chawken or tc please read..

[toomnymods]

Well I finally submitted to buying 2 1.2 "mp" palaminos yesterday from newegg.com :D :p :D (got tired of waiting on the "desktop palaminos that will never come, lol).. these are going to go into the 2 new crunchers I'm assembling.. Both will have the epox 8k7a. What I'm wondering is my t-birds will not for the life of them run stable over 155 fsb on my epox mobos using crucial pc2100 timings are 16-8-8-3-2-2-2 ( some people are hitting 160-180 fsb :eek: ) I'd be happy to just hit 167 @ cas 2 where the /5 pci divider kicks in.. Just wondering excactly how you have your bios setup as far as memory timings and anyother thing that might affect cpu/ memory fsb speeds.. Also what is the average o/c for the new 1.2 palamino mp's?? Some say arounds 1.4, but with this mobo shouldnt it be easy as hell to hit about 1.55?? Just wonderin'


Crunch On!!!!

[toomnymods]

Also someone in a forum yesterday said "Ibm harddrives suck for high fsb speeds??? :confused: These are the only drives I currently use:
3 Ibm Deskstar gxp 60 60gb (2 in raid 0)
2 Ibm Deskstar gxp 75 30gb Raid 0
1 Ibm Deskstar Gxp 60 20gb


so far the raided gxp 75 has achieved the highest stable fsb o/c @ 155 the others are at 152, and 149

something here Is definatly fishy... God how i'd love to hit 1.8 on aircooled with my 1.4 :D :p

Back to dreamin' I guess,lol :p
Crunch on!!

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
Well I finally submitted to buying 2 1.2 "mp" palaminos yesterday from newegg.com :D :p :D (got tired of waiting on the "desktop palaminos that will never come, lol).. these are going to go into the 2 new crunchers I'm assembling.. Both will have the epox 8k7a. What I'm wondering is my t-birds will not for the life of them run stable over 155 fsb on my epox mobos using crucial pc2100 timings are 16-8-8-3-2-2-2 ( some people are hitting 160-180 fsb :eek: ) I'd be happy to just hit 167 @ cas 2 where the /5 pci divider kicks in.. Just wondering excactly how you have your bios setup as far as memory timings and anyother thing that might affect cpu/ memory fsb speeds.. Also what is the average o/c for the new 1.2 palamino mp's?? Some say arounds 1.4, but with this mobo shouldnt it be easy as hell to hit about 1.55?? Just wonderin'


Crunch On!!!!

Right now, with Corsair PC2400, I have my timings at 8/8/8/2/2/2.5/2. I am running at 162x9 +.3 on the Vcore voltage and +.3v on the memory voltage.
It has been running solid as a rock for at least a week now, 24/7 running Seti.
Probably tomorrow I'm going to up it to 164fsb. That seems to be approaching the limit of the MP chip. TC also said that 1.500 was just about the top limit.
I will be curious as to how much you get out of yours.

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
Also someone in a forum yesterday said "Ibm harddrives suck for high fsb speeds??? :confused: These are the only drives I currently use:
3 Ibm Deskstar gxp 60 60gb (2 in raid 0)
2 Ibm Deskstar gxp 75 30gb Raid 0
1 Ibm Deskstar Gxp 60 20gb


so far the raided gxp 75 has achieved the highest stable fsb o/c @ 155 the others are at 152, and 149

something here Is definatly fishy... God how i'd love to hit 1.8 on aircooled with my 1.4 :D :p

Back to dreamin' I guess,lol :p
Crunch on!!

I have an IBM 40gb DTLA drive in it now, don't need a raid setup for just Seti so only running 1 drive - and it hasn't had a problem yet. I only use IBM DTLA series drives in all my machines. Great drive.

