XavierX wrote on 2024-11-14, 19:53:

so my other stick of RAM is faulty

non sequitur.
Update the BIOS you will get all the RAM to work (up to 3.25gb total)

Bruno128 wrote on 2024-11-14, 21:58:

non sequitur.
Update the BIOS you will get all the RAM to work (up to 3.25gb total)

But it is faulty - I tried it with only that specific RAM stick installed and it failed to give me a video signal. I then swapped for the other one (as a single) and it worked. I'm only using 2GB of RAM, i.e. 2 x 1GB sticks.

Both together give me no video signal, the faulty one on its own gives me no video signal, the working one does give me a video signal.

I can only conclude it's faulty.

Video signal =full post and working?

myne wrote on 2024-11-15, 03:22:

Video signal =full post and working?

Yes, all working now with the temporary GPU I've tested with.

Ultimately I'm replacing the GPU for something else, but at least I know everything is working as it should. I've now flashed the MB with the 3.19a firmware, so I'll upgrade the CPU very soon.

I have these, but not sure which one is "best":

Intel SLB9J Core 2 Duo E8400 3.00GHz LGA755 CPU

Intel Core 2 Duo E7600 3.06 Ghz 1066Mhz 3MB SLGTD

Any preference or are they about the same?

It's hard to achieve 333 FSB on Asrock for E8400 to work on the default speed. On 266 FSB E7600 is simply faster due to clock difference.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-11-15, 05:12:

It's hard to achieve 333 FSB on Asrock for E8400 to work on the default speed. On 266 FSB E7600 is simply faster due to clock difference.

Perfect, thanks. Looks like I'll try the E7600 and see what happens.

Will post back with any updates.

Just one last upgrade of the GPU to go!

XavierX wrote on 2024-11-14, 23:06:

I can only conclude it's faulty.

You conclusion is unfounded. It’s not common for DDR2 modules to just randomly go full-dead. If one of the chips was faulty board would at least begin POST sequence.
Module in question most likely has SPD preset the old bios can’t work with. But you keep ignoring that topic.

I mean, it's a kit of two likely identical modules. They probably have identical SPD presets, don't you think?

Old modules could easily go full dead by shorting onto the heatsink or some other way. After all, usually nobody cares about old cheap ram modules and tosses them around in random boxes.

Bruno128 wrote on 2024-11-15, 09:29:

You conclusion is unfounded. It’s not common for DDR2 modules to just randomly go full-dead. If one of the chips was faulty board would at least begin POST sequence.
Module in question most likely has SPD preset the old bios can’t work with. But you keep ignoring that topic.

In order for me to "keep ignoring that topic" - it would have been raised with me previously, which it was not.

Your continuation of this topic is abrasive and unhelpful (to all concerned). For all intents and purposes, the module is faulty - it doesn't work like the other exact same module - the reason it doesn't work is irrelevant.

I have no need to look into this further, I have now purchased 2 more RAM sticks as replacements (and a backup) - they only cost £4 for the pair, so I really don't care to try to "fix" or fault-find the other one.

In more positive news, I have now installed the Intel Core 2 Duo E7600 3.06 Ghz and all is working fine.

One last thing to do - add a different GPU, which I'll be using as a VHS capture device (bit odd, but that's the recommended route for the "best" raw VHS rips).

@XavierX:

Do you have flashed the latest beta BIOS 3.19a which is highly recommended? It is available from my website's ASRock page -> https://soggi.org/motherboards/asrock.htm.

Personally I wouldn't go with DDR2 533 or 667, if you don't need more than 2 GiB RAM - I would take DDR 400.

kind regards
soggi

I read 2 years of so of history of this thread, just few notes.

