"Steeler Fan" said:
Base on VIA P4X266E
http://www.asrockamerica.com/Products/x533.htm
Any feedback on this board? Just bought haven't received yet.
Before buying a motherboard, you should download the manual and
read it.
1) This is a basic board, with a Via chipset. If you go to the
via.com.tw website, the Northbridge connects to the Southbridge
with a 266MB/sec Vlink bus. This passes the basic requirement
that something faster than a 133MB/sec PCI bus is used to connect
the two chips together, because otherwise there could be performance
problems with some combinations of PCI cards. Good so far.
2) If you read the manual, the clocks for the various subsystems
are not independent of one another. This means, for example,
that if you use a 533MHz FSB processor, the basic board clock is
133MHz, your DDR memory will run at 266MHz, and the AGP and PCI
will be their normal 66MHz and 33MHz respectively. When you
attempt to overclock, all the clock frequencies rise in proportion.
The limit could be the PCI bus, which will start to have problems
around 37.5MHz (sometimes IDE devices derive their clock from
the PCI clock, and they are the first to screw up). So, don't
count on overclocking the board more than about 13% if you are
booting from IDE drives or using a lot of PCI cards (that is just
my guess on the limit - it may go further, and after all, that is
the fun part, finding out how far it can be pushed).
I can see another possible trick - you could use a 400FSB processor
and then set the FSB_SEL jumper to 533. This will attempt a 33%
overclock, yet keep the other clock frequencies at nominal. So,
I wouldn't waste money depending on this working, but if you have
a spare 400FSB processor sitting around, it might make a fun
experiment. You can then bump the FSB clock by the above mentioned
extra 13%. (If you need more Vcore to get this to work, there is
no Vcore adjustment, so a "wire trick" might be required to get
enough Vcore - this really isn't an overclockers board.)
Consult the database at
http://www.cpudatabase.com/CPUdb/ to see
what is possible - since this really isn't an overclockers board,
maybe sticking with the 13% above nominal option is a safer
processor purchasing strategy.
For compute bound performance, there will be no difference between
this board, and any other board using a P4 with a 533MHz bus.
Similarly, games performance will be OK if the majority of textures
are stored in the video card before a level starts.
If you plan on running something that requires a lot of memory
bandwidth, there are better choices of motherboard.
The manual says the AGP slot can handle 3.3V or 1.5V cards, so
you can run an old Voodoo5 or an ATI Rage Fury Maxx if you want.
Considering the prices I see on Pricewatch, this thing really is
a bargain ($48 shipping included). If you go to your local computer
store, many individual PCI cards cost about that much.
Post back your experience, because little is known about Asrock
boards.
HTH,
Paul