[TC]

I'm running corsair PC2400 at 8882222 at 175 FSB max voltage on the ram. The best I could get out of my 1.2 gig MP was 1440 with a thermalright sk6 and delta 38 fan. I put a water block on it just for testing purposes and it wouldn't go any higher and extra voltage didn't help. Turned out that 1440 wasn't stable, so I backed off to 1400 and it's happy there. Can't think of anything else in the cmos that would help you get higher speeds. I suspect it's your ram - I can't get regular crucial sticks to do any better than yours, but the corsair dimms use crucial (micron) chips that are hand picked. The new mushkin dimms with heat spreaders look good, but I haven't tried any. I've got maxtor diamond max 60 drives in all of my epox systems. I did own a pair of ibm 75 gxp's but they're having major reliability problems from what I've been reading, and one of mine crashed a month after I bought it - took out my raid array. They were in my P4 box that was running a FSB of 118, so they were slightly overclocked. If you get better ram you ought to be able to run just over 166 where that 1/5 divisor kicks in. That would take the stress off everything but the ram and chipset. Oh one last thing, have you put artic silver on the northbridge? I pulled all of my chipset coolers and they each had a tiny dab of plain old grease. I cleaned each one and applied a nice thin coat of artic silver. That might help a little. Assume you have decent cooling for your case - I use no less than 3 120mm fans on mine. That's about all I can think of.

[chawken]

Originally posted by TC
I'm running corsair PC2400 at 8882222 at 175 FSB max voltage on the ram. The best I could get out of my 1.2 gig MP was 1440 with a thermalright sk6 and delta 38 fan. I put a water block on it just for testing purposes and it wouldn't go any higher and extra voltage didn't help. Turned out that 1440 wasn't stable, so I backed off to 1400 and it's happy there. Can't think of anything else in the cmos that would help you get higher speeds. I suspect it's your ram - I can't get regular crucial sticks to do any better than yours, but the corsair dimms use crucial (micron) chips that are hand picked. The new mushkin dimms with heat spreaders look good, but I haven't tried any. I've got maxtor diamond max 60 drives in all of my epox systems. I did own a pair of ibm 75 gxp's but they're having major reliability problems from what I've been reading, and one of mine crashed a month after I bought it - took out my raid array. They were in my P4 box that was running a FSB of 118, so they were slightly overclocked. If you get better ram you ought to be able to run just over 166 where that 1/5 divisor kicks in. That would take the stress off everything but the ram and chipset. Oh one last thing, have you put artic silver on the northbridge? I pulled all of my chipset coolers and they each had a tiny dab of plain old grease. I cleaned each one and applied a nice thin coat of artic silver. That might help a little. Assume you have decent cooling for your case - I use no less than 3 120mm fans on mine. That's about all I can think of.


That's kind of weird about the IBM drive prob that you had. Every machine that I have, are using IBM 75GXP (DTLA) drives, and never had a problem with any of them. That is the only drive that we use where I work - and out of about 100 drives purchased in the last 6 months, only had 1 go bad - and that was within 72 hours of installing it.
On the Epox I am cooling it with the GlobalWin CAK38, AS2 on CPU and chipset, 2 case fans 1 80mm delta 60cfm intake, and 1 80mm Sunon 39.5 output.
With this setup I originally could not get above 158fsb with timings at 8882222, but when I changed it to 8/8/8/2/2/2.5/2 it went to 162fsb and has been very stable. Tomorrow morning I'm going to up it to 166fsb and see how it runs.

[chawken]

As soon as I posted the previous post, I went and adjusted the fsb up to 166x9. Posted and loaded Windows just fine, so I'll watch it and see how it does.

[Rottys-R-Us]

OK so I only have 2 :eek:

Chawken, about you K7-Master.

What are your BIOS setting, mem,etc ?

My mem is @ 8-8-7-2-2-2-2.

150x10 is tops, won't go 150x10.5

I have had it @ 1.540 but a lower FSB, thats a no no.

thanks.

Dave.

