Maybe this info will help some people out.
I just got an MSI 694 Pro AR – you’re probably familiar with it, but if not it’s a dual FCPGA socket 370
based on the Via 694X chipset. This is Via’s new stab at SMP sets.
I was worried about the memory performance, chipset reputation, etc, given my
past experience with Via. Outside Loop was kind enough to set me up
with two 700E cc0’s pre-tested at 1 gig. After taking care of some drivers,
I was up and running at 1030Mhz. Ran Sandra CPU Bench –
looked great, ran memory – looked like crap! Tweaking all the BIOS settings
(running Mushkin PC133 rev 2 at 147 FSB) didn’t help matters much.
I finally found a couple article here and here
about using H Oda’s WPCredit software to edit chipset features not available in the BIOS.
(Ed.note: We also have one here.
Found out the board was defaulted to no interleaving, and slowest settings for just about everything. I raised
everything, set 4 way interleave, used WPSet to lock in the changes.
Ran Sandra memory – damn what a nice improvement. More like night and day!
Originally Sandra mem was about 260/280. After tweaks it averages 480/510!!
A major improvement for so little effort. It turns the
performance of this board from ho hum, to top notch.
Not only that, this baby is rock solid to boot. Probably won’t be many people with this board,
but as somebody else said, this is THE dual FCPGA board to own right now –
that is until the VP6 and other’s make their real debut. This may not be
worth posting, but it helped me a LOT, and was hard to find.
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