First post, by VooDooMan
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I have problems with stability and performance on this one.
This motherboard seems interesting to me since it is one of the last chipsets that natively supports Tualatin processors, it has DDR and SDR slots and only ASUS produced them, and since ASUS makes solid boards I thought this one will give some good results in benchmarks.
My configuration of this board is:
- ASUS TUA266 with DDR/SDR memory (512MB/512MB)
- Pentium3 1400-S Tualatin (SL6BY)
- GeForce 4 Ti 4600 128 MB AGP by Albatron (44.03 drivers)
- Windows 98 SE
- ALI AGP 1.90 drivers.
- 120GB HDD
- Fortron 300W PSU
When it comes to stabilty, I thought at first that this MOBO is broken since I got crashes all the time in most Direct 3D applications.
Installing different verions of ALI AGP drivers, and trying many drivers for VGA card didn’t help to solve that problem in any way.
Finally, I discovered that disabling the PCI ENHANCED MODE in BIOS solves the problem with stabilty, but still the performance is very bad... I got only 9054 points in 3D mark, while I was expecting to reach around 9500 at least.
The second thing is performance. It seems that the memory timings and their read/write results are holding this mobo back. I tried both, DDR and SDR as well and the performance was always bad, with SDR it was even worse. I can’t tighten the memory timings in the BIOS (even though I set the CAS Latency to 2 in the BIOS it still remains 3, tRAS should also be 5 not 6.) to get some better results. It should be 2-2-2-5.
I heard that this motherboard does not support memory interleaving, that is why the memory read/write results are bad.
My questions are:
- Does anyone here have experience with this board and encountered the same problems as I did?
- Which software should I use to tighten the memory timings?
- Is there a patch for enabling the memory interleaving (something similar to the one that was made for VIA chipset based boards)?