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ASUS A8N-SLI :: Work Arounds:Expensive Bugs:Tweaking:Info

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stu_allen said:
Dunno, but 33.33 dosent work on mine - ntune reports its still tracking. When i set it to auto it works!
33.33 doesn't work at mine neither with bIOS 1003 or 1004-001(was working with beta BIOS 1003-005...)

BUT

If you set your overclocking to "Manual" and the frequency to other than the stock 200 MHz, you'll see with ntune or clockgen, it will be locked.
 
WOOHOO! Finally it is locked!! I've tried auto before but it never "took". Now it is showing it as 33.34 with the HT at 217. I've my memory at 2.5-3-3-10 and I'm wondering if I can take the thing up to DDR466... :)

I noticed the 8.5% OC (17MHz HT) made a 12% improvement in the CPU score on 3DMark05. From 4266 to 4752. Man does that benchmark pummel my machine! The fps almost never breaks above 30!!
 
Has anyone had this problem. I'm running 104 bios everything is stock at the moment (no OC) My computer was working fine then all of a sudden my DVD drives start going constantly and the HDD light is solid. I tried to restart the machine and the same thing happened it took like 5 min. for window to fully load. I unpluged them from the IDE and now everything is back to normal minus the DVD drives. Any suggestions?
 
It's FINALLY BEEN MASTERED!!

After weeks of pain and literly hudreds of reboots, I have mastered every single in and out of this motherboard. To completely lock your AN8-SLI, you will have to do the following in steps..

From scratch;
#1
Leave everything at stock in bios with all options you want set to allow you to install windows and get things up and running.

#2
Have your Motherboard CD handy and install your chipset drivers/ide/ethernet and so fourth. Important tools to get and install are nVidia's nTune which we will use to check the HTT and clockgen which can be found in the link within post #1 in this thread. Install ASUS Update, yes its windows bios updating software. The last piece of software we are gonna use is CPU-Z to give us accurate CPU readings.

#3
Once you've downloaded everything and installed, we can begin. flash Bios 1004.001 Beta through ASUS Update program! This was my problem hence I never used it before but instead used the dos version. The big difference is the windows version can totally clear and update your cmos checksum, the little thing that stores stuff like the date, HTT and voltage. MAKE SURE YOU CHECK THAT BUTTON.

#4
Once your bios is clear, go into your bios and select 201MHz for your FSB setting and leave the PCI lock to AUTO. Select 4X HTT from your bios. Pump up your Dimm voltage if ya need to, save your settings and then reboot. Head back into windows.

#5
load up ntune, and use the nvmonitor util. Look at your HTT, it should be 804MHz not 1008MHz. If its 1008MHz, you missed a step on #4 or you may need to reflash the bios yet again. Next go into clockgen and have a look at your PCI MHz. move your FSB slider and your pci bus should now be locked. If all these steps are done, your motherboard should be completely unlocked and you should be able to achieve HTT of 300 or even higher even with PATA drives.

Thanks everyone for posting tips for me to look at, fore I very much appreciate all of your help.


OC-Master
 

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OC-Master,
How did you get your memory to run at 283.06? If I run my memory > 230 I can't pass memtest86. To get to 230, I have the vdimm set to 2.85 right now and if I set it lower then I can only get the memory to go to 210-220 range.

I can get my HTT up to 290 (~2.6Ghz) but I have to drop my memory back to 266 divider netting about 186Mhz on the memory on a HTT=290. Which costs about 20% performance hit in Sandra memory testng.

thanks,
John
 
OC-Master said:
Here is my AN8-SLI faq;

First off, their is a bug that drove me almost $80CAD insane and I must quickly point out.

PCI Lock Bug:
Just a heads up for everyone, after weeks of testing this board now and still waiting on my 2nd sata converter, I've finally figured out this board inside and out. First off, prepare to be either upgrading your IDE hard drive to newer SATA models or getting the sata converter if you plan on overclocking with IDE PATA hard drives.
The AN8 series does not lock the PCI bus while PATA hard disks are connected to the motherboard. I must stress that things really get hectic as soon as you venture above 210MHz FSB. To put this into perspective, a FSB of 233 translates into a 38MHz on the PCI Bus which is useally the most amount of punishment the average hard drive can take. BTW, the so called lock that is found in the latest 1004.001 beta bios still doesnt fix this bug for those of you who were curious to the potential of that bios feature. If you clock up your motherboard with Ai Booster, you'll notice your video card give out at about 239 with the screen going garbled, again a result from the non locked PCI Bus. To avoid all of this havoc, simply stay away from legacy PATA drives or like me go buy a converter or two to avoid this hitch. You can pickup SATA converters here,OC-Master
This CANNOT be true. I'm running at 9 x 289 MHz (2.6 GHz) with an old Hitachi/IBM PATA IDE 60 GB drive. My Patriot/PDP TCCD is also at 289 MHz. I'm using the 1004-001 beta BIOS so maybe that solved this issue.

