobe file up to either 6'x8'? It takes a long
time(45min),
the file size gets up to 800MB.

If you want to go really fast then, get even more memory and create a
ramdrive to use as a scratch disk and pagefile. Might need to lower memory
speed to support more memory but since even at pc2100 speed 800megs would
take just a couple of seconds to stream through the processors cache, the
bottleneck must be disk usage. If you can take hard disk transfers out of
the operation, might find that resizing operation takes just a couple of
minutes.

He's ready to scrape his P4 dell(2 hrs)
and wants another box.
What's the vid card?

Counter intuitively the Vid card has little or no effect on photoshop
performance, its acceleration features are only useful to the OS and games.

 

[Pief]

Pief
Thanks again for all this info. sokay -I like to blab
I think I'm going to try out the NForce Asus
board. The dealer is happy to give it a go and it won't cost me anything but
the difference in price between the two if any.

Might be worth it, extra ~20 bucks, windows will need some attention, new
drivers etc..

I'm stuck on a gig with this
board anyway as it can only use two slots (1&3) for 400DDR whereas I can up
to 1.5 with the NForce (I wanted 1.5 in the first place).

You can add another dimm into slot 2 as well, youll just need to find the
new stable frequency by changing bios settings and using memtest (ddr400
will happily run lighter on the system at 333 speed or 266 - the system
will just 'feel' its very good ddr333)
The nforce could/~should have better memory driving ability, probably.

In the meantime I've had to drop it to 1.8 Ghz and 266 for the memory speed to get it really
stable (I think). It's about 25% slower than it was at full speed but I can
live with this for now. I'll download the memtest and give it a go but I'll
wait a bit to really torture it I think. I'm learning a lot here so again
many thanks.

Now 266 seems low, - the cpu itself mightnt like running that way -heh,
(sheesh)...sure you installed the via hyperion 4in1 drivers?

ok, ill leave you to it -good luck,
pief

 

[Pief]

=|[ Pief's ]|= blagged:

To generate a jpeg from the same array though, the whole
array needs read many, many times.

Since I was talking so ambitiously :| I need to correct that in case
anyones mislead. -Jpeg encoding sweeps the source once too, but does have
more processing to carry out than resampling.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/part2/section-6.html

I just judge that a 45 minute operation, even on a ~5 gig bitmap seems
avoidably long -for an athlonXP, resampling ~should be quick as memory
access allows, fsb/mem dependant.

blah, blah...

 

[Mick]

Pief
Sorry if this seems dumb but I'm tired and confused (it's nearly 2 AM here)
and I don't really know a lot (yet) about all this. I've downloaded memtest
but haven't run it yet. What should I be looking to tweak in the BIOS
besides CPU and memory speed? I've now got it at 1.8 and 333. I've tried it
at 2 and 266 and it crashed doing very simple stuff in Photoshop (using the
lasso tool). I downloaded and installed the latest hyperion 4in1 drivers
from the viaarena website.

Pief
Thanks again for all this info. sokay -I like to blab
I think I'm going to try out the NForce Asus
board. The dealer is happy to give it a go and it won't cost me anything but
the difference in price between the two if any.

Might be worth it, extra ~20 bucks, windows will need some attention, new
drivers etc..

I'm stuck on a gig with this
board anyway as it can only use two slots (1&3) for 400DDR whereas I can up
to 1.5 with the NForce (I wanted 1.5 in the first place).

You can add another dimm into slot 2 as well, youll just need to find the
new stable frequency by changing bios settings and using memtest (ddr400
will happily run lighter on the system at 333 speed or 266 - the system
will just 'feel' its very good ddr333)
The nforce could/~should have better memory driving ability, probably.

In the meantime I've had to drop it to 1.8 Ghz and 266 for the memory speed to get it really
stable (I think). It's about 25% slower than it was at full speed but I can
live with this for now. I'll download the memtest and give it a go but I'll
wait a bit to really torture it I think. I'm learning a lot here so again
many thanks.

