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Gigabyte GA-60XET-C - Am I nuts ?!?

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6502kid

6502kid

Member
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Joined
Dec 18, 2000
Location
Peoria Ill
Has anybody gotten one of these yet and tried it out ?

Specifically with that F9c bios that ol'man posted ?

Am asking since I have decided to build yet another system
to play UT and Monty Pythons Complete Waste of Time on.

I have purchased for this so far an Enlight case, 350w
Enermax PSU, 2x256mb OCZ Sdram with chip cooler,
Sblive.

Will be grabbing another IBM 60GXP drive and a video card
of some type after x-mas.

While I am on the topic, what do you think the chances are of
Intel releasing those 1.4-1.5g Celly Tualatins before Q2/Q3
next year ?

I may have to get one of those slow 1.2 jobs to play with
in the meantime. :rolleyes:

Q.2 Have I gone nuts ?

Note: I was laid off on April 17th 2001.

Will OC or program for food.

:D :beer: :burn: :beer:
 
I have 1 sitting all wrapped up under the Christmas tree, along with a Tualatin 1.26 server proc and can't get them until Christmas! :eek: I have heard some good things about the board and can't wait to see how it performs. With the f9c bios, it sounds like the major bottleneck might be finding memory fast enough to run at cas2 at the very high fsb speeds and not the pci and agp bus speeds.

BTW, good luck with the OCZ memory; I've read of people having problems getting it to run even as fast as Crucial PC133 cas2 stuff. I'm leaning more towards the Mushkin or Corsair PC150 myself.
 
I'm running the Gigabyte GA-60XET ATM with a Celeron 1.2 @ 1.5 gig using only 1.575 volts totally stable and very fast (kills a P4 up to about 1.7 ghz!).
With the latest bios off Gigabytes web site you can also run your FSB up as high as you like and always keep your pci/agp busses in spec thanks to a feature in the bios that i've never seen before that allows you to set the base pci/agp PLL clock speed and the bios selects the nessecary dividers to keep the pci/agp bus as close to spec as possible....Works a treat! Can run over 170 mhz FSB while keeping your pci/agp devices happy!

You also have full voltage control with tualatin chips between the ranges of 1.050 - 1.825 volts (that is a definate 1.825 volts - previous Gigabyte bioses woulden't allow 1.825 volts....Only 1.8 volts!) and voltage control over the AGP slot as well as voltage control over the DIMM slots....

The GA-60XET is one cool, well featured board!:D
 
Cool. I am going to use one of those for my P3-S chip.

That board seems to be almost exactly like my TISU, except
for the addition of the ability to keep the pci/agp in spec.

This P3-S chip runs rock solid at 145fsb at default voltage.
It does fine at 148-158 with just a .025 or .050 bump.
After that the hard drive, memory or video flakes out.

After I get the 60XET-C for this chip, I will pop one of those
cheap cellys into this TISU and see if I can get it to go 133+ !
 
Flu!d said:
Really....What are you gonna do with over 512MB of RAM?!
Click to expand...

So is the XET-c and the XET the same??????? I thought you have the XET and not the XET-c?????? :eek:

Will the XET-c work the same without dual bioses?
 
I believe XET-C is a little watered down version without the Creative chip that is equivalent to a SB128 with digital out, but other than that and BIOS they are basically the same.

The limit of 512mb memory is a little downer, but I'd rather have that limit than running a VIA chipset, besides this board would be changed out anyway by the time 512mb becomes a real bottleneck.

It's easy to check how much memory you really need: go into Sandra then "Windows Memory Information" and the most bottom one "True Allocated Memory Load" should be no more than about 120%.

Personally with 512mb I never seen it get above 100% unless working on a few hundred MB Photoshop file, while browsing the web, and a whole other bunch of stuff open in XP.

Now, what is the deal with those BIOSes? Gigabyte's site has F9d out, is that a newer beta than F9c?
 
I also believe the XET-C is a slightly watered down version of the XET, no duel bios and no onboard creative sound but otherwise identical.
I'm running the F9d bios ATM and it is exactly the same as the F9c bios as far as I can tell....If they changed something I can't notice it!

BTW....While i'm not using it, that onboard Creative sound ain't too bad!
 
Well, just tried F9d, and it works.

The only gripe is that it will not necessarily make PCI/AGP bus exact in specs (33/66mhz) , it will be either higher or lower, and in rare cases to specs as the PCI/AGP still depends on front side bus but uses a different divider technique.

Keeping the PCI/AGP does keep the system stable, but the only real improvement is in CPU benchmark. With traditional overclocked PCI/AGP we would see across the board improvement, in HDD scores, video performance, etc...
 
LJ5L said:
Well, just tried F9d, and it works.

The only gripe is that it will not necessarily make PCI/AGP bus exact in specs (33/66mhz) , it will be either higher or lower, and in rare cases to specs as the PCI/AGP still depends on front side bus but uses a different divider technique.

