MoBo suggestions to replace PC Chips 810 series

[Hookem]

At work the computer "expert" made the following boxes the PC Chips 810series mobo, 850mhz Athlon processor, Western Digital wb-300-bb ATA/100 30gig hard drive, 256megs PC133 memory and a Deer DR-A250atx power supply.....These boxes are pure junk!!!! Suggestions on a new mobo and Athlon approved power supply would be greatly appreciated....mind you these were supposed to be graphics work stations.....Hope you dont die laughing. Any way any help fixing these boxes would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Eriksson]

What is wrong with these boxes? Stability issues or lack of speed?

 

[bruce]

Hahahahaha... Oh sorry, You will probably want to keep the PC-133 ram, so a DDR board is out, so you're looking at a board based on Via's KT133A or 133E chipsets. I've heard good things about Abit's 133E board, and it has a pretty blue PCB (that's Printed Circut Board to you newbies, you know who you are), and it's supposed to have a good price point, not sure on that though. Personally, for a little more, you could get what I have: an Iwill KK266, without a doubt the best KT133A overclocking board. It's generally cheaper than Asus' and Abit's 133A based boards and it is also rock stable at high FSB speeds, believe me you won't be disappointed in this board. And remember "Friends don't let friends buy PC Chips!!" hahahaha!!! Good luck!

 

[bruce]

Dawwwh!!! forgot about th PSU, sorry laughing too hard about the PC Chips board! Good power is important to AMD boards and procs. so at 300W get an AMD approved PSU, enermax is good as I inderstand. At 350W or 400W I don't think AMD approved is as important, but that's just one man's opinion, go with your gut and your wallett. Spend some time over at www.pricewatch.com and see what you can afford! hahaha, PC Chips, hahaha!!!!

 

[Hookem]

Eriksson (Jul 03, 2001 09:40 a.m.):
What is wrong with these boxes? Stability issues or lack of speed?
Stablility issues and lack of speed when multi-tasking in graphics programs. When I recieved the box I formated the hard drive, setup found a disk cache utility or compressed volume and asked me to check the compressed volume with the disk cache program or to remove the utility. Since I am a newbie this is all french to me....So being a newbie I reformated the hard drive and loaded Windows 2k when loading Photoshop it told me that, photoshop and windows primary paging file was on the same volume that could reslut in poor performance. When looking at setup it tells me that 16megs of the 256 is shared,since i really dont know what i am looking at in setup smart for hd disabled, l-1,l-2 and system caches are enabled. plug and play shared memeory size 16mb, cpu core voltage 1.760v, cpu ratio 8.5mhz cpu freq. 100mhz, dram freq. 100mhz the cpu temp is 45c-113f and system temp 35c-95f hope this gives you something any help finding out how to check problems in set up would help me. When i got the computer the onboard sound, lan, were disabled on the device manager so i loaded them off the mobo driver cd that came with the mobo.

 

[Eriksson]

The page file comment is hardly your problem, but windows page file is used when your box runs out of ram (at least it is supposed to work like this) Then when Win has to read write to page file your disk access speed is occupied more or less, and slows down other transfers. Therefore using two drives might be better, one for page file and second for PS+files.
( No biggie on good setup IMO)

This lost 16megs of memory are assigned to the onboard video card.

I dont know if you installed the VIA 4in1 drivers for this board but this is highly recommended, and can cure disk assess speed and stability issues as well.

You should be able to run your memory at 133mhz even though you fsb is 100 try to find setting in bios for this 'sdram= fsb+pci'

As many have already pointed out, onboard video and sound are not good things in a Graphical workstation. However perhaps cost effective in office work. IMO this board is not suitable for graphical workstation at all.

Getting a decent vid card and try using it on this board might help a lot though. This link indicates that several graphics card should work.

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I cannot comment a lot on graphics, but at work I use Matrox G400 dual head, and really like it. At home I use Geforce2MX and it is ok too. However not as good image quality as Matrox offers, and of course no dual head.

I dont know how much you (or your company) likes to spend on this box (or perhaps boxes) If you plan to upgrade the motherboard and stick with sdram I suggest you try first to get decent vid card, and see how this works out. The thing is that all avalible socketA boards for sdram uses the VIA KT133(A) chipset, I am not sure at all that Abits, Iwill, or Asus offer anything over this board but overclocking features, but perhaps.

Here is a list of my own "CAD station", I think is quite nice all around setup for graphics too. *Note* I am not talking about professional renderer in heavy video animations aka MAYA, 3DSMAX etc

Abit KT7A-RAID
1G [email protected] (I guess few work places accept watercooling so..)
256Meg
Two IBM ATA100 in 40G RAID-0
Aopen- Full tower with 300W psu
Geforce2MX (not the best I know)
etc..


PS
I you are doing heavy graphics this tread might interest you.

http://forums.overclockers.ws/forums/UltraBoard.cgi?action=Read&BID=7&TID=5395&SID=61154