Now 266 seems low, - the cpu itself mightnt like running that way -heh,
(sheesh)...sure you installed the via hyperion 4in1 drivers?

ok, ill leave you to it -good luck,
pief

 

[Pief]

Pief
Sorry if this seems dumb but I'm tired and confused (it's nearly 2 AM here)
and I don't really know a lot (yet) about all this. I've downloaded memtest
but haven't run it yet. What should I be looking to tweak in the BIOS
besides CPU and memory speed? I've now got it at 1.8 and 333. I've tried it
at 2 and 266 and it crashed doing very simple stuff in Photoshop (using the
lasso tool). I downloaded and installed the latest hyperion 4in1 drivers
from the viaarena website.

~maybe youll get this in the morning then (uk timezone here, but I dont
see morning so often..)

1.8 volts is pretty much an overclockers setting for Barton cpu used to
keep the cpu stable at much greater multipliers, the default voltage is 1.6
or 1.65. The CPUs stability can be tested quite independantly of the memory
stability. Now youd be very unlucky to get a (defective) barton thats not
happy on 333fsb but theyre not garuanteed to run at 266. I think your
memory should be ok at 333 fsb too, so thats the config to aim for.
At 333 fsb, 11x multiplier will give xp~2500 performance and should run
well at 1.65v , no need to overvolt it more -more heat and current draw..

I have my fan running on 5v instead of 12v and can change the cpu
multiplier to anything as long as it doesnt run too hot which happens when
it gets to about 2Ghz with the slow fan -so that rules out cpu stability
when you run it at 333 - not too hot..normal voltage..

So the cpu speed doesnt need tweaked as such, 11x at 1.65v should be fine
for 333fsb (as long as the cpu is ok)

Watch out for the different ways to report the speeds, its 333 double data
rate, but 166Mhz, I think the bios reports fsb in mhz -so 200 fsb will
actualy be the top 400ddr speed. And memory might be reported as ddr rate
so mem should be 333ddr for fsb of 166, theyre the same mhz but confusing
data rate reporting going on %}

anyway, memory - In the bios you can take it off manual and set/see the
speed, and then on the same page where the speed is set theres 'chip
configuration' option at the bottom. That opens another page with the
memory timings. These are fiddly. If its says 'by spd' in there, just leave
the bios and test that config with memtest bootdisk first, let memtest run
for a while, if it gets through a whole pass of tests ~25mins worth, the
memory is pretty stable, best to leave it for hours though, overnight or
whatever to be sure of rock solid stability, but many normal computers
arent as stable as that! Anyway, as soon as you do get any errors, escape
and reboot into the bios, head into the 'chip configuration' screen again
and turn it off 'byspd' to manual.

The first 5 settings are whats relevant to play with (as they appear in my
bios).

Notes for them for 333 speed:

CAS latency - the main culprit, try increasing just one step, later try
lowering to 2(!)
RAS to CAS delay - this should be 3 i think
CAS PRECHARGE delay - could well be 2, or 3
ACTIVE PRECHARGE delay - could be 6 or 7
SDRAM 1T COMMAND CONTROL - take it off 'auto' change to 'disable' (10%
slower but much more stable if timings arent the problem)/(auto probably
disables it anyway, disabling is the conservative setting)

No point bothering with any other of the settings on that page I think.
Also note, If theyre set wrong, memtest will often pick it up quickly, but
sometimes doesnt detect until later tests.

Now if you find a memory config thats stable under memtest, but are still
getting errors in windows, you can trust memtest and cpu is unlikely to be
prob unless its overheating so programs might have actualy been damaged by
installing while the machine was flaky. Though program errors shouldnt
cause bluescreens or total reboots with winXP -unless XP itself is damaged.
Anyway thats hopefuly not the case.