Keeping the PCI/AGP does keep the system stable, but the only real improvement is in CPU benchmark. With traditional overclocked PCI/AGP we would see across the board improvement, in HDD scores, video performance, etc...
Click to expand...

Yeah this is known that is why I call it a pseudo turbo pLL. It is still better if I can get my PCI/AGP down under 36MHz. I would really like to know what I could run my PCI at if I was at 166fsb? Could you give some insight into this? How about 177 FSB?

Do you have a way of finding this out?
 
Well, to find out what PCI/AGP speeds you'll get with a given FSB we'd have to plug it into the BIOS and see what it does with it, but I already put back F8 ;) sorry

From memory I recall trying 125mhz FSB which gave me several options PCI/AGP: no alteration 41/62mhz, then when using the new option it went to something like 31/51mhz, then 20/40mhz, then 10/20mhz...etc... so it should give plenty flexibility.
 
Why on earth would you flash back to F8?! If you, for some unknown reason, don't want to use the pci PLL feature why don't you just disable it in the bios?

Dividers very rarely keep the pci/agp busses 'exactly' in spec (33 / 66 mhz) when using odd FSB speeds and the pci PLL feature on the Gigabyte mobo is no different....Try running an ST-6 at 170 mhz FSB and see where you're pci / agp bus speeds are at - I tried this in the bios on the Gigabyte GA-60XET and the mobo reported pci/agp bus speeds 'slightly' below spec....Running the pci / agp busses slightly below spec did not result in any noticable peformance drop no matter how hard I benchmarked and seemed to make the system, if anything, more stable....

I also found using the F9d bios that my Sandra memory benchmarks were noticably higher....

As far as i'm concerned i'd rather run my pci / agp busses 'slightly' below spec than 'slightly' above spec....Especially when there is no noticable peformance drop / stability problems, even in benchmarking....

And remember....Dividers alone do a woeful job at keeping the pci / agp bus speeds exactly in spec when running odd FSB's as well....
 
Why did I go back? Because I don't overclock ;)

F9d is a beta, so why have it when not even using it, and all it takes is 3 key presses to restore F8 from 2nd BIOS chip, just one less thing to worry about.

I tried benchmarking F8 stock vs F9d stock and CPU performance did go up marginally, but I suspect within the margin of error for the benchmark.
 
Hi Flu!d,

I now got the Gigabyte GA-6OXET too!! I didn't install it yet, because I had no time, but I'll install it on Friday or Saturday. Right now I'm at 166 MHz FSB with my trusty old P3 667 cC0-stepping, which does these 830 MHz without upping the VCore!!
I hope I'll get it to work @200 MHz FSB on this board. That would be insane, but possible, I think! I'll replace the stock northbridge cooling with my videocard cooler and I'll buy some RAM that can at least do 166 MHz @Cas2.
And then in January or February I'll get a Celeron Tualatin 1GHz or 1,1 GHz!

Thanks so far for the information on that great board!!

Regards

Ingo
 
Wow....830mhz from a P3 667! The highest I could get my P3 667 to at standard voltage was 750mhz....Although I suspect my pci / agp bus speeds were going to high over 150mhz FSB (this was with my old GA-60XE....Same as the XET but not tualatin compatible and no PLL pci adjustment!). That's an impressive overclock man! Good luck with the Gigabyte board....It's a quality stable board and i'm sure you'll have hours of fun!

One thing I have noticed with this board is that, from time to time, it dosen't like resetting....It is by NO MEANS unstable and is definatly a bios issue (hopefully it will be fixed in future bios updates), it just dosen't like resetting from time to time when you're really pushing the envelope....

....Dosen't worry me at all as I never have a reason to reset!

[edit] Hmmmm....Was just playing with motherboard monitor and noticed that my +5 volt line is running at 3.14 volts and my +12 volt line is running at 11.48 volts. I think my trusty A-Open 250 watt PSU is beyond it's limits....I think this is why my system dosen't like resetting at times....
 
Last edited:
I think you're right. You should exchange your PSU!

BTW, overclocking my P3 667 to 830 MHz wasn't very hard. As I said, it's a cC0- stepping FCPGA Socket 370 chip and I only bought it because I knew it was cC0. The only problem, that kept me from clocking it higher was always my mobo. First I had an Abit BF6 that couldn't even run stable @160 MHz FSB. And right now I have an MSI 815EPT Pro board that doesn't allow to set the FSB higher than 166 MHz. That's why I'm still @830 MHz with that chip. I think I could get it to 1 GHz with the 200 MHz FSB of the Gigabyte board, but we'll see. If I'm succesful, I'll post some scores of the system running @200 MHz FSB.

So cross your fingers! *g* Thank god, that I know where to get RAM that can handle these high frequencies(170 MHz @ 2-2-2 and much more @ 3-3-3; didn't see one test where they were able to ru it higher than 170, because the PCI frequency got too high for all the HDDs then :)
 
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