[Bar81]

Originally Posted by Judas

keep those crossed fingers crossed.

i would be on your look out for that machine dieing (or some part) soon or who knows how long, just don't be serprised if something goes pop.

Intermitent problems i hate. one day it'll boot the next nothing... yeah i hate when things do that.

Of course, I'm gonna be keeping an eye out as I'm still quite concerned. I could deal with the mobo going out as long as it doesn't take anything else with it. At this point I don't really know if the weirdness was from the PSU or the mobo. If anything starts being even a little bit weird after I put it all back together tonight I'm probably going with the Manta board ($235 here ).

edit: Well, looks like I found out what the problem was - floppy power connector. Turns out that the new floppy I got has a little bit of a screwy connection, if it goes in slightly askew it just shorts out the PSU and won't let anything start. Unplug the floppy or readjust it and it works fine. Amazing how such a silly little thing can bring down a whole system Glad it wasn't anything more serious as I like the board and want to play with it now that it's got the voltmod

edit2: Well, the floppy continues to be a PIA. I'm going to have my dealer replace the POS with a TEAC I hope. As to everything else, it looks good although moving my MaXline array to the Sil3112 card resulted in me having to wipe the drives completely even if they weren't running in RAID (they were in RAID1 previously on the ULi controller). Speeds are where they should be despite the Sil3112 being on the PCI bus (came with the latest BIOS since the chip is so old). The RAID1 WD SE16 drives are now on the ULi southbridge in SATA1 mode which doesn't affect their transfer rate, but it caps their burst theoretical burst speed. Of course the Raptor on the JMicron is working nicely. We''ll see how it all overclocks later tonight but I've got to say, I have no idea how people are running 1.55v on air unless they are using some load fans. My 1k rpm 120mm Nexus fans probably can handle up to 1.45v and if you had up to 2k rpm you could probably do 1.5v on the CPU but outside of that you might as well have a 747 running next to you.

edit3: f it. I've had it with my current setup. Seems the JMB360 controller on the mobo is not playing nice with the JMB360 controller on the eSATA card. Given the PCI-E x1 slot placement I'm limited to an extremely short eSATA card, namely one that is no longer than the PCI-e x1 slot. I should have known this would happen. Two controllers from the same company don't tend to play nice with each other, particularly when they are both the same model. Oh well, have my eye on the Sapphire Pure Crossfire anyway. Although that board uses two Sil 3132 controllers, since they're on the mobo I have to presume that the modifications necessary to make them work nicely together have been made in the BIOS, particularly as this is essentially the ATI Manta reference. So, taking back the Sil 3112 PCI controller, gonna get a replacement TEAC black floppy for this POS Panasonic and going to see if I can trade in my Audigy 2 ZS towards the price of the Sapphire A9RD580 which as I noted above is disgustingly expensive here as it is a special order air delivery type of deal (the third world doesn't do much AMD so parts for S939 are not plentiful particularly with expensive niche products like the Pure.) Will probably do a blowout when I get it all setup.

[PandaZ3]

Amazing that the ASRocks owned by ASUS seem to have a better if more limited BIOS.

Abit is the hands down winner of the BIOS interface though.

[2r4z0r2]

im running at8 32x @ 333 with lower multi w.o any problems...synces ht at 1000 ...only one thing i have problem with...the bios has no options for graphic cards like the other boards i see...only one payload size for pcie and thats it...i am trying to run 2 x1800xl 512mb cards in crossfire without master card and i am experiencing tearing of the screen similar to when ther is no vsync enabled while using one card...in crossfire with vsync enabled i still get tearing, and cannot figure out why im getting these types of errors...should i trade for asus board or dfi, since they have more options in bios>?

[Bar81]

Originally Posted by 2r4z0r2

i am trying to run 2 x1800xl 512mb cards in crossfire without master card and i am experiencing tearing of the screen similar to when ther is no vsync enabled while using one card

What gave you the impression you could run two regular x1800xl cards in xfire

[Bar81]

Originally Posted by PandaZ3

Amazing that the ASRocks owned by ASUS seem to have a better if more limited BIOS.

Well, the ASRocks generally work as they should unlike Asus. In addition if there's a legitimate issue you can actually email and correspond with the actual ASRock engineers who will quickly (24-48 hours max) issue a new BIOS to address the issue. They actually go beyond the call, like when I got them to add DTR microcode into the K8S8X BIOS

In contrast, Asus is garbage. Non-existant tech support and if there is a real issue they'll just ignore you like they did most recently with the issue between the Raptor WD740GD-FLA0 and the Sil ports on the Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe (and that's not even mentioning the shit overclocks that resemble nothing shown in the so called "professional" *cough*paid-off*cough* review sites.)

