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

thought great i can upgrade slow with this board until i saw
2x slots for ddr1 well i have 2 x 256mb 1 x 512 so that's me buggered then
 
Hi guys, due to having the wrong email address my account got suspended for over a month, eventually some of the great mods helped me out by reinstating me :)

Anyway an update on my current situation:

@sonyaddict, this might be interesting for you as you seem to have the exact same symptoms as I did.

For people that have been reading this for the last couple of months you might remember that my computer was crashing randomly during games every 30-60 minutes with a high pitched whining noise coming over the speakers. It would just freeze until I had to reset. It started getting worse and worse until it was happening in windows when closing firefox windows or doing just about anything.
I assumed it was my crappy old memory as that was getting a lot of errors in memtest. So finally about two weeks ago I ordered the Geil 6400 Cas4 set when it went down to £99. I installed it and was playing for about half an hour when it crashed with the exact same symptoms. I almost put my head through the screen. Well actually I just sat there stunned for a few minutes thinking about it.
I resolved to fix the situation no matter what. I thought before that I had ruled out every single component as I had already tried changing everything out or disabling it.
This time though I went with a completely clean install of windows on one of my 40GB hdds instead of the 80GB. I laid everything out on the ground and had just the motherboard, gfx card, geil memory and 40gb hdd installed.
I got that up and running and used Med2:TW as my test environment as that always crashed before.
That seemed to work so I installed my Audigy 2 soundcard. That even seemed to work so then I installed BF2 and installed the wireless network card and without thinking also attached the audigy 2s front panel.
When I played BF2 for about half an hour it crashed. So I knew something I just attached was the cause. I tried a USB wireless reciever instead of the pci card and still got the same problem. I then swapped out the sound card for an old SB Live! 5.1 Digital card. Hey presto that problem was gone!

I now believe that it was actually the front panel for the audigy 2 that was causing the problems. I want to test out the audigy 2 on its own but thats in my gfs computer as I had to take the SB Live from hers. One theory is that it could be the firewire port on the front panel. The Dual-VSTA doesn't support firewire natively so perhaps it has a problem with it on another device?

Does anybody else successfully use either the Audigy 2 or a SB front panel on this motherboard?

@sonyaddict: What sound card do you use in your system? This could be your problem.


Anyway I finally have crash free gaming with fantastic memory. My top FSB has dropped from 300 to 285 stable with the DDR2 memory but the extra performance and speed of loading is phenomonel. Next on the shopping list is a PCI-E graphics card and a SATA hdd. Then I can finally get a DS3 like I've always wanted :)

Waiting for both money and cheap DX10 cards first though.

@Mattey: You have DDR400 RAM it would seem from CPU-Z. This has a native speed of 200mhz, you would have to severely underclock to get it running at a 1:1 ratio. Try setting the RAM speed to DDR333 and pushing your FSB higher if you want to try that. You might be able to hold a 300FSB stable with memory speeds of 187.5 which wouldn't be that far under its native 200mhz. You might even get lucky and be able to clock past 300mhz FSB. A 320FSB would give you 200mhz RAM speed on the 8:5 ratio that you get from setting it to DDR333 timings.

@Gazza: You have to manually set your RAM speed in the bios to DDR400 or else it defaults to a lower speed. It's the first option under the chipset menu.
 
** WARNING **
The 4CoreDual-VSTA does not support the core 2 duo e4300 on the default
bios it needs bios version 1.40.
Mighty strange so you're buggered i guess if you get a 4300 and this board
which i just ordered luckily i checked the site and supported cpu list
and am now canceling my order cant get the bios to 1.40 without
a cpu now can i.

Dear Geoff,
Thank you for contacting ASRock
If your motherboard come with the BIOS P1.30 (or former), it may not able to boot up with E4300 CPU.
If you meet this problem, please kindly contact your dealer or refer below link to contact local distributor to help update BIOS P1.40

Well so i have to gamble as to what bios i'll get that's a bit daft.
erm i've never heard of a motherboard coming with anything but the first bios
are things different now they update the bios at the factory now?
 
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I got the 4core with bios 1.0 and my E4300 booted up fine and did a clean install of windows with it.

However it did not recognise the CPU in windows and it registered as a 1.7ghz in Winxp and not 1.8 Ghz.
Bios update resolved that though.