[toomnymods]

Well Thanks for the help guys.. I kinda figured it was either the ram or the harddrive, now seeing that both of you are using the Corsair pc2400 I might go buy a stick and see how it does.. Now I've got 6 worthless sticks of crucial pc2100,lol :( Ohh well that's life.. I know for sure If I could get my fsb over 166 thad'd help my memory scores tremendously... Right now on the average I'm processing wu's in the 4hr 5 min range but If I could get better memory scores I'd proabbly shave atleast 10 mins off my wu times..right now my memory scrores are 692/901 Kinda fair, but still way less than what I've seen.. Can't wait till my 1.2 mp's get here :p .. Also did you guys load on the bios update immediatly before or after adding the new processors???
Thanks guys

[TC]

It would help you some for sure. My mem score at 175 is 975/1038. You don't have to use the bios update just for the MP. It adds support for SSE, but I'm not sure Seti uses those optimizations. I've had two flash attempts fail on the same board, requiring a new chip from Epox (which they mailed to me for free twice) so I'm not fooling with it anymore. Seems like that board is jinxed. It just quits half way through the flash, but my other Epox boards have been flashed without trouble.

[Morpheus]

TC...

How about the old "hot swap" on the BIOS... should work fine for you in that situation.. (you did say that it was just the one board, yes?)

[TC]

Yeah just one board, and I did swap bios chips from a board with slower cpu installed so the MP would be crunching while I wait on a new chip. When I get the new chip I may try flashing it in a board that has handled a flash okay before. Never have had a board that wouldn't flash bios chips - wonder where the problem is? Awdflash hangs after it has rewritten half the chip - done this on two bios chips.

[toomnymods]

So basically flashing to the newest bios for the mp's is useless?? I sure in the hell cant afford a rig being down for a week,lol I dont wanna go back to triple digit land :p (rank 100+) lol Worked so hard just to get to 96... how many wu's a day is ur mp rig pumping out? anymore than 6-7 a day?? If it does 7 I'm gonna be happy as hell, That'd be an extra 14 wu's a day for me :D :p :D
Crunch On!!!

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
So basically flashing to the newest bios for the mp's is useless?? I sure in the hell cant afford a rig being down for a week,lol I dont wanna go back to triple digit land :p (rank 100+) lol Worked so hard just to get to 96... how many wu's a day is ur mp rig pumping out? anymore than 6-7 a day?? If it does 7 I'm gonna be happy as hell, That'd be an extra 14 wu's a day for me :D :p :D
Crunch On!!!

The first day that I set mine up, I flashed to the 1711 bios version, without any probs.
By the way - it has been crunching along soundly since setting it to 166fsb. Later today I will up it to 168 and see how it does.

[toomnymods]

Damn you are making me jealous.. Definatly gonna try corsair pc2400 next payday.. Just hours away from getting my 2 1.2 MP Palaminos god I can't wait :D :p :D Might buy a couple more and build a few dually board if they turn out awesome.. Right now I've got my eyes on Abit dually mobo that is supposed to come out some time the end of the summer which should be 3-4 week at the most, but seeing how long they delayed the KG-7 & KG-7 Raid I'm thinking it won't be out till much later.. :confused: Ohh yesterday when my Sgt. Major walked into the barracks to inspect everyones room he came into mine and was like "Holy $hi@ Cpl. Jensen Why do you need 4 computers in your room" ( only 3 are actually running right now though) he then said "You planning on taking over the world!?!" I just started laughing.. then I said "I build them for people and sell them.." Hopefully he bought it.. :p


Crunch On!!

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
Damn you are making me jealous.. Definatly gonna try corsair pc2400 next payday.. Just hours away from getting my 2 1.2 MP Palaminos god I can't wait :D :p :D Might buy a couple more and build a few dually board if they turn out awesome.. Right now I've got my eyes on Abit dually mobo that is supposed to come out some time the end of the summer which should be 3-4 week at the most, but seeing how long they delayed the KG-7 & KG-7 Raid I'm thinking it won't be out till much later.. :confused: Ohh yesterday when my Sgt. Major walked into the barracks to inspect everyones room he came into mine and was like "Holy $hi@ Cpl. Jensen Why do you need 4 computers in your room" ( only 3 are actually running right now though) he then said "You planning on taking over the world!?!" I just started laughing.. then I said "I build them for people and sell them.." Hopefully he bought it.. :p


Crunch On!!


