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P4P800/P4P800SE sync FSB problems
I've had some trouble getting my new sytem up and running right and would
like some help. Here's the scoop. I bought a P4P800SE and a P42.6C, had it running fine, no problems. The only ram I had when I got it was a single stick of Kingston DDR3200 Valueram. I started testing how far I could get the processor clocked up to once I'd burnt it in for about a week. I was able to easily get to 3250 but needless to say, I wasn't running sync. I bought a dual-channel 2x256Mb OCZ DDR4000 on a recommendation from a friend and tried it out. It works fine, but here is where I discovered that the fsb/memory ratio can't be locked on this board either, there isn't an option. I tried all the suggestions in the forum. No luck, I appeared to lose dual-channel mode as soon as I raised the FSB over 200 on the P4P800SE but on the P4P800 board it stays in dual-channel mode. It runs fine async on either board. But this isn't why I bought the ram is it? A colleague at work is running a P4P800, not the SE and he's got it running sync and he has the ratio setting in the bios. It's even in the manual, I checked before buying the board. Sure enough, I have a similar problem, no ratio setting in the bios of the new P4P800 I've bought. I flashed up to rev 1017Beta from 1014 one rev at a time. No change. The system runs great with everything at auto, even runs fine with the cpu at 3250 but this automatically clocks my ram back to 2700 no matter what I do. I also crash running 3D Mark2001SE if I'm overclocked. None of this happened with the old single stick of 3200? I'm not sure where to go on this from here. I've always had perfomance mode set to standard, spread spectrum is the first thing I disable on every motherboard I touch. Setting the mem timings to 3-4-4-8 doesn't change anything and if you leave it set to By SPD the board tries to push the memory to 2.5 timings (I noticed that mention elsewhere in the forums too). On the P4P800SE I can see and set my DDR speed to 500 but it won't post. On the P4P800 it doesn't offer me the 500 speed option at all, it's like it doesn't detect it's full speed. I check with all the different bios rev's I tried. I've reseated the memory twice, cleared the bios numerous times as well, installed one stick at a time. Nothing has helped so far. I don't use Asus AI software, everything I work with is in the bios. Here's the configuration: Asus P4P800 Intel P4 2.6C, stock Intel cooler 2x256Mb DDR4000 OCZ, dual-channel kit, OCZ500512ELDC-K should be the part number, I can check the modules if needed but that's what I ordered. ATI Radeon 9000Pro 2x120Gb Seatgate 7200.7 SATA150 as RAID1 volume (boot drive) Western Digital 120Gb BB series (misc data temp data storage, being removed soon) on Primary Master LiteOn DVD-RW on Secondary Master LiteOn DVD-CDRW combo on Secondary Slave ATI TV-Wonder Soundblaster Audigy Antec SLK2650BQE with Antec 380W PSU from a Sonata 80MM Vantec Stealth mounted on an IceSystems T-Bone fan bracket to cool chipset and memory So here are the questions: Do you need to hit a key sequence with this board to get more bios options like my GA-7VAX? Did I miss something really simple here? Is the Audigy or the TV Wonder a problem? (I doubt it's the Radeon 9000Pro?) Is it because I'm running RAID1? There were no extra options there before I connected the drives Is it a memory compatability issue? Why doesn't the new P4P800 offer me the manual DDR speed setting for 500? Any help appreciated, thanks in advance Mark |
#2
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oops...sorry just cleared the bios and forgot to reset time!