• There are utilities to limit RAM to 512 MB for Windows9x to start. Its good to have at least boot entry from them for testing, if something run there fine, you can try it with more mem or vice versa its good for debug.
• There is issue with 512 MB GPUs and Nvidia drivers, there were some Bios changes + utils from Rloew to fix it, but it was quite complicated and had problems to get it work, but it needed other his patches to work too.
• At the the i found out, that even some patched Nvidia new drivers give you much less compatibility than older Nvidia cards, older card is solution and Radeon 9000/X300-X850 are good middleground.
• There is video how someone made working even Windows NT4 on new MB and Radeon X300 - PCI-E, so its probably worth to try to make others PCI-E / AGP radeons to work.
  Windows 2000 is quite good alternative, but there has to be some games witch are not running with Win2000 and NT4.. nice additional is native support of multiple cores,
  i dunno how good is Win2000 and NT4 altoritm hypervisior/ manager or how to call with assigning processes to multiple cores, but it would probably much better than Win9x multiprocessors hacks,
  because that support was native and in age of NT4 and Win2000, there were at least dual CPU highend workstations with reasonable price ($5000 or maybe less, maybe someone here would remember it better, i was too young and poor..)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSN43szLVts&a … _channel=Omores

soggi wrote on 2024-11-16, 08:33:

@XavierX: […]
Show full quote

@XavierX:

Do you have flashed the latest beta BIOS 3.19a which is highly recommended? It is available from my website's ASRock page -> https://soggi.org/motherboards/asrock.htm.

Personally I wouldn't go with DDR2 533 or 667, if you don't need more than 2 GiB RAM - I would take DDR 400.

kind regards
soggi

Hi, yes, thanks. I've updated to the latest 3.19a from your site (plus the flash tool). All went to plan, after checking and double checking everything before I flashed.

With regards to RAM - is there a reason for recommending 400Mhz sticks? I just installed 2 x 1GB 667MHz sticks and all is good (as far as I can tell right now).

This PC won't be pushed at all, or used to play games. It's purely a VHS capture rig, so it will be running a couple of capture related programmes and running an ATI All-in-Wonder 7200 (or 9200) AGP graphics card.

XavierX wrote on 2024-11-17, 22:15:

Hi, yes, thanks. I've updated to the latest 3.19a from your site (plus the flash tool). All went to plan, after checking and double checking everything before I flashed.

Good to hear flashing the BIOS worked w/o a problem! 😀

XavierX wrote on 2024-11-17, 22:15:

With regards to RAM - is there a reason for recommending 400Mhz sticks? I just installed 2 x 1GB 667MHz sticks and all is good (as far as I can tell right now).

If you're fine with the two 1 GiB DDR2 667 sticks then everything is OK.

I have an ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA myself (and all the four LGA 775 Dual-VSTA boards are very similar, also concerning the BIOS) and there are some pitfalls/issues and one of the is that I noticed that DDR2 533 BIOS setting seems to be faster than DDR2 667. But that's not the most important reason I would prefer DDR400 over it, the most important is that f.e. good DDR 400 RAM (CL2.5-2-2-5) has lower latency than good DDR2 667 RAM (CL4-4-4-12) -> see the table in the German Wikipedia article (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR-SDRAM#Laten … en_im_Vergleich) which together with its higher clock rate of 200 MHz vs 166 MHz give you a better total access time. The only thing which is better with the DDR2 667 RAM is the higher bandwidth (3.2 GB/s vs 5.3 GB/s). Which is better for someone depends on the software which is used and has to be tested...but as said above: If you're fine with your RAM then everything is OK!

kind regards
soggi

OK, new issue - I've only noticed it recently when using the PC more often - I've only really run the PC in short bursts for testing so far - this issue has only popped up once before and never returned, but now it's fairly frequent.

This has happened a few times recently - the desktop completely freezes and I cannot get out of it - mouse fails to move, keyboard doesn't work - desktop screen is just frozen with mouse pointer stuck in place.

The only way to get out of this is to force a power cycle - although occasionally it will just reboot itself during a freeze and then go back to normal (without any error screens).