But as I said it did boot, but I understand you not wanting to risk it,
 
Darg said:
Hi guys, due to having the wrong email address my account got suspended for over a month, eventually some of the great mods helped me out by reinstating me :)

Anyway an update on my current situation:

@sonyaddict, this might be interesting for you as you seem to have the exact same symptoms as I did.

For people that have been reading this for the last couple of months you might remember that my computer was crashing randomly during games every 30-60 minutes with a high pitched whining noise coming over the speakers. It would just freeze until I had to reset. It started getting worse and worse until it was happening in windows when closing firefox windows or doing just about anything.
I assumed it was my crappy old memory as that was getting a lot of errors in memtest. So finally about two weeks ago I ordered the Geil 6400 Cas4 set when it went down to £99. I installed it and was playing for about half an hour when it crashed with the exact same symptoms. I almost put my head through the screen. Well actually I just sat there stunned for a few minutes thinking about it.
I resolved to fix the situation no matter what. I thought before that I had ruled out every single component as I had already tried changing everything out or disabling it.
This time though I went with a completely clean install of windows on one of my 40GB hdds instead of the 80GB. I laid everything out on the ground and had just the motherboard, gfx card, geil memory and 40gb hdd installed.
I got that up and running and used Med2:TW as my test environment as that always crashed before.
That seemed to work so I installed my Audigy 2 soundcard. That even seemed to work so then I installed BF2 and installed the wireless network card and without thinking also attached the audigy 2s front panel.
When I played BF2 for about half an hour it crashed. So I knew something I just attached was the cause. I tried a USB wireless reciever instead of the pci card and still got the same problem. I then swapped out the sound card for an old SB Live! 5.1 Digital card. Hey presto that problem was gone!

I now believe that it was actually the front panel for the audigy 2 that was causing the problems. I want to test out the audigy 2 on its own but thats in my gfs computer as I had to take the SB Live from hers. One theory is that it could be the firewire port on the front panel. The Dual-VSTA doesn't support firewire natively so perhaps it has a problem with it on another device?

Does anybody else successfully use either the Audigy 2 or a SB front panel on this motherboard?

@sonyaddict: What sound card do you use in your system? This could be your problem.


Anyway I finally have crash free gaming with fantastic memory. My top FSB has dropped from 300 to 285 stable with the DDR2 memory but the extra performance and speed of loading is phenomonel. Next on the shopping list is a PCI-E graphics card and a SATA hdd. Then I can finally get a DS3 like I've always wanted :)

Waiting for both money and cheap DX10 cards first though.

@Mattey: You have DDR400 RAM it would seem from CPU-Z. This has a native speed of 200mhz, you would have to severely underclock to get it running at a 1:1 ratio. Try setting the RAM speed to DDR333 and pushing your FSB higher if you want to try that. You might be able to hold a 300FSB stable with memory speeds of 187.5 which wouldn't be that far under its native 200mhz. You might even get lucky and be able to clock past 300mhz FSB. A 320FSB would give you 200mhz RAM speed on the 8:5 ratio that you get from setting it to DDR333 timings.

@Gazza: You have to manually set your RAM speed in the bios to DDR400 or else it defaults to a lower speed. It's the first option under the chipset menu.
Click to expand...

I am using an audigy 2 oem no problems with that. Only had a freezing issue after overclocking and using internet explorer so I really don't know if it is even an overclocking issue?
 
Okay so it must just be the frontboard for the audigy 2 that was causing the problem all along. So simple to fix.. doh.

Anyway someday I'll get the audigy 2 back and swap it out for the SB Live and see if the problem comes back. I'll post here with my findings :)
 
Scooby-DoobyDoo said:
Hi just been scouting around and found someone who has listed some recommended bios settings. He also gets the bus speed up to 317mhz.
Click to expand...
Well I can only get to 290 and thats with ddr2? If I set the dram frequency to 667 it only runs in single channel mode?
 
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You should set it to dual channel mode in the BIOS. It's one of the last settings in the memory timings area.

If you check page 6 I think you'll find a link to another forum where they got the FSB all the way up to the 340 limit. That was with some tricky volt mods that I haven't really tried myself. You'll need a multimetre anyway and I don't have one ;)
 
E4300 and 4core

Just rebuilt my system around these components, together with 2gb corsair value 4300 DDR2.