If the board wont run 166/333 fsb&mem, it probably is better to try
something else, but if it will - happy days

gl,

 

[Mick]

Pief
Once again thanks for the load of info. I'm on UK time as well but I do tend
to see the mornings on weekdays these days as I have to go to work and my
kid won't let me go past 7.30 in any case. I just ran memcheck at the
default speed 2.1, 400 and the machine crashed during the test. Not sure
what that indicates. 1.8, 333 seems to be the highest stable setting I can
get without doing any of the other tweaks. Any higher CPU speed and it
crashes. I'm going to get the dealer to get the A7N8 and see if this works
at default speed. If not then it's tweaking ad infinitum.

Pief
Sorry if this seems dumb but I'm tired and confused (it's nearly 2 AM here)
and I don't really know a lot (yet) about all this. I've downloaded memtest
but haven't run it yet. What should I be looking to tweak in the BIOS
besides CPU and memory speed? I've now got it at 1.8 and 333. I've tried it
at 2 and 266 and it crashed doing very simple stuff in Photoshop (using the
lasso tool). I downloaded and installed the latest hyperion 4in1 drivers
from the viaarena website.

~maybe youll get this in the morning then (uk timezone here, but I dont
see morning so often..)

1.8 volts is pretty much an overclockers setting for Barton cpu used to
keep the cpu stable at much greater multipliers, the default voltage is 1.6
or 1.65. The CPUs stability can be tested quite independantly of the memory
stability. Now youd be very unlucky to get a (defective) barton thats not
happy on 333fsb but theyre not garuanteed to run at 266. I think your
memory should be ok at 333 fsb too, so thats the config to aim for.
At 333 fsb, 11x multiplier will give xp~2500 performance and should run
well at 1.65v , no need to overvolt it more -more heat and current draw..

I have my fan running on 5v instead of 12v and can change the cpu
multiplier to anything as long as it doesnt run too hot which happens when
it gets to about 2Ghz with the slow fan -so that rules out cpu stability
when you run it at 333 - not too hot..normal voltage..

So the cpu speed doesnt need tweaked as such, 11x at 1.65v should be fine
for 333fsb (as long as the cpu is ok)

Watch out for the different ways to report the speeds, its 333 double data
rate, but 166Mhz, I think the bios reports fsb in mhz -so 200 fsb will
actualy be the top 400ddr speed. And memory might be reported as ddr rate
so mem should be 333ddr for fsb of 166, theyre the same mhz but confusing
data rate reporting going on %}

anyway, memory - In the bios you can take it off manual and set/see the
speed, and then on the same page where the speed is set theres 'chip
configuration' option at the bottom. That opens another page with the
memory timings. These are fiddly. If its says 'by spd' in there, just leave
the bios and test that config with memtest bootdisk first, let memtest run
for a while, if it gets through a whole pass of tests ~25mins worth, the
memory is pretty stable, best to leave it for hours though, overnight or
whatever to be sure of rock solid stability, but many normal computers
arent as stable as that! Anyway, as soon as you do get any errors, escape
and reboot into the bios, head into the 'chip configuration' screen again
and turn it off 'byspd' to manual.

The first 5 settings are whats relevant to play with (as they appear in my
bios).

Notes for them for 333 speed:

CAS latency - the main culprit, try increasing just one step, later try
lowering to 2(!)
RAS to CAS delay - this should be 3 i think
CAS PRECHARGE delay - could well be 2, or 3
ACTIVE PRECHARGE delay - could be 6 or 7
SDRAM 1T COMMAND CONTROL - take it off 'auto' change to 'disable' (10%
slower but much more stable if timings arent the problem)/(auto probably
disables it anyway, disabling is the conservative setting)

No point bothering with any other of the settings on that page I think.
Also note, If theyre set wrong, memtest will often pick it up quickly, but
sometimes doesnt detect until later tests.

Now if you find a memory config thats stable under memtest, but are still
getting errors in windows, you can trust memtest and cpu is unlikely to be
prob unless its overheating so programs might have actualy been damaged by
installing while the machine was flaky. Though program errors shouldnt
cause bluescreens or total reboots with winXP -unless XP itself is damaged.
Anyway thats hopefuly not the case.

If the board wont run 166/333 fsb&mem, it probably is better to try
something else, but if it will - happy days

gl,