"zzipper" wrote in message .. . I've had some trouble getting my new sytem up and running right and would like some help. Here's the scoop. I bought a P4P800SE and a P42.6C, had it running fine, no problems. The only ram I had when I got it was a single stick of Kingston DDR3200 Valueram. I started testing how far I could get the processor clocked up to once I'd burnt it in for about a week. I was able to easily get to 3250 but needless to say, I wasn't running sync. I bought a dual-channel 2x256Mb OCZ DDR4000 on a recommendation from a friend and tried it out. It works fine, but here is where I discovered that the fsb/memory ratio can't be locked on this board either, there isn't an option. I tried all the suggestions in the forum. No luck, I appeared to lose dual-channel mode as soon as I raised the FSB over 200 on the P4P800SE but on the P4P800 board it stays in dual-channel mode. It runs fine async on either board. But this isn't why I bought the ram is it? A colleague at work is running a P4P800, not the SE and he's got it running sync and he has the ratio setting in the bios. It's even in the manual, I checked before buying the board. Sure enough, I have a similar problem, no ratio setting in the bios of the new P4P800 I've bought. I flashed up to rev 1017Beta from 1014 one rev at a time. No change. The system runs great with everything at auto, even runs fine with the cpu at 3250 but this automatically clocks my ram back to 2700 no matter what I do. I also crash running 3D Mark2001SE if I'm overclocked. None of this happened with the old single stick of 3200? I'm not sure where to go on this from here. I've always had perfomance mode set to standard, spread spectrum is the first thing I disable on every motherboard I touch. Setting the mem timings to 3-4-4-8 doesn't change anything and if you leave it set to By SPD the board tries to push the memory to 2.5 timings (I noticed that mention elsewhere in the forums too). On the P4P800SE I can see and set my DDR speed to 500 but it won't post. On the P4P800 it doesn't offer me the 500 speed option at all, it's like it doesn't detect it's full speed. I check with all the different bios rev's I tried. I've reseated the memory twice, cleared the bios numerous times as well, installed one stick at a time. Nothing has helped so far. I don't use Asus AI software, everything I work with is in the bios. Here's the configuration: Asus P4P800 Intel P4 2.6C, stock Intel cooler 2x256Mb DDR4000 OCZ, dual-channel kit, OCZ500512ELDC-K should be the part number, I can check the modules if needed but that's what I ordered. ATI Radeon 9000Pro 2x120Gb Seatgate 7200.7 SATA150 as RAID1 volume (boot drive) Western Digital 120Gb BB series (misc data temp data storage, being removed soon) on Primary Master LiteOn DVD-RW on Secondary Master LiteOn DVD-CDRW combo on Secondary Slave ATI TV-Wonder Soundblaster Audigy Antec SLK2650BQE with Antec 380W PSU from a Sonata 80MM Vantec Stealth mounted on an IceSystems T-Bone fan bracket to cool chipset and memory So here are the questions: Do you need to hit a key sequence with this board to get more bios options like my GA-7VAX? Did I miss something really simple here? Is the Audigy or the TV Wonder a problem? (I doubt it's the Radeon 9000Pro?) Is it because I'm running RAID1? There were no extra options there before I connected the drives Is it a memory compatability issue? Why doesn't the new P4P800 offer me the manual DDR speed setting for 500? Any help appreciated, thanks in advance Mark |
#3
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In article , "zzipper"
wrote: oops...sorry just cleared the bios and forgot to reset time! I don't know if I can make sense of all your symptoms, but here goes... When the 875/865 boards first came out, it was noted that the DDR memory setting only corresponded to the actual frequency when the board ran at stock speed. For example, if the CPU got 200MHz clock (FSB800) and the DDR memory setting was "DDR400", then the memory actually ran at 200MHz_clock * 2 (for DDR rating) = DDR400. What the DDR memory settings were actually doing, is selecting "ratios" and not frequencies. As soon as the processor was overclocked, the memory options would remain the same, but the actual memory frequency would increase by the amount the FSB was overclocked. So, the reason the P4P800 offers nothing above DDR400, is DDR400 is the 1:1 ratio, and as far as I know, there isn't an option to have a memory clock higher than the processor clock. So, on the P4P800, DDR400 = 1:1 ratio, DDR333 = 5:4 ratio, DDR266 = 3:2 ratio. There may be other ratios available, but in the Intel datasheets for the Northbridge, in typical Intel fashion, not all the values are documented (so Asus would have discovered and tested them in the lab, to figure it out). Example: You have a P4 version C processor with FSB800. You decide to change the processor clock from 200MHz to 250MHz. The