[2r4z0r2]

it can since 6.5 beta and cebit in hannover

[PandaZ3]

Originally Posted by Bar81

Well, the ASRocks generally work as they should unlike Asus. In addition if there's a legitimate issue you can actually email and correspond with the actual ASRock engineers who will quickly (24-48 hours max) issue a new BIOS to address the issue. They actually go beyond the call, like when I got them to add DTR microcode into the K8S8X BIOS

In contrast, Asus is garbage. Non-existant tech support and if there is a real issue they'll just ignore you like they did most recently with the issue between the Raptor WD740GD-FLA0 and the Sil ports on the Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe (and that's not even mentioning the shit overclocks that resemble nothing shown in the so called "professional" *cough*paid-off*cough* review sites.)

I agree and I had good experience (Till a resistor went south) with a ABIT UL8, a Uli chipset and the apple of my eye rigt now are my two ASRock Dual 939's. I use a ASUS NF4U board too, it did setup easy, but I am unimpressed with the BIOS options.

I think EPoX has done well by their fans too

I also got good tech support from Gigabyte when I recently built a new 754 ssystem with a less than 24 hour response (NewEgg selling 3400 OEM 754's for $99 plus a Gigabte or Biostar Mobo free, great bargain system)

[Bar81]

Originally Posted by 2r4z0r2

it can since 6.5 beta and cebit in hannover

care to point out where you read that?

[Bar81]

Originally Posted by PandaZ3

I agree and I had good experience (Till a resistor went south) with a ABIT UL8, a Uli chipset and the apple of my eye rigt now are my two ASRock Dual 939's. I use a ASUS NF4U board too, it did setup easy, but I am unimpressed with the BIOS options.

I think EPoX has done well by their fans too

I also got good tech support from Gigabyte when I recently built a new 754 ssystem with a less than 24 hour response (NewEgg selling 3400 OEM 754's for $99 plus a Gigabte or Biostar Mobo free, great bargain system)

Yeah, love my 939Dual but just outgrew it storage-wise. It was even nicer when I voltmodded it Moving on up now to the Sapphire A9RD580 which should hopefully <fingers crossed> do what is needed especially at the price but the Abit dealer here is an idiot and doesn't have any AT8 32X boards in stock and the Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe was not good. Got the teac black floppy as well, now just waiting until Sunday or Monday for the board and I'll be ready to go, I hope.

[2r4z0r2]

Originally Posted by Bar81

care to point out where you read that?

But hey now ...they listnen very well. ATi had a private demo room where they have been showing off Crossfire without the cable. ATI was demo'ing a [color=#000080][color=#000080! important][color=#000080! important]PC[/color][/color][/color] with two X1800 XL graphics card, not using the crossfire cable ! How does that work ? Simple .. they send the data over the PCI-Express slots instead of over that Crossfire cable. We knew it was already possible for the X1300 cards and maybe even X1600 cards. But now the X1800 XL cards will be able to do this also. Best thing yet .. you do not need a mastercard to do this. These are two very huge plusses !

http://www.guru3d.com/article/article/328/2/


and i can also confirm from my experience im running 2 x1800xl in crossfire with minor problems atm...not sure if its the board or the size of 512mb on the cards

i should go and get an asus to research more, but im waiting for my abit board to sell

[Bar81]

Interesting. But was it ever publicly announced or is it just a below the radar hacked set up? I know that the lower end cards are officially supported but does ATI ever announce actual support for the X1800XL dongleless xfire?

edit: Looks like the Guru3d boys are confused. They only demoed X1800GTO which is lower spec than X1800 XL in dongleless xfire:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/03...800_crossfire/

Could explain why you're having issues. I haven't seen anyone running X1800 XL dongleless.

[2r4z0r2]

yeah...well i think only gto and gt are officially suported, bit xls also show up as crossfire capable in ccc so they shoould work without problems...this guy did it over at futuremark boards
http://www.futuremark.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4461


and another guy on anandtech did it also w.o problems
anyways, i am still waiting on the answer from ati about that...anyways, i guess i will try the asus board and see if it has the same issues

[Bar81]

Yup seems he was using the abit but regular 256mb xls. Other guy with 512mb was having issues as well. May be the mem amount as all the dongleless approved cards up until now are 256mb

[2r4z0r2]

if i flash 256mb bios to 512mb card, does the card still continue to use 512mb?

[Bar81]

No idea until you try

[2r4z0r2]

heh ati tool says 256 but is there a benchmark that will measure it?

[2r4z0r2]

ok it seems that the card bios does not affect the ammount of memory, so it always has 512mb...that is definitely the problem i have then...all i need now is someone to hack the catalysts for them to address 512mb in crossfire without master card like it does for 256 mb versions of xl, gto, and gt

[Bar81]

Remember also that the 512MB cards have been modified to account for the extra memory so they are not identical to 256MB cards.

[2r4z0r2]

this is definitely vsync problem...how can i enable it in crossfire that it will apply to both cards...are there any hacked drivers that always use vsync?

[Bar81]

Isn't there a vsync option in the drivers? btw how do you know it's vsync, have you enabled it in some games and it fixed your issues?

[2r4z0r2]

because when i test vsync off with a single card i get the exact same "errors"/tearing as all the time with crossfire enabled, unless its a superAA mode