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

I'm using an arctic cooling Freezer 7 Pro, stock x1900gt fan. I didn't actually pay attention to the temperatures, except for the x1900gt temp which was around 82. (I'm not going to get used to temps in computers that high :P )

Well I think I had windows xp + catalyst driver corruption, so I'm not sure whether 300 was the max limit. After dinner I'll have another stab at it with my brand spanking new win xp install.
 
bump.

Is there any more info on this please. This board seems a real tempting proposition. I want to upgrade as I've only got an Athlon 64 3200+ at the moment. It's over 2 years old now, but I don't have the money to spend on a new graphics card and memory at the moment. How are people finding this board. Is the performance noticable compared to their old systems? Is it stable?

Please please let us know.

Also why aren't overclockers selling such a great board?

Richard
 
Seems stable to me, though I have had a few hangs with SpeedFan and MBM when they try to interrogate the board.

One problem I had was the lack of support for booting from a PCI RAID card, so a reinstall on a standalone disk was required.

Still at stock speeds but I'll see how far the 6400 will go when I get a chance.
 
gamesreviewer said:
bump.

Is there any more info on this please. This board seems a real tempting proposition. I want to upgrade as I've only got an Athlon 64 3200+ at the moment. It's over 2 years old now, but I don't have the money to spend on a new graphics card and memory at the moment. How are people finding this board. Is the performance noticable compared to their old systems? Is it stable?

Please please let us know.

Also why aren't overclockers selling such a great board?

Richard
Click to expand...

Anandtech.com seems to be be very curious about the board and say good things about it. There are 3 articles involving this board, comparing AGP and PCI-E performance on identical chipset chards (i think they used the 7300gs) DDR vs DDR2 performance, and the VIA chipset performance in comparison to others. They seem to like it, and think it is very stable.
Their latest article: http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2814

It isn't very overclockable. 330mhz fsb max is a touch limiting, especially as the motherboard doesn't seem to be able to handle that anyway. Voltage adjustments are minimal. But thats not really what the motherboard was designed for. I overclocked to an fsb of 315, for a E6300 speed of 2.2 ghz but I'm not sure if it was fully stable, I didn't really check.
The performance increase that you'll see is from the Core2duo chip.

Overclockers probably don't stock it due to lack of demand, but I'm sure they can appreciate the sheer value for money in a 36 quid core 2 duo motherboard with AGP/PCI-E, DDR and DDR2. I still can't believe they've put all that in for the price, as I usually attribute more options with higher cost.
I think the Asrock 939Dual-sata2 AMD motherboard that also has PCI-E and AGP started being sold here because of the forum interest.

I imagine if we pimp this board enough, they may well stock it. Consumer power.
 
I am still on a survey vessel running the job. But I have bought a T-Mobile card to access the internet :) Unfortunatly it made me spend more money. Yesterday I ordered the 2GB of Geil memory that OcUK have on offer, I could not resist it :( . Hopefully it should work in this board and in the next one I get. It will be interesting to see how it performs. Arghh... I want to be at home :( Oh well :p
 
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crazyswede said:
I am still on a survey vessel running the job. But I have bought a T-Mobile card to access the internet :) Unfortunatly it made me spend more money. Yesterday I ordered the 2GB of Geil memory that OcUK have on offer, I could not resist it :( . Hopefully it should work in this board and in the next one I get. It will be interesting to see how it performs. Arghh... I want to be at home :( Oh well :p
Click to expand...

To put your mind at ease, the Geil works pretty much flawlessly on mine. I have FSB at 300, times of 3-3-3-6 T1.

When I get one of the next gen motherboards I have faith I'll be able to overclock my components like a demon.
 
This looks very interesting, little help though if I wanted to move to an E6400 using this motherboard, how much of the following would I have to replace?

AMD Athlon XP3000 (obviously replace this)
ASUS A7n8X Deluxe (obviously replace this)
Antec 430W non v2
Geforce 6800GT AGP
2 x Corsair 512MB DDR XMS3200C2PT

The PSU and memory are my 2 big question marks. This is a 3 year old system and I need to keep it going at least another 18 months as I dont have the funds for a full rebuild.

Out of interest, how much benefit would I get in replacing just the CPU, would it be better to save the £200ish and wait 18months til I can do it properly

Cheers
 
I went from a xp2500 @ xp3200 speeds to an E6300. In normal computer use, everything is smoother and nippier. In games, it made a pretty significant difference. a lot of games that were processor limited jumped in frame rate.