Edit: I guess your last post cleared this up. But go back and edit the first post so as not to confuse anyone. I've been running at 289 MHz to 292 MHz since the 1004-001 BIOS came out last week.
 
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thank you so much for this guide, I was having little luck with this motherboard (bios v1002) and getting very frustrated at the seemingly broken overlocking options

unfortunately I wasn't able to find any DFIs and the only other choice was the MSI, and having read a few reviews of the AN8 I went and bought it :bang head

edit:

finally found out that I have to set Max RAM frequency to DDR333 to get CPU/11, which gave me 210Mhz as RAM's frequency once I overclocked the HTT to 256Mhz
 
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DaveB said:
3. Asus A8N SLI, A64 3000+ 90nm Socket 939 @ 2.6 GHz, 2x512MB Patriot PC3200 TCCD @ 289 MHz, Gigabyte 6600GT 128MB PCI-e, Win XP Pro SP2

DaveB,
What are the latencies and vdimm's you use to get your PC3200 RAM to 289Mhz? I spent some time last night pushing the system and here is what I my best effort so far
CPU mult = 8.5 @ Auto (floats from 1.45 to 1.475)
HTT mult = 3x
FSB = 306
RAM = 2-3-3-6 1T @ 2.85V
RAM divider = 266 (2:3 ratio)
That results in CPU @ 2.6Ghz w/RAM @ 200Mhz

The best I can get for RAM Mhz is about 222Mhz w/3-4-4-10 1T @2.8V.

I'd like to at least be able to do a 333Mhz (5:6 ratio) on my RAM and lower my FSB a little and still get 2.6Ghz but I am stuck.

Also care to share any benchmarks you have? I have a generally similar setup and would be curious to see how my system stacks up.

AMD 64 3000+ [email protected]
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe rev1.02 BIOS 1003 Final
2x512MB Corsair XMS PC3200C2-PT
Leadtek nVidia 6600GT Extreme
Enermax Noisetaker 495 (470W)


thanks,
John
 
Discovered a new problem. After fixing the PCI Lock and HTT issue, my hyper transport multiplier keeps reseting back to 3X everytime I reset the PC. Problem is, appearently nTune cannot hold settings for more than the session so I have to reset the darn thing everytime if I want a performance increase.

I benched with 3X, then benched with the 4X enabled, nearly a 500 point increase in 3Dmark05. My original score was 6001 points and efter discovering this bug, I'm now running almost 6700 points.


OC-Master
 
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swindelljd said:
DaveB,
What are the latencies and vdimm's you use to get your PC3200 RAM to 289Mhz? I spent some time last night pushing the system and here is what I my best effort so far
CPU mult = 8.5 @ Auto (floats from 1.45 to 1.475)
HTT mult = 3x
FSB = 306
RAM = 2-3-3-6 1T @ 2.85V
RAM divider = 266 (2:3 ratio)
That results in CPU @ 2.6Ghz w/RAM @ 200Mhz

The best I can get for RAM Mhz is about 222Mhz w/3-4-4-10 1T @2.8V.

I'd like to at least be able to do a 333Mhz (5:6 ratio) on my RAM and lower my FSB a little and still get 2.6Ghz but I am stuck.

Also care to share any benchmarks you have? I have a generally similar setup and would be curious to see how my system stacks up.

AMD 64 3000+ [email protected]
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe rev1.02 BIOS 1003 Final
2x512MB Corsair XMS PC3200C2-PT
Leadtek nVidia 6600GT Extreme
Enermax Noisetaker 495 (470W)


thanks,
John
VDIMM is 2.9V, the timings are 3-8-4-4 Auto @ 289 MHz. It runs at 285 MHz or so with the timings tightened to 2.5-8-3-3 Auto, but since the benches I tried don't do any better with these timings, I'm leaving it at 3-8-4-4 Auto for now. I'm not a benchmark freak, but I do have Aquamark3 loaded. I tried it and it scored 61,700.
 
