Sly_Botts wrote on Yesterday, 04:01:

On a side note: After all this, I am noticing some chirping on the sound card when I'm playing games or music. I'm going to look into this.

turn on AGP delayed transaction and PCI delayed transaction in the BIOS setup.

shevalier wrote on Yesterday, 05:31:

Sly_Botts wrote on Yesterday, 04:01:

On a side note: After all this, I am noticing some chirping on the sound card when I'm playing games or music. I'm going to look into this.

turn on AGP delayed transaction and PCI delayed transaction in the BIOS setup.

Yeah unfortunately there's no option in the bios I'll probably just move the card to a slot farther away from the GPU and CPU. Micro ATX board so that's probably why.

Sly_Botts wrote on Yesterday, 14:34:

shevalier wrote on Yesterday, 05:31:

Sly_Botts wrote on Yesterday, 04:01:

On a side note: After all this, I am noticing some chirping on the sound card when I'm playing games or music. I'm going to look into this.

turn on AGP delayed transaction and PCI delayed transaction in the BIOS setup.

Yeah unfortunately there's no option in the bios I'll probably just move the card to a slot farther away from the GPU and CPU. Micro ATX board so that's probably why.

Bad.
The most standard BIOS option for VIA.
Helps a lot when two low-latency drivers start fighting for access.
Besides, if the graphics card has its own memory, the sound card definitely doesn't.
And it's time to play the sample.

I have a very similar A8V Deluxe motherboard. It also behaves strangely with SSDs using its onboard SATA controller and also the AGP bus is finicky too. I dislike this board to be honest.

I'm wondering if the aforementioned AGP & PCI Delayed Transaction BIOS options are present but for some reason hidden, and could be enabled via modification?

shevalier wrote on Yesterday, 18:56:

Bad. The most standard BIOS option for VIA. Helps a lot when two low-latency drivers start fighting for access. Besides, if the […]
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Sly_Botts wrote on Yesterday, 14:34:

shevalier wrote on Yesterday, 05:31:

turn on AGP delayed transaction and PCI delayed transaction in the BIOS setup.

Yeah unfortunately there's no option in the bios I'll probably just move the card to a slot farther away from the GPU and CPU. Micro ATX board so that's probably why.

Bad.
The most standard BIOS option for VIA.
Helps a lot when two low-latency drivers start fighting for access.
Besides, if the graphics card has its own memory, the sound card definitely doesn't.
And it's time to play the sample.

I fixed it!!!

I had to install the George Breese VIA PCI Latency Patch.

Sly_Botts wrote on Yesterday, 04:01:

Hi everyone, […]
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Hi everyone,

So I decided I wanted to retire my Pentium 4 Prescott 3.2Ghz ASUS P4P800X system and try to build a modest 2005 Windows XP system.

CPU: Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Manchester
Motherboard: ASUS A8V-MX
RAM: 1GB DDR1 PC3200 2-3-3-7-10 timings
Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Video: ATI Radeon x800 pro 256MB
Storage: WD 250GB SATA III SSD with SATA to IDE Adaptor by StarTech

So I was able to obtain this motherboard from ebay for a fairly expensive price. (65 Euro's plus 35 shipping to Canada). My options were very limited as most Socket 939 Motherboards I could find were PCIe only and those that had an AGP slot were very expensive (Hundreds of Dollars). So i settled for this one despite my fears of it having a VIA chipset.

The attachment A8VMotherboard.jpg is no longer available

Let me tell you, this was quite the time.

First I discovered that the Chipset VIA VT8251 doesn't play well with SATA drives that are not SATA I or II (mostly just SATA I) However it could detect the SSD despite it being SATA III and I was able to get windows XP installed and run it in RAID MODE. AHCI was not recommended for this MB as apparently the chipset was designed to run SATA drives in RAID mode to perform the same function as AHCI. Despite this SSD being detected and useable, it would cause issues while running Windows XP. Files would get deleted or drivers deleted, settings changed etc; Very strange behaviour, so I decided to bypass the SATA controller altogether.