All seems very fast, just turned it up to 300FSB, writing this now at 2.7Ghz. Its not 100% stable like this, needs some tweaking. Stock volts. No problem detecting the E4300, although I've now flashed to the latest bios.

Anyone got any more speed out of an E4300? Hard to complain though - this is serious performance for the money.
 
Upgrade build

Hi all,

I've just completed an upgrade on the weekend from my old P4 2.5GHz Northwood to a C2D e6300 using existing AGP 7800 card and 1gig (2 x 512 ) DDR400 memory. I can say that this went extremely well and I'm very impressed with this motherboard.

I've noticed when running CPU-Z that the BIOS has decided to run my memory at 166 and not 200MHz? the BIOS setting is at AUTO. Should I change this to 200MHz? Do I just change the setting or are there other values to change too??

Thanks in advance
 
Well so far I can only get a mild overclock. 292 cpu frequency on an e6400 and bootguard doesn't seem to work. Damn! the cmos is right under my audigy 2.Using ocz 6400 as well as a pci express gpu. It is either me or the board :(
 
292 is quite a good FSB speed for PC6400 RAM. With DDR ram you can expect a 300FSB. I went from 1GB PC3200 at 300FSB to 2GB PC6400 RAM at 285FSB and I can't get it stable at any higher speed.

The E4300 seems to be one of the best cpus for this board as it has a 9X multiplier instead of 7X with the E6300.
 
some bios settings I found here

Came across these settings
Advanced:

Overclock Mode - CPU,PCIE Async.
CPUFr. - 325
PCIE Fr. - 119
PCI Fr. - 34.78
Spread Spectrum - Disabled
Boot Failure - Disabled

Max CPUID Val. - Disabled
Intel Virtuali. - Disabled
CPU Thermal Thr. - Disabled
No-Execute Memory. - Disabled
Intel Speedstep - Disabled

Chipset:

Dram Freque. - 400
Flexib.- Disabled
Cas Latency - 4
Interleave - 4-Way
Precharge - 3
Tras - 8
trcd - 4
trfc - 15
trrd - 3
trtp - 2
twtr - 2
twr - 4
Bus Select.- Dual
Command Rate - 2T

Advanced Memory... all default
Advanced Host Conf:
Pipeline DRQCTL - Enabled
all other default

DRAM Voltage - High
AGP Voltage - High

Primary Gra.Adapt. - PCIe
AGP - Auto
AGP Fast Write - Disabled
AGP Aperture Size - 256MB
AGP Staggered delay - auto
AGP GADSTB - auto

V-Link - normal
PCI delay Transaction - enabled
IDE Drive Strenght - normal
PCIE Downstream Pipeline - disabled
Onboard LAN - enabled
Onboard Sound - disabled

ACPI - default

IDE - default

PCIpnp - default

Floppy - enabled

Super IO - all disabled but Floppy Controller enabled

USB Conf. - default

H/W Monitor:
CPU Quiet - Enabled
Target CPU - 50

Also:

the AGP is at 1,84 V
and the NB at 1,67 V

using PCIe and DDRI...

Its Prime stable; but i had to decrease FSB to 320 cause the PCIe VGA-Card doesn´t make 119-120MHz Freq.; but this is required to reach 225 FSB stable (-screenlockups in Oblivion after 10Minutes gameplay, but Sound still continues to play) now its at 117 MHz PCIe. I have a ATI... maybee with NVIDIA it doesn´t make a difference...
 
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Don't use those settings! You'll just have to reset your CMOS. Those settings were reached by someone who had done both the vNb and vAGP volt mods. Also he is running DDR 400 RAM which helps a lot when overclocking this board. DDR2 RAM just can't get that high a FSB.

You will have to find your own optimum settings for overclocking. Using someone elses exact settings is just asking for trouble. Unless you've done the exact same volt mods and have the exact same hardware then it just won't work. You should be happy if you can get up to 300FSB on this board.

EDIT: Just looked at your previous post. DDRII 6400 RAM and PCI-E graphics card means you can't go over your current FSB, atleast not significantly. If you do look for other peoples settings then make sure that they are also using DDRII 6400 RAM and PCI-E graphics. If you find a way to do it then please post it here but I have yet to see it done.
 
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