Asus SK8V problems

[Clas Mehus]

Have set up a system with a Asus SK8V and Athlon 64 FX-51, and have
some "issues".

System config:
-Athlon 64 FX-51
-Kingston HyperX PC3200 Reg/ECC
-Abit FX5900
-Hitachi Deskstar 7K250
-NEC ND-1300A
-Plextor Premium 52x
-FSP 350W PSU
-Cooling: Gigabyte 3D Cooler Pro for CPU, 120 mm case-fan, 120 mm
PSU-fan.

-I use a Hitachi 7K250 S-ATA-harddrive. I tried to connect this to the
chipset-connected Serial ATA-connectors and tried both with
driverpackage from the bundeled CD, from Asus' Web and from VIA's web.
I can starte the install of WinXP SP1, the setup finds the drive and I
can create partitions. Thus, when trying to format the harddrive I get
a error-message that the partition cannot be formated.

When using the Promise-controller the drive works fine, but I would
like to use the VIA-controller.

Anyone experienced silimar behavior from a K8T800-board?

-The CPU runs on 2250 MHz, but should run on 2200. When I look e.g. in
Aida32 is set as 10 x 225. Thus, I cannot find that any BIOS-settings
are incorrect. Tried both the latest official BIOS and the latest
beta-BIOS. The same happens. Have loaded setup defaults. With this,
Aida also report the memory to run on 450 MHz.
I had some stability-issues, and have to run the CPU-fanspeed quite
higher that I really think should be nesessery. Have run the same
CPU-cooler on a Athlon 64 3200+ on a K8V Deluxe with quite lower
temperature on lower fanspeed.

Ideas?

 

[Clas Mehus]

-The CPU runs on 2250 MHz, but should run on 2200. When I look e.g. in
Aida32 is set as 10 x 225. Thus, I cannot find that any BIOS-settings
are incorrect.

And update on this.

I changed the performance optimalization in the BIOS from "Turbo" to
"standard", and it seems like Aida now reporting 2215 MHz (and
10x222). Windows and other programs also report this clockfrequency.
CPU got quite much cooler, but there is still some overclocking. Aida
report memory to 443 MHz now. Memory is set to DDR400 manualy in the
BIOS now...

I guess this overclocking problem might also be responsible for the
HD-controller problem I wrote about in my first post.

 

[Paul]

And update on this.

I changed the performance optimalization in the BIOS from "Turbo" to
"standard", and it seems like Aida now reporting 2215 MHz (and
10x222). Windows and other programs also report this clockfrequency.
CPU got quite much cooler, but there is still some overclocking. Aida
report memory to 443 MHz now. Memory is set to DDR400 manualy in the
BIOS now...

I guess this overclocking problem might also be responsible for the
HD-controller problem I wrote about in my first post.

A post I read on Abxzone suggested that Turbo boosts Vcore. You
might check the voltage in the monitor. That would be why it got
cooler, and not due to the tiny frequency difference.

A user over there reported that his SATA drive got trashed at
230MHz, so I guess it does happen. Thinking by analogy, when
the PCI bus was pushed from 33MHz to 37.5MHz, that could cause
problems with IDE disks in the past. Maybe this is the same thing -
230/200 * 33MHz = 40MHz, which is slightly past that point.

Maybe the SATA link is used to derive a clock inside the SATA
disk drive. Since some SATA drives use a SATA - PATA bridge,
rather than being native, maybe if the SATA clock is tied to
the FSB and is getting bumped up, this in turn is corrupting
the disk due to the IDE clock inside the disk.

Now, I thought that SATA clocks were supposed to remain at
their nominal frequency. I vaguely remember a 100ppm spec
on the crystal used to synthesize the link clock, so tying
the SATA clock to the FSB or to the HT bus, is a bad thing
to do.

I love theories

Paul