The other issue with this motherboard which killed it for me initially was that there are issues with the 8M800 AGP chipset not being able to handle fast ATI cards and many others. There were some Nvidia cards that would work (See 6600 GT) but I bought this to utilize my x800 pro. So I was determined to make it work as it would crash any time I tried to play a game or run any benchmarks. So here is what I did after 3 days of troubleshooting:

1: Update the Bios: I updated the bios to the latest 0503 bios

2: In the bios I had to make sure my AGP settings were specific:

The attachment AGP.jpg is no longer available

3: I wiped my drives and did a fresh install of XP 32-bit SP3

4: Once XP was installed I installed the VIA 4in1 chipset ver.456, followed by ver.524a. Right after this I went into device manager, found the VIA CPU-AGP controller and made sure the driver was updated to VIA CPU to AGP2.0/AGP3.0 Controller

5: Installed AMD Dual-Core Optimizer patch for XP and the AMD K8 processor drivers for the X2

6: Installed .Net frameworks and drivers for Sound Blaster AUdigy.

7: Finally installed Catalyst 5.13 for the x800pro.

8: System reboots, it automatically turns off AGP Read, AGP Write, PCI Read and PCI write because of SmartGart.

9: Turn on AGP Read, AGP Write, reboot.

10: Turn on PCI Read, PCI write, reboot.

Enjoy Games.

On a side note: After all this, I am noticing some chirping on the sound card when I'm playing games or music. I'm going to look into this.

Sly_Botts wrote on Today, 04:46:

shevalier wrote on Yesterday, 18:56:

Bad. The most standard BIOS option for VIA. Helps a lot when two low-latency drivers start fighting for access. Besides, if the […]
Show full quote

Sly_Botts wrote on Yesterday, 14:34:

Yeah unfortunately there's no option in the bios I'll probably just move the card to a slot farther away from the GPU and CPU. Micro ATX board so that's probably why.

Bad.
The most standard BIOS option for VIA.
Helps a lot when two low-latency drivers start fighting for access.
Besides, if the graphics card has its own memory, the sound card definitely doesn't.
And it's time to play the sample.

I fixed it!!!

I had to install the George Breese VIA PCI Latency Patch.

Enabled PCI Delay Transaction in the VT8235 southbridge, to smooth out video capture cards when Athlon CPU cooling is enabled.

The ‘delayed transaction’ option in the BIOS reduces performance by a catastrophic 0.5–1%. 😀
Something Asus, in its battle against common sense, could never bring itself to do.

Wow, so much good info here!
Thank you for sharing your troubleshooting experience and steps to resolve the issues, Sly_Botts. 😀

I have an ASUS A8V-MX as well that I bought over a decade ago just because it was super cheap on eBay and listed as not working / for parts or repair.
It ended up working, but just needed 1 electrolytic cap changed (the board uses Matsushita FJ/FJS which are known good series, but there was one failed one for no particular reason.)
Anyways, good to have this info if/when I get to do a build with it. Or I might sell it, now that you mention how crazy the prices have gone on these. FWIW, I got mine for $5 back then. Shipping was something like $15, but that's because I also ended up buying another s939 board from the same seller and had the shipping combined. On a 2nd thought, I'll probably end up keeping it, since this is my only s939 board with true AGP. I do have two 939Dual-SATA2 boards, but GPU-Z always reports the AGP bus as "AGP 1x @ PCI"... so not sure if it's a true AGP bus. Plus, one of them is on its way out (dying Southbridge.)

One thing I remember about the A8V-MX back when I did a temporary setup with it (in order to test it) was that it doesn't seem to be capable of any CPU overclocking. Basically, any time I tried to increase the bus speed, even by 1 MHz, the board would not boot anymore and needed a CMOS reset. Curious if that's the case with yours too. I have a lot of 3200+ Venice CPUs and most of them seem to have no problem running at 2.5-2.6 GHz (a +25% OC) on stock voltage, which is basically about on par with the 4000+ (which runs at 2.4 GHz, but has twice the L2 cache). One of these OC'ed on this board and with an older AGP video card (like a GeForce 4 or FX 5000 series) could make for a really nice Windows 98 retro rocket, I think.

BTW, for anyone curious, I did a "cap map" and rough power rail map-out for this board, which can be seen here:
https://www.badcaps.net/filedata/fetch?id=2200556