memory is set to "DDR400", which is actually selecting the 1:1 ratio. Since that ratio is now fixed, when the processor goes from 200MHz to 250MHz, the memory goes to 250MHz as well, and the memory actually runs at DDR500, even though the BIOS setting says "DDR400". Example_2: Same FSB800 processor. Same overclock, 200MHz to 250MHz processor clock. This time, you set the memory to "DDR333". The ratio 5:4 is triggered. When CPU clock is 250MHz, the memory gets 250*(4/5)=200MHz. The memory actually runs at DDR400. As for the P4P800SE, it almost looks like they tried to fix the BIOS to indicate actual DDR rate, rather than just represent the available ratios. I would guess, that the five values listed in the BIOS are not available under all conditions, and only the DDR rates supported by the above mentioned ratios would show up. So, for example, if you set the processor clock to 250MHz, then I would expect to see DDR500 offered in the P4P800SE, instead of the bogus "DDR400" 1:1 seen in a P4P800 BIOS. The rest of your symptoms could be due to the SPD programming of the OCZ memory, and its interaction with the BIOS. There are two ways to parse the SPD. One way is to use fixed point math, rounding and calculations etc. Another way is to if-then-else for fixed values you would expect to find as the result of following the JEDEC standard. For memory above DDR400, there is no JEDEC standard defined for DDR433, DDR500 etc. And, as a consequence, no expectation of a sane parsing of the SPD. Many memory manufacturers fix this, by only showing DDR400 timings in the BIOS, in the hopes that the SPD won't upset the BIOS. It is then the user's responsibility to set the params manually. A result of this, is a badly written BIOS will "throw up its hands", if it doesn't understand what it is reading. The absolute safest BIOS setting it could use, is a 3:2 ratio, and turning off dual channel (although the latter part seems like overkill - for dual channel, it should be enough to find two identical sticks!). I tried searching on abxzone.com, for more concrete examples of how the P4P800 SE BIOS works. You may want to give that a few tries, as I haven't turned up anything interesting yet. One tidbit I did find, suggests that AMI writes the early BIOS for boards, and then at some point Asus stops paying for that service, and takes over support for themselves. If they cannot understand or follow the AMI code, that might result in some quirks in later BIOS. There are too many boards in that family, to follow how the BIOS on all of them work. The attempt to use actual frequency on the P4P800 SE came as a surprise to me. I didn't think Asus would ever step away from the "ratio" method of the P4P800. Abxzone has many threads on the family, including some interesting hacks, where you flash a P4P8X BIOS onto a board, then flash the non-boot-block portion of the real board BIOS, to get some different chipset initialization code. User "Bigtoe" figures prominently in some of these efforts. It is possible that if you pick up a BIOS Savior for $20-$25 and flash a different board BIOS, you might end up with a more predictable overclock behavior. Just depends on how "risk averse" you are. I saw the writing on the wall over there, and bought a P4C800-E instead. The thing is, 1:1 overclocks are not guaranteed to be free of video artifacts on the 865PE chipset. Search on p4p800 and artifact for more interesting results, including the abxzone poll that was taken, which shows what percentage of 865PE boards work well at 1:1 ratio plus overclocking. http://www.abxzone.com/forums/search.php http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showth...ighlight=p4p8x http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showth...rtifact+p4p800 Paul "zzipper" wrote in message .. . I've had some trouble getting my new sytem up and running right and would like some help. Here's the scoop. I bought a P4P800SE and a P42.6C, had it running fine, no problems. The only ram I had when I got it was a single stick of Kingston DDR3200 Valueram. I started testing how far I could get the processor clocked up to once I'd burnt it in for about a week. I was able to easily get to 3250 but needless to say, I wasn't running sync. I bought a dual-channel 2x256Mb OCZ DDR4000 on a recommendation from a friend and tried it out. It works fine, but here is where I discovered that the fsb/memory ratio can't be locked on this board either, there isn't an option. I tried all the suggestions in the forum. No luck, I appeared to lose dual-channel mode as soon as I raised the FSB over 200 on the P4P800SE but on the P4P800 board it stays in dual-channel mode. It runs fine async on either board. But this isn't why I bought the ram is it? A colleague at work is running a P4P800, not the SE and he's got it running sync and he has the ratio setting in the bios. It's even in the manual, I checked before buying the board. Sure