Yeah - I am so impressed with this setup I am planning to replace my 2 MSI's with Epox and 1.2MP's. I hate the MSI setups, can't o/c worth a damn. I will definately get the ABIT KG7-Raid to replace the Iwill rig, and add an ECS with the SiS chipset just to run it against the AMD761 chipset.

[chawken]

O.K. Toomny - just cranked her up to 169x9 and it just started a .427 WU. It ran just fine, for the last 12hrs at 166x9. WU times from 162 to 166 went down about 8 minutes on a .044 AR. Wierd thing - the last 5 WU's for this machine have been .044 .044 .045 .039 .027. It's killing my processing times.

[toomnymods]

You still @ cas 2?!? holy cow!! Starting to think now Crucial ram is junk :( :mad: :( Ohh well Just more stuff to buy, lol Keep me posted as I'm defiantly intrested in how far you can get that mp and your ram to go before it screams for mercy,lol

Crunch On!!!

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
You still @ cas 2?!? holy cow!! Starting to think now Crucial ram is junk :( :mad: :( Ohh well Just more stuff to buy, lol Keep me posted as I'm defiantly intrested in how far you can get that mp and your ram to go before it screams for mercy,lol

Crunch On!!!

No. My settings are 8/8/8/2/2/2.5/2. It locks up at 8882222. If I set cas latency to 2.5 it runs fine.
If I get it running solidly until tomorrow morning - I'll try 171fsb.

Tweak it until it breaks - then tweak it some more.

[toomnymods]

Can you do a small favor for me run Sisoft sandra TE and let me know what your benchmarks are for your cpu and the ram... Kinda curios what your hitting with those ram timings..
Thanks...

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
Can you do a small favor for me run Sisoft sandra TE and let me know what your benchmarks are for your cpu and the ram... Kinda curios what your hitting with those ram timings..
Thanks...

I have Sandra 2001 - I'll put it on that machine and run it. I will have the results this afternoon.

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
Can you do a small favor for me run Sisoft sandra TE and let me know what your benchmarks are for your cpu and the ram... Kinda curios what your hitting with those ram timings..
Thanks...

Sandra 2001se:

CPU Benchmark:
ALU = 4223 MIPS
FPU = 2078 Mflops

Multi-Media:
Interger MMX = 8277 it/s
Floating Point = 10,388 it/s

Memory:
ALU/Ram = 910 MB/s
FPU/Ram = 1007 MB/s

[toomnymods]

Thanks.. Yes your processor is rockin' it is proably way more efficient at doing apps that's why it is soo fast.. Cause all my processors beat it in all the cpu benches except the floating point one.. your memory scores are kickin ass too.. i bet if you download the newest TE version (it's free) your scrores might even be higher as they have enabled support for the new palaminos in there I believe..
Thanks for your time..

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
Thanks.. Yes your processor is rockin' it is proably way more efficient at doing apps that's why it is soo fast.. Cause all my processors beat it in all the cpu benches except the floating point one.. your memory scores are kickin ass too.. i bet if you download the newest TE version (it's free) your scrores might even be higher as they have enabled support for the new palaminos in there I believe..
Thanks for your time..


1 WU in, run at 169x9. .427 3hr 21min.

[toomnymods]

Damn that is fast as all blazin' hell :eek: lol
Just wondering if the desktop palamino will be able to do the same.. People are talkin' that they might try a multiplier lock.. as well as disable the mp instructions for these chips.. I surely hope they dont.. As far as I can tell they will be identical except for the increased clock speed...

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
Damn that is fast as all blazin' hell :eek: lol
Just wondering if the desktop palamino will be able to do the same.. People are talkin' that they might try a multiplier lock.. as well as disable the mp instructions for these chips.. I surely hope they dont.. As far as I can tell they will be identical except for the increased clock speed...