If you look at the anandtech articles, it suggests that theres very little difference between ddr1 and ddr2, and as we know 2 x Corsair 512MB DDR XMS3200C2PT is fast ram in any eyes. The 6800gt is still a fine card, and will work at agp x8.

If you are looking to upgrade, upgrading the chip will be more beneficial than the graphics card, as the xp3000 and the AGP only would be a limiting factor.

I'm running my e6300, 2gb geil ultra DDR2, x1900gt, a raptor, 250gb barracuda on a 430w PSU and it works fine.
 
This would be a great buy for me at the moment as i'm strapped for cash

I was thinking of first buying this board and slotting in an E6400 chip and cooler and seeing if I can't get more oomph out of my current FX5900 card.

At the moment my CPU is an old SKT A 2100+XP running at 1.67 GhZ (not overclocked).

Do you think I would get any more FPS with just the new chip?

Also I have PC2700 DDR 2*512MB would this memory work with this card? How could I check before buying that the mem will work ok?

This card looks great.

Only thing (perhaps a revision) but when I order this card from a well known french website (i live in Belgium) it quotes in bold that is PCIe 16X. I would link to the site but I think its against forum rules or is it? Considering OC don't stock this product.

Also I don't want to fork out a load of cash for gfx card with DX10 around the corner.
 
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This is one wierd board - mine would not overclock at all with Giel One PC4800 but put in some corsair value and it would overclock to 280mhz. I had to switch to an AGP 6800GT from a 7800GTX to get it up to 300Mhz.

Oh - the memory performance is so bad putting in PC2700 would not make much difference. Its now relegated to one of my servers until september when SLI capable MB should be available.
 
pah just realised that the board doesn't support my GFX card and probably won't support my mem.

Still at 60€ it'll be a nice board until more budget conroe boards appear later.

Also an excuse to buy new memory and card.

hehe.

The MB manual says you cannot use 3.3v AGP cards in it. Perhaps worth knowing.

I've mailed ASROCK regarding the PC2700 so i'll let you know about that.

My cheap upgrade is now costing 685€ :rolleyes:
 
seems like a good buy for the price. Cant afford whole new system with holiday to save for now so might invest.

Wonder how much better gaming will be from my XP2600+ and 6800GT AGP card to a 6300 conroe.
 
Theres only a couple of games conroe would raise the fps in, its really as simple as that at the moment.
Maybe in the future the dual core will be utilised for physics and other things but at the moment upgrading your gfx card would do more for games and total main memory as well.

anandtech did a good round up on this, fear and age of empires? I think were the games that showed any difference based on cpu power
 
Does that use lots of AI with long waits or something.
I can remember playing strategy games years ago (eg. battle isle by bluebyte) and towards the end of the game I would have to wait half a day for the computer to decide its turn, games like that should benefit greatly even now
 
silversurfer said:
Does that use lots of AI with long waits or something.
I can remember playing strategy games years ago (eg. battle isle by bluebyte) and towards the end of the game I would have to wait half a day for the computer to decide its turn, games like that should benefit greatly even now
Click to expand...

Yup Football manager does a lot of number crunching, think of processing a 500mb excel spreadsheet if youve had a game going for a while. The current version is optimised for dual cores, using one to do background calculations and the other to let you carry on playing, It SHOULD (hopefully) therefore be a much faster playing experience
 
Well over the weekend I tweaked up my GFX card and the 6400 so it is running at 300MHz FSB and 2.4GHz (default volts & AC FP7 heatsink). It seems stable there (many posters claim 300MHz is the max stable for the 775DUAL-VSTA) and I'll have a go at taking it further soon.
 
incase any of you were interested ASROCK mailed me to let me know I can use my DDR 2700 with this board. What I forgot to ask is if I could use that mem with CORE2 :rolleyes:

Still for 56€ it's a great stop gap board until some mid-range sli's appear.
 
tealeafed from xs

memconfigut3py4.jpg
 
I have found with the E6300 and 1gb of DDR400 RAM, the FSB to top out around 315 with stock volts.

It does some funny things with the RAM timings when you overclock, I have them set to auto at the moment with the FSB at 310. Everest reports it at 155Mhz (DDR) a ratio of 4:8.

It seems a stable board though, it's been at 2170Ghz for a week now, on 24/7 running a teamspeak server, FTP file server, mIRC and a folding client at 100% on one core. Temps under a Zalman 7700cu are between 26/29 with the above load.

For the price, it seems a good value board, no great OC's but offers a cheap gateway to own a Conroe/Allendale
 
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