Very nice, but didn't you have a couple of old WD Raptor 36GB or 74GB drives lying about for testing 😉

That would have been fun to try out.

Beastly, beastly, beastly. This is very similar to my first C2D rig 4 years ago so I like everything bout it. Nice touches with the Ninja and the case. Looks "industrial strength".

It amazes me how the RAM chips on that 9800 Pro 256MB are too hot to hold my fingers on even with RAMsinks.

BigBodZod wrote:

Very nice, but didn't you have a couple of old WD Raptor 36GB or 74GB drives lying about for testing 😉

I sold off a Velociraptor 150GB a couple of months ago. I figured it was time to sell it before it's worthless. 😁

VR150 is very quiet though believe it or not. It supports AAM. The older, big Raptors are rocks in a blender and I avoid that now. Especially when I can just get a SSD!

Yeah these asrock boards are nuts. I have had good results at 1066mhz... i mean it's not rock stable but will certainly last through some benchmarks and some gaming. It takes a couple days to freeze, at least in my experience. I obtained some high spec ram that let me run the memory divider 1:1 at 1066FSB, and before that I was running 2:3 with 1100FSB+

Are you using the beta bios 3.22? On that one it will let you set CAS 3 and get more flexibility, haven't tried it out myself though, I had better ram before I had the E5800 that necessitated it because of it's fractional multiplier.

I tried a Core 2 Extreme X6800 in it. 2.93 GHz, 1066 FSB. The board would freeze at various points during POST until it had warmed up for about 5 mins. I tried all sorts of things, including BIOS settings, diff RAM, diff video cards and even cleaned the CPU pads. BIOS v3.20 and v3.30.

Besides, with this board and chipset, RAM ratios cause problems. With a 1066 FSB CPU, the BIOS locks to the 3:2 ratio, meaning your PC3200 is at around 177 MHz. A 800 FSB CPU allows 1:1 ratio. There's no advantage to a 1066 FSB.

IMO, the best CPU is one from the Pentium E5x00 family. High clock speed, Wolfdale, 800 FSB, and an adequate 2MB L2.

swaaye wrote:

There's no advantage to a 1066 FSB.

/me snrks.

You sure about that?

jaqie wrote:

You sure about that?

Yup on this board I'm sure there's no advantage to 1066 over 800. You end up with less memory bandwidth because of how the BIOS locks you to 176 MHz RAM clock. With a real Core 2 chipset, designed for 1066+ MT/s FSB, where you have DDR2/3 that can run 1:1 or better, it's another story.

swaaye wrote:

Besides, with this board and chipset, RAM ratios cause problems. With a 1066 FSB CPU, the BIOS locks to the 3:2 ratio, meaning your PC3200 is at around 177 MHz. A 800 FSB CPU allows 1:1 ratio

It's not locked, just have to have some good ram 😀

prophase_j wrote:

It's not locked, just have to have some good ram 😀

No, it is truly locked. 😀 The DRAM speed selection in the BIOS is greyed out and can not be changed when a 1066 MT/s CPU is installed. It locks to the 133 MHz RAM setting (3:2 ratio). I believe even manually lowering FSB does not change this. It's very annoying of course.

With a 800 MT/s CPU installed, the BIOS allows you to select any ratio.

Those tricky Asrock BIOS programmers did some annoying things. It's also impossible to set the multiplier of a Extreme edition CPU. It remains greyed out. So you have to resort to Windows utilities. And there is no CPU voltage (maybe for the best, considering the VRM here).

swaaye wrote:

I sold off a Velociraptor 150GB a couple of months ago. I figured it was time to sell it before it's worthless. 😁

VR150 is very quiet though believe it or not. It supports AAM. The older, big Raptors are rocks in a blender and I avoid that now. Especially when I can just get a SSD!

See, I still have 4 of these bricks lying about, a pair of 36GB and a pair of 74GB Raptors.

They were decent drives but hot and noisy to some degree yes 😉

As for the fact you can get a decent SSD then yes, that is a good sub for one of these drives.

swaaye wrote:

No, it is truly locked. :) The DRAM speed selection in the BIOS is greyed out and can not be changed when a 1066 MT/s CPU is in […]
Show full quote

No, it is truly locked. 😀 The DRAM speed selection in the BIOS is greyed out and can not be changed when a 1066 MT/s CPU is installed. It locks to the 133 MHz RAM setting (3:2 ratio).
...
With a 800 MT/s CPU installed, the BIOS allows you to select any ratio.
...
And there is no CPU voltage (maybe for the best, considering the VRM here).

Okay I think I understand better now. I have only had 800FSB in it so in that case I don't know. Wow.. I would find that incredibly annoying too.

swaaye wrote:

Those tricky Asrock BIOS programmers did some annoying things. It's also impossible to set the multiplier of a Extreme edition CPU. It remains greyed out. So you have to resort to Windows utilities.

With both my e2160 and the e5800 they are grey until I disable Speedstep in the bios.

prophase_j wrote:

With both my e2160 and the e5800 they are grey until I disable Speedstep in the bios.

I don't know if I tried that but that makes sense.

Well I sold that X6800 anyway, because it's worth about $110 and the RAM ratio being locked was a real showstopper for tweaking. The $50 E5700 seems flawlessly stable on the board.

I'm trying out a bunch of AGP cards. Radeon 8500 and 9800 Pro. Geforce 5200U and 5900U. It's interesting to see them run games when the CPU is definitely not a bottleneck.

The 775i65G does have another unfortunate issue, that being the lack of S3 sleep. It looks like S3 was available in early BIOSs but was removed because of problems.

Maybe a bit unrelated. But from my experiences with this board and my recent build which also involved buying a ton of parts from 06-08- cpus, mobos, etc, and the benefit of hindsight, I'm drawn to conclude that Core 2 is a very powerful architecture but running on motherboards that are antiquated, eg. only 4gb ram cacheable, 2 ram slots stable, finicky with modern O/Ss like Ubuntu, Win 7, quirky setups, etc.

The same generation AMD stuff, on the cpu front AM2 dual cores right up to Phenom 1 and chipsets from Nvidia 5xx to 790FX may have less clock for clock power (well, maybe not Ph1 but it clocks lower anyway) but seem to have more modern chipsets, easier to use, setup and overclock. To me at least, though this may be psychological, AMD systems seem more stable and smoother at the desktop.

Hmm if I were to describe it in automotive analogy it would be like Core 2 = driving an 80s rear wheel drive big engine Beemer (fast but on the edge oversteer happy handling) and AM2/2+ = new Golf GTi (maybe not as fast but easy, relaxed handling).

Sure you could build a AM2+ setup with AGP that's nice too.

ie
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=AM2NF3-VSTA

Hey guys, i'm also using the same board: here's a pic

HD4670
e6600 @ 2.6ghz
2x1gb PQI DDR400
RAID 0

i am looking for a modded bios so i can run CL3 - i want to buy a set of DDR500 - maybe someone can help ?

ps: how ghetto is my machine - don't you just love the electrical tape ? !! lulz : >

🤣 it looks nice enough to me.

I see you attached a fan to the northbridge. That little chip sure does get hot but mine hasn't blown up yet so I'm ignoring it. 😀

The 865PE chipset on my old 478 Gigabyte board had a fan on it from the factory. They are toasty little buggers.

Very nice system!