If they lock the multiplier - it really doesn't matter to me. I am running it at the default multiplier, x9

By the way - I just jumped my fsb up to 171. Boots fine - seti is running. We'll see how it does until tomorrow morning.

[toomnymods]

Did you have to flash the bios to get the palamino to work?? My palamino's just arrived minutes ago I plan on trying it out on the 8K7A board first.. Right now it has the 1711 bios is thier a newer bios out or no?? I looked on Epox's site and this was the newest bios..
Thanks for all the help.. :p :D

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
Did you have to flash the bios to get the palamino to work?? My palamino's just arrived minutes ago I plan on trying it out on the 8K7A board first.. Right now it has the 1711 bios is thier a newer bios out or no?? I looked on Epox's site and this was the newest bios..
Thanks for all the help.. :p :D

My bios version is 1711. TC says that there is a newer one, but it's not on their English site. I'm not sure of where he found it. If there was a newer one, I would want TC to try it out first, and let us know whether it is worth upgrading.

[toomnymods]

I have the same excact bios version you do and it will not post.. I even cleard the cmos, set it to 100mhz and using default voltages.. will power up, but i cant tell whether the cpu is working or not cause thier is no video, god i hope i didnt get a bad cpu this would suck balls.. any ideas??? P.S. I also got the revision 1.1 mobo and trying it on the 8K7A if i can't get it to work soon will try it on my 8k7A+ later tonight.. will wait for ur thoughts first..
thanks

[TC]

Originally posted by chawken


My bios version is 1711. TC says that there is a newer one, but it's not on their English site. I'm not sure of where he found it. If there was a newer one, I would want TC to try it out first, and let us know whether it is worth upgrading.

Beta bios version 1802 - adds official support for the MP and SSE. I was going to try it out and the flash failed. People talk about it over at Athlon Motherboard. The bios was posted there.

Athlon MB Epox Files (http://www.athlonmb.com/files.php#Epox)

[toomnymods]

I give up.. I've had it with this beta bios bullshi# Everything i've tried doesnt work.. why would they just release the bin file without the award flash exe file to mate it with??? I've never flashed thru this way before and it's tickin me off spent the last 6 hours just trying to get the damn 1802 bios version to work with the 1711 award flash utility thingy, wont do crud.. they dont have nuthing on thier site either for download..
guess I'll have to wait 6 weeks or more to actually use my new mp chips... God I'm ****ed :mad:
Ohh well time for bed I'm about to blow a head gasket..

[chawken]

Originally posted by toomnymods
I give up.. I've had it with this beta bios bullshi# Everything i've tried doesnt work.. why would they just release the bin file without the award flash exe file to mate it with??? I've never flashed thru this way before and it's tickin me off spent the last 6 hours just trying to get the damn 1802 bios version to work with the 1711 award flash utility thingy, wont do crud.. they dont have nuthing on thier site either for download..
guess I'll have to wait 6 weeks or more to actually use my new mp chips... God I'm ****ed :mad:
Ohh well time for bed I'm about to blow a head gasket..

I am surprised that you are having so many probs.
My board version is a 1.0 with the bios flashed to 1711. I'm not sure of using a beta bios right now. I'll let a few people beta test it first.

This is how I configured my dips and jumpers -
CPU Ratio SW2:
1 on
2 on
3 off
4 off
5 on

JP2 CPU Vcore
Jumper 4-9 this is +.3v

JP3 DDR Adjust
Jumper 4-9 also +.3v

JCLK1 Jumper 2-3

With these settings your board should boot. Try booting with only the video card and memory and drives.

I am pretty sure that you know how to configure a system, so forgive me if I am stating the obvious to you.

[TC]

Bios version 1711 is not in beta. Version 1802 is - you'll notice it's not posted on the Epox web site. Were you running the board with version 1711 before you installed your new cpu? I suspect you may have a problem with your new cpu, not the board. I have 3 8K7A's all using the 1711 bios. Also you don't need the latest bios just to run an MP. It worked just fine for me with the older bios version that didn't support the 1/5 divisor. I'm assuming you have tried clearing the cmos, putting the multiplier back to auto, and running a different chip that you know was working?