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uh DaveB are you running your ram at 1T or 2T, because noone has been able to go past 245 FSB running any type or RAm at 1T?
 
prominance said:
uh DaveB are you running your ram at 1T or 2T, because noone has been able to go past 245 FSB running any type or RAm at 1T?
What's with the "uh"? Anyway, 1T/2T is set at Auto as indicated in the previous question regarding timings.
 
Yes, I just confirmed that for you. Set at 1T it freezes after displaying the IDE channels. At 2T it happily boots into Win XP Pro.

Edit: Just ran SiSoft Sandra 2004 Memory test and scored 6676/6668. How does that compare to running at 245 MHz at 1T?
 
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DaveB said:
Yes, I just confirmed that for you. Set at 1T it freezes after displaying the IDE channels. At 2T it happily boots into Win XP Pro.

Edit: Just ran SiSoft Sandra 2004 Memory test and scored 6676/6668. How does that compare to running at 245 MHz at 1T?


My system does 6850MB/s in Sandra running 466MHz 2.5-4-4-8-1T with two sticks of PC4400 on the AN8-SLI. It is the highest I can seem to go with 1T with the motherboard being the limitation. Even if I use CL3, the board still cannot boot at 468MHz or 470MHz.


OC-Master
 
I'll try 2.5-4-4-8 when I get home since it does 2.5-3-3-8 up to about 285 MHz. Plus, I should bump the VDIMM up to 3.0V and see where it goes. I can run SiSoft Sandra a little faster, but I only do benches at my max stable running speed. The CPU is fine a 2601, but just go a little higher and it gets iffy.
 
OK, tried 2.5-4-4-8 which seems fine and ups the SiSoft Sandra 2004 Memory test score to 6750/6729. I also upped HT to 4x.

Upped the VDIMM to 3.0V, HTT @ 293 MHz, CPU @ 2637, SiSoft Sandra 2004 Memory test score now 6848/6816.

HTT @ 296 MHz, CPU @ 2661, SiSoft Sandra 2004 Memory test score now 6891/6887.

HTT @ 299 MHz, CPU @ 2695, SiSoft Sandra 2004 Memory test score now 6985/6976.

HTT @ 301 MHz, CPU @ 2712, SiSoft Sandra 2004 Memory test score now 7023/7027. But, SuperPi fails, so no need to go further. ;)

SuperPi 1M (33s) tops out at HTT @ 298 MHz, DDR @ 298 MHz, CPU @ 2686, SiSoft Sandra 2004 Memory test score @ 6969/6952.
 
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Wow lots on info! I've been running my A8N-SLI Deluxe for over a week now. I've tried lots of OC combo's and will try more with the knowledge gained from reading here.
My problem is I just ordered another 74G Raptor that will arrive today as I wanted to go NV Raid0.

So you can't us the Nvidia SATA in RAID?????? How can this be!!

Also I have used the SI contoller in the past (NF3 MSI board lastly) and can tell you that YOU ARE BETTER OFF on a single raptor than raid0 on that HORRIBLE controller (I'm talking benchmarks only).

Anyone using NV and RAID????
 
Well I am using the NVIDIA RAID controller. I have two 80GB IDE drives (one secondary controller) setup in a RAID 1 (mirrored) array. These are my bootable OS drives.

[EDIT]NOTE: I had to go to BIOS 1003 to get this to work. Also I had to put the drives on the secondary controller (per the docs) and my CD/DVD drive on the primary controller. I'll try to run a benchmark tonight on both sets of drives for comparison. Cost wise the OS drives, WD 80GB, cost $40/ea and the data drives, Maxtor 160GB, cost $100/ea. [/EDIT]

[EDIT2]
Benchmarks:
OS drives: NVIDIA RAID 1 Array Secondary Master/Secondary Slave = 23MB/S
Data Drivers: PCI SI RAID 1 Array Primary Master/Secondary Master = 51MB/S Looks like I need to move those OS drives to separate channels.
[/EDIT2]

No idea about using SATA drives or the SI controller.

I will mention however I have a PCI based IDE controller from SI that I use to RAID 1 my data drives and performance seems pretty good. I only have 7200RPM drives so it's possible that the 10K drives would overload the bus.

John
 
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I have gone in a slightly different direction with my harddrive setup. Using the SI raid controller, I have created a 157gb raid5 disc using 3 80gb Hitachi 13G0252 7200rpm 8mb cache discs. Setup was smooth and has been working for about week now without problems.

Benching with HD Tach yields an average read of 91.9MB/s which compares favorably with tests in their database. The big deal for me was getting parity with this drive setup.

Overall cost is also competitive. Drives were purchased from eWiz.com for $57.68 each so with tax and shipping the total was under $200.

John
 
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