First post, by tincup
- Rank
- Oldbie
P4's come in for much cheerful derision in these forums but the cpu can't be as easily discounted when considering high-end platforms for the AGP V5.
In my pursuit for a fast rig to run this card, and having progressivley migrated from P-2's, Tualatin 1.1 & 1.4, Duron 1.6, I aquired an inexpensive P4 mATX board that supports a P-4/2.8mhz and has a 3.3v universal AGP slot to test.
It's early yet but the results are promising - this is a very fast setup for the V5 - not the maximum achievable per comments I received on a related thread - but substantial.
The board is a bit odd though. It's a one off 'Asus-for-Sony' part with almost no spec information, drivers, bios updates seemingly available online. While it shares many of the features of the P4S533 line it does not seem to match any of the Asus-only releases exactly so it's all very trial and error. I did manage to find the Sony user's manual - pretty useless but offers a few hints for solving some tech issue.
The major limitation is a *very* opaque bios. The only thing it really does is see the 2.8 Northwood, DDR 333 and allow a whole host of unnecessary onboard features to be turned off.
Fortunately I discovered a reference to "unlocking" the bios buried in an 10-year old OC forum which makes life a lot easier. Remove the ram, fire up to the beeps, shutdown, replace ram, reboot and then when you can access a 'safe mode' bios with all th bells and whistles. The downside is this needs to be done each time you want to enter the detailed bios.
Nonetheless I was able to confirm 2x AGP mode, CPU:DRAM ratio [4:5], ram frequency/timings and verify that more OC related settings were available.
One other issue is that the board needs a power supply with a 3-pin power fan speed monitor plug in or it reports a bogus rpm error at POST - it's by-passable [F1] but an annoyance. I'm tracking down a case fan with an RPM sensor plug now.
Also, there is one "Unknown Device" in Device Manager I can't resolve and I'm hoping that it's the fan speed monitor function. We'll see.
Slowing building up the OS setup, and more later.
EDIT: It just feels really fast compared to the previous builds..