[toomnymods]

Well I guess I found out what the problem is.. I took out the palamino and swapped the processors to see if the 8K7a was maybe a faulty board (it's not...) Booted just fine with my 1.0ghz processor.. then i was like what the hell can it hurt I took the processor from my 8K7A+ and installed my 1.2 "MP" palamino in it's place and it booted perfect!! :D :p So my guess Is for some odd reason the 8K7A is not compatible till the bios flash is completed... the 1802 while on the other hand for some odd reason the 8K7A+ somehow supports it enough to use it atleast using the 1711 bios.. I even emailed thier tech support and they sent me the newest and best revision of thier beta bios's for the palamino support but then again it dont have the damn award flash utility so I'm back to square one again.. if I send this to someone can they configure it so all I'll have to do is during boot press alt-f2 to flash the bios.. I don't know how to flash the bios by using the boot disk and the a prompt..

p.s. i called thier tech support and they were naming off stuff left and right what to do.. I kept saying tried it, tried it, tried it, tried it, about 15 times I know i had to of been tickin the guy off,lol He said they havent even tried to use a palamino mp on either of these motherboards who knows.. all i know is it's workin fine on my 8K7A+ still thinking of flashing the bios if you can help me configure the bin file thing to make it flash.. i guess i'm a ******, Stuff is too damn complicated for me.. I liked Asus Flash utility program worked straight from windows, and was super easy to use.. Also they sent me the brand new beta bios version 8k7a1823 hopefully this will be compatible with the raid and the non raid versions.. what you think guys??

Thanks for the suggestions guys..

[chawken]

Originally posted by TC
Bios version 1711 is not in beta. Version 1802 is - you'll notice it's not posted on the Epox web site. Were you running the board with version 1711 before you installed your new cpu? I suspect you may have a problem with your new cpu, not the board. I have 3 8K7A's all using the 1711 bios. Also you don't need the latest bios just to run an MP. It worked just fine for me with the older bios version that didn't support the 1/5 divisor. I'm assuming you have tried clearing the cmos, putting the multiplier back to auto, and running a different chip that you know was working?

Sorry - I was refering to the 1802 bios version as being beta. I'm running mine with the 1711. I just don't trust beta versions of drivers or bio's. I'll let others test them, then when I hear that they are really worth upgrading to - from a reliable source, like yourself - then Ill go for it.

[TC]

Send me the binary image and I'll take a look at it. BTW using the flash utility is easy - just use a boot floppy, type awdflash at the prompt, once in the utility type the full name of the new binary file - i.e. 8k7a1802.bin, then just tell it to procede. If you want to automate it, make an autoexec.bat file with the following lines

@Echo off
awdflash 8k7a1802.bin /py

and it will automatically run from the boot floppy.

[toomnymods]

I flashed the bios on my 8K7A+ to bios version 8K7A1823 working great boot times seem way faster.. Already increased my ram timings to 8-8-6-2-6-2-2 with multi of 9 and fsb of 146.. This chip is still within its first 8 hours use.. How do you think I should burn it in?? Dont wanna kill it, but would love to see it hit over 1500 mhz maybe couple of weeks down the road.
Thanks for the help guys... :D :p I'm a happy camper now!!

Crunch On!!

[TC]

Here are my results. Old version was 1711, new is 1823 - thanks to Toomnymods for the latest beta bios direct from Epox.
Well here's the verdict:

EP8K7A revision 1.0 bios beta 1823.
Week 21 1.2 gig MP @ 1400 8X175 memory settings top down 8882222

1) bios reads "Athlon MP" versus Athlon 4
2) boots faster, no doubt
3) Hoda shows support for SSE instruction set
4) cpu score unchanged @ 3956/1953
5) mem score changed a bit - before was 975/1038, now it's 949/1058 - so one decreased while other increased.

Haven't had time to tell if it made any difference with Seti. Will update if anything interesting happens. To my knowledge Seti does not use SSE optimizations.