Trying to decide on 3800+ motherboard (Also between it and I 830)

[Paolo Pignatelli]

In the final stages of deciding between an Intel 830 and an Athlon x2 3800+,
I am inclined to go Athlon at this point for power consumption (noise)
reasons. In reviewing the appropriate motherboards, however, I am finding
that there seem to be many complaints about stability of some of the MB I
am interested in. I plan to install 2 Gigs to start off, and will
eventually add another 2 gigs. I am looking at AsusA8N-SLI-Premium, but on
a vendor site, there are many complaints about having more than 2 sticks of
memory, and SATA issues too.
Can someone who has built upon the 3800+ and has 2 or more gigs of RAM
installed (even if not the Asus product) please help?
Will have 2 WD HDs (250's) and a low end graphics card (I don't game), and
will be running XP Pro.
I would like to use an Antec Sonata II case - is there then sufficient
cooling?

TIA

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

In the final stages of deciding between an Intel 830 and an Athlon x2 3800+,
I am inclined to go Athlon at this point for power consumption (noise)
reasons. In reviewing the appropriate motherboards, however, I am finding
that there seem to be many complaints about stability of some of the MB I
am interested in. I plan to install 2 Gigs to start off, and will
eventually add another 2 gigs. I am looking at AsusA8N-SLI-Premium, but on
a vendor site, there are many complaints about having more than 2 sticks of
memory, and SATA issues too.
Can someone who has built upon the 3800+ and has 2 or more gigs of RAM
installed (even if not the Asus product) please help?
Will have 2 WD HDs (250's) and a low end graphics card (I don't game), and
will be running XP Pro.
I would like to use an Antec Sonata II case - is there then sufficient
cooling?

TIA

I have an X2 4400+ system with 4G on an MSI K8N Neo4. The system is
completely stable as long as you run the memory at the rated speed of
333MHz for four double sided DIMMs. The A64 memory bus is limited to
333MHz when you are using two pairs of double sided DIMMs. I have another
A64 system with 1.5G that has a pair of double sided DIMMs and one pair of
single sided DIMMs, that system runs at 400MHz without any problems. For a
2G system it's no problem running at 400MHz if you use a pair of 1G DIMMs,
unfortunately to go beyond 2G you'll need two pairs of double sided DIMM
because no one seems to be making single sided DIMMs larger then 256M. The
good news is that it doesn't matter much, the difference in performance
between a 333MHz memory system and a 400MHz memory system is only about 5%.

 

[Ed Light]

My Gigabyte K8NS-939 is running four 512k Kingmax Super Rams at pc400. But
actually it's set at pc333 manually and the clock is at 240, equalling
pc400.

When the clock was at 200, stock, it would run them when set manually to
pc400.

However, that was with the F3 bios, which they have removed from their site.
The next F4 wouldn't do it, and they wanted me to try F5 but I had gone back
to F3 and become lazy. They are on F7 now, I think.

The issue I had was I had to set it to pc400 with a clock speed of 200, let
it auto-set the timings, then write them down and set them to manual.
Otherwise when I set it down to pc333 it would tighten up the timings. It
ran ok this way at clock 240, but got a poorer score in memtest86.
--
Ed Light

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[General Schvantzkoph]

My Gigabyte K8NS-939 is running four 512k Kingmax Super Rams at pc400. But
actually it's set at pc333 manually and the clock is at 240, equalling
pc400.

When the clock was at 200, stock, it would run them when set manually to
pc400.

However, that was with the F3 bios, which they have removed from their site.
The next F4 wouldn't do it, and they wanted me to try F5 but I had gone back
to F3 and become lazy. They are on F7 now, I think.

The issue I had was I had to set it to pc400 with a clock speed of 200, let
it auto-set the timings, then write them down and set them to manual.
Otherwise when I set it down to pc333 it would tighten up the timings. It
ran ok this way at clock 240, but got a poorer score in memtest86.

I have 4G of OCZ RAM on my system. It's the ordinary DDR3200 DIMMs, it's
not their premium RAM which might have greater timing margins. When I set
the DDR speed to 400MHz the system was unstable although I was able to
run Memtest86 overnight which is an indicator that Memtest86 isn't very
good. I tried substituting two 512M Crucial DIMMs for two of the OCZ
DIMMs. When I did that the system wouldn't even boot, it would get a
kernel oops. Letting the system auto set the RAM speed to 333MHz fixed the
stability issues. I went back to the four sticks of OCZ and have been
running the system 24/7 since July without a hickup.

 

[Paolo Pignatelli]

This is so helpful, thank you all. One of the reasons for building this
system is to get back to the concept of PC, "Personal Computer". Right now
a branded PC is as much a Personal Computer as "Home Baked" supermarket
bread is home baked.

Thanks

 

[Ed Light]

When I set
the DDR speed to 400MHz the system was unstable although I was able to
run Memtest86 overnight which is an indicator that Memtest86 isn't very
good.

I always require my machine to pass memtest86 and also prime95, not just one
of them, which is much safer.


--
Ed Light

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MS Smiley :-\

Send spam to the FTC at
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Bring the Troops Home:
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