ASRock 775Dual-VSTA for Conroe (Core2) with both AGP/PCI-E and DDR1/DDR2 support

Just want to add a few words to this.

The new bios (2.10) seems to make my system more stable. I was unable to get Flight Simulator X to open as I would get the BSOD straight away; but now I can play it for more than an hour.

I'm wondering whether it has anything to do with the fact that I have 400Mhz ram, and it states that it only supports 266Mhz or 333Mhz DDR2.

Anyways, 680i should be out in a few days time; can finally get round to overclocking this E6600!

James Pearce
 
Darg said:
The latest graphics cards will probably be bottlenecked somewhat with the PCI-E slot limited to 4x speeds.
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indeed, however lets face it the majority of people who are resorting to buying an Asrock 775 Dual VSTA PROBABLY dont have the cash - or are not willing to spend the cash on very powerful pci-e cards... thats an assumption of course ;)
 
asrock question

I read most of the pages on this board.. Heard someone talking about a vga compatibility list for this board? anyone got a URL?

just wondering, will a agp fx5500 256meg videa card run in this board?

7900gs's work fine dont they? I wouldnt be running them at the same time ;)

Thinking about getting a e6300.. and 7900gs a little bit after that.. and keeping my fx5500 for the time being..

What would be the deal with bios updates? do you download the updates before you build your system? or .. burn them to cd..

doesnt updating the bios then allow for ddr800 support? Is their a simple answer for ddr800 and that running slower then expected.. and how to speed it up to its ddr800 rating?
 
I've just bought one of these boards and an E6400 as part of a gradual upgrade, as many others have done, and mostly, i'm very impressed - since i upgraded from an NF7-S v2 and 2500XPM @ 2.5GHz so i should be ;)

However, soon after installing it i got a BSOD as i was opening a video with media player while copying a large chunk of files across drives. I didn't think too much of it until the next day i got a blue screen and my PC completely locked requiring a hard reset. That happened while i was playing Warcraft. I booted up again and reloaded the game, logged in, and within minutes the same thing happened. This happened about 6 or 7 more times within a few minutes of each other. At the time i was raiding with my guild, and have lots of addons active so the memory probably takes a fair beating.

I assumed the memory was to blame since i'm using unmatched 512MB dimms (Corsair XMS3200CL2). In my old board i had to use them in the single channel memory slots because trying to run dual channel my PC wouldn't survive long in windows. Inbetween all the reboots in WoW though i changed memory speed from 400 to 333 to 266 to no avail. I removed first one dimm, then the other (putting the first one back ofc!). I turned on the compatibilty feature for memory in the bios. None of these things made any difference, i was still crashing within a few minutes of getting back into WoW.

The next day i updated all the motherboard drivers to the latest ones from VIA (newer than the Asrock site) and ran Memtest in Windows with no errors, then ran Orthos without errors and without the Cores going above 45C. Then i installed FarCry and i've been replaying that for the last few days without any problems at all. But last night, i had just finished watching a movie in media player, then opened Firefox, and as i did so i got a BSOD with a message that it was doing a memory dump again :(

For reference, i'm using E6400, 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS3200CL2, Antec Truepower 430W, Asrock DUAL VSTA, Hercules 9800Pro, 2 x SATA Samsung drives.

Any ideas what i can do to stop these bluescreens? Does the latest bios with microcode (whatever that is) update have anything to do with this?

Hope someone can help cos i'm really pleased with the upgrade so far apart form crashing lots in WoW...
 
Dodgem. Make sure compatability mode is off. And also that you set the timings manually, that way you know what they are.

Also, set DDR voltage to HIGH and you are right to leave the ram at the 266 setting. You might want to try setting the ram to 2T aswell to see if that makes any difference.

asimons999. This site http://www.asrock.com/product/775Dual-VSTA.htm will have all the information you need to do with the board. FAQ's and compat lists.

To update the bios, you just download the windows version from that site, not the dos one, and run it. It'll then update and then you just restart the system and its all done, nice and easy :)
 
ill be pointing identical ddr400 in their..

If it comes up as 266.. what should I do? seems to be a re-occuring problem for a lot of people..

Set voltage to high? as well as.. setting the timings or something?

not that im that noob with computers.. but never did much OCing.. and I dont have a indepth knowledge of how the ram timings work.. 4-2-5-1 doesnt mean much to me ;)
 
asimons999 said:
ill be pointing identical ddr400 in their..

If it comes up as 266.. what should I do? seems to be a re-occuring problem for a lot of people..

Set voltage to high? as well as.. setting the timings or something?

not that im that noob with computers.. but never did much OCing.. and I dont have a indepth knowledge of how the ram timings work.. 4-2-5-1 doesnt mean much to me ;)
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Once you have all your stuff, if you download CPUz it will be able to tell you various things about your CPU/Mem/Motherboard etc.

Use that to see what timings are at stock, and if they differ from what the manufacturer has rated them.

The first number is the CAS rating, then Ras to Case Delay, Ras Precharge and Tras last. Those are the only timings you really want to be changing when using DDR1 ram. Im not sure about DDR2 but I think its more or less the same, they just use higher numbers (higher latency) than their DDR1 counterparts.

If you need any other help let us know. Also, welcome to the forums :D

EDIT: With regards to 266(the memory divider) that clocks the memory at a ratio lower than what the FSB is set to. I have no idea why on this intel board they have kept AMD style dividers, because it makes it more complicated for noobs. Put simply, when set to 400, it means the memory is 1:1 with the FSB. The default FSB is 266, so double that because its DDR and you have a lot more than regular 3200 ram can handle. Setting a lower divider (266 or 333) in the bios will slow the ram down so that it works within its correct speed.
 
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thanx for the welcome..

will see how I go, There is a chance I might get the e6600... and save longer for the video card.. but hey.. then I will miss out on the lan partys in the holidays ;)

so we will see i guess..
 
Thanks for the advice Bilston, but i'm still getting bluescreens :(

So far i have updated to the latest BIOS (2.10), Changed from latest VIA drivers to latest Asrock drivers (which is actually a step back to 5.07), set the memory timings manually to spd values - 2.5,3,3,7,2T I've set RAM voltage to high, turned Compatibility off, run Memtest86 for 10 full passes - no errors.

The error messages i get are usually IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL or BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER

I'm crashing for no apparent reason though it doesn't seem to happen if i'm doing NOTHING, but it could be Warcraft, Farcry, Firefox, Media player - i'm using IE to write this because Firefox crashed the pc again as i clicked in the edit box to begin posting.... but for all i know IE may crash too at some point!

Since Memtest showed no errors i'm assuming my mobo is screwed atm.

Anyone have any ideas or do you agree that it's RMA time for this motherboard?
 
What USB devices do you have installed? Try removing all of them and see if you get the bluescreens.

Googling that error shows that it only occurs when USB hard drives are installed, got any of them?
 
What should I be setting the aperture size on in the bios? I have a 128mb 6800 AGP card?

FEAR has crashed to desktop twice this morning and when I get BSOD it usually refers to the nvidia driver
 
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Target said:
What should I be setting the aperture size on in the bios? I have a 128mb 6800 AGP card?

FEAR has crashed to desktop twice this morning and when I get BSOD it usually refers to the nvidia driver
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aperture size doesnt really make much difference in my experience. Try 128mb. What PSU you got? Latest drivers for the card installed?
 
Changed to 128 as you've suggested and so far ok.

I've got an 460W Akasa PSU and yep, got the latest drivers.

I wonder if switching to PCI-E might be the solution? Has anybody had BSOD with PCI-E cards?
 
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