Any ideas of what's causing this?

The only difference from before (when I wasn't getting any freezes) is the new CPU install and new RAM, but this all started to happen when I was trying to install a Sound Blaster X-Fi audio card - so maybe something to do with that?

Not sure how to diagnose, I'm not getting any BSOD errors, just a freeze and then either manual forced reboot or auto-reboot by the PC.

Also, on an unrelated note - I'm using an IDE to SATA converter for my main HDD where XP is installed - do I need to use this or can I now just plug my drive into one of the SATA ports on the board?

Many thanks!

Small update - I decided to restore my PC to before I started installing the X-Fi drivers and software - now it's been running for a few hours without issue, so I can only presume it's something from the Sound Blaster software that's causing it.

Not sure why the conflict, but I'll need to either find another sound card or find better software to run it.

XavierX wrote on 2024-11-19, 17:59:

Also, on an unrelated note - I'm using an IDE to SATA converter for my main HDD where XP is installed - do I need to use this or can I now just plug my drive into one of the SATA ports on the board?

It depends... Is it a Serial ATA 1.5 Gbit/s (also called SATA I) HDD? I recall there is bug in the VIA VT8237A southbridge which caused problems with Serial ATA 3.0 Gbit/s (SATA II) HDDs and the HDDs had to be set to SATA I via jumper to work correctly. Additionally Windows won't start, if AHCI/RAID mode is activated unless the appropriate driver is loaded, Intel's can be integrated afterwards, VIAs eventually not.

kind regards
soggi

soggi wrote on 2024-11-19, 20:40:

It depends... Is it a Serial ATA 1.5 Gbit/s (also called SATA I) HDD? I recall there is bug in the VIA VT8237A southbridge which caused problems with Serial ATA 3.0 Gbit/s (SATA II) HDDs and the HDDs had to be set to SATA I via jumper to work correctly. Additionally Windows won't start, if AHCI/RAID mode is activated unless the appropriate driver is loaded, Intel's can be integrated afterwards, VIAs eventually not.

Thanks for the info. It's a Seagate ST500LM021 – SATA 6Gb/s, so reasonably modern and fast. If there's no issues using an adapter, I'll just leave it as I've set it up - seems to work fine (pretty quick too).

I will be connecting another one of these drives for storage, so I presume I can do that via SATA without issue? Or do I need the BIOS change to make it work?

I'm not overly familiar with the correct settings for XP builds (normally on my modern PC builds, I just connect the drives to SATA and that's about it).

XavierX wrote on 2024-11-19, 17:59:

OK, new issue - I've only noticed it recently when using the PC more often...

I have both Audigy 2 ZS (for windows 98) and X-Fi Xtreme gamer (or somesuch, standard full featured except breakout modules/consoles) and it's behaving well.

However, I did have similar issues (as well as BSODs sometimes) when I used built-in sata controller with modern 400GB Kingston SSD. The system would either randomly freeze or respond slowly or straight out crash in Windows XP.

The same would happen in Windows 98, albeit mostly in dos games running in it (random stutters when loading assets, etc). I swapped it with somewhat older (circa 2017 WD blue 400gb SSD) and it all went away.

Zoomer wrote on 2024-11-19, 22:11:

I have both Audigy 2 ZS (for windows 98) and X-Fi Xtreme gamer (or somesuch, standard full featured except breakout modules/consoles) and it's behaving well.

Funnily enough, I also tried the Audigy 2 ZS before the X-Fi and I had similar (worse) results - constant freezing and I couldn't even get the software to install properly.

Looks like I might have to find an older HDD, just in case it's the same issue. What specifically am I looking for to make this play nicely?

Soggi describes SATA3 problems. I've heard about that too. Probably even saw this in some official documentation.

However, this seems to be on the device by device basis. At least in my case.

However, if this is indeed connected to SATA3 version, then you should be looking for the devices, that allow forcing the SATA version with jumpers, I think.