enough, I have a similar problem, no ratio setting in the bios of the new P4P800 I've bought. I flashed up to rev 1017Beta from 1014 one rev at a time. No change. The system runs great with everything at auto, even runs fine with the cpu at 3250 but this automatically clocks my ram back to 2700 no matter what I do. I also crash running 3D Mark2001SE if I'm overclocked. None of this happened with the old single stick of 3200? I'm not sure where to go on this from here. I've always had perfomance mode set to standard, spread spectrum is the first thing I disable on every motherboard I touch. Setting the mem timings to 3-4-4-8 doesn't change anything and if you leave it set to By SPD the board tries to push the memory to 2.5 timings (I noticed that mention elsewhere in the forums too). On the P4P800SE I can see and set my DDR speed to 500 but it won't post. On the P4P800 it doesn't offer me the 500 speed option at all, it's like it doesn't detect it's full speed. I check with all the different bios rev's I tried. I've reseated the memory twice, cleared the bios numerous times as well, installed one stick at a time. Nothing has helped so far. I don't use Asus AI software, everything I work with is in the bios. Here's the configuration: Asus P4P800 Intel P4 2.6C, stock Intel cooler 2x256Mb DDR4000 OCZ, dual-channel kit, OCZ500512ELDC-K should be the part number, I can check the modules if needed but that's what I ordered. ATI Radeon 9000Pro 2x120Gb Seatgate 7200.7 SATA150 as RAID1 volume (boot drive) Western Digital 120Gb BB series (misc data temp data storage, being removed soon) on Primary Master LiteOn DVD-RW on Secondary Master LiteOn DVD-CDRW combo on Secondary Slave ATI TV-Wonder Soundblaster Audigy Antec SLK2650BQE with Antec 380W PSU from a Sonata 80MM Vantec Stealth mounted on an IceSystems T-Bone fan bracket to cool chipset and memory So here are the questions: Do you need to hit a key sequence with this board to get more bios options like my GA-7VAX? Did I miss something really simple here? Is the Audigy or the TV Wonder a problem? (I doubt it's the Radeon 9000Pro?) Is it because I'm running RAID1? There were no extra options there before I connected the drives Is it a memory compatability issue? Why doesn't the new P4P800 offer me the manual DDR speed setting for 500? Any help appreciated, thanks in advance Mark |
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Hi Paul, thanks for the detailed info. I was able to return the P4P800SE for
credit and you are right about the 1:1 ratio being the 400 DDR setting, I discovered this Sunday night. All it well and I'm happily running at 231FSB with the memory and cpu running sync which was the objective. Hopefully when I get a better cpu cooler in a couple of weeks I'll be able to crank up to 250. That's why I got the PC4000 DDR:-) Again, thanks for your help and info. Mark "Paul" wrote in message ... In article , "zzipper" wrote: oops...sorry just cleared the bios and forgot to reset time! I don't know if I can make sense of all your symptoms, but here goes... When the 875/865 boards first came out, it was noted that the DDR memory setting only corresponded to the actual frequency when the board ran at stock speed. For example, if the CPU got 200MHz clock (FSB800) and the DDR memory setting was "DDR400", then the memory actually ran at 200MHz_clock * 2 (for DDR rating) = DDR400. What the DDR memory settings were actually doing, is selecting "ratios" and not frequencies. As soon as the processor was overclocked, the memory options would remain the same, but the actual memory frequency would increase by the amount the FSB was overclocked. So, the reason the P4P800 offers nothing above DDR400, is DDR400 is the 1:1 ratio, and as far as I know, there isn't an option to have a memory clock higher than the processor clock. So, on the P4P800, DDR400 = 1:1 ratio, DDR333 = 5:4 ratio, DDR266 = 3:2 ratio. There may be other ratios available, but in the Intel datasheets for the Northbridge, in typical Intel fashion, not all the values are documented (so Asus would have discovered and tested them in the lab, to figure it out). Example: You have a P4 version C processor with FSB800. You decide to change the processor clock from 200MHz to 250MHz. The memory is set to "DDR400", which is actually selecting the 1:1 ratio. Since that ratio is now fixed, when the processor goes from 200MHz to 250MHz, the memory goes to 250MHz as well, and the memory actually runs at DDR500, even though the BIOS setting says "DDR400". Example_2: Same FSB800 processor. Same overclock, 200MHz to 250MHz processor clock. This time, you set the memory to "DDR333". The ratio 5:4 is triggered. When CPU clock is 250MHz, the memory gets 250*(4/5)=200MHz. The memory actually runs at DDR400. As for the P4P800SE, it almost looks like they tried to fix the BIOS to indicate actual DDR rate, rather than just represent the available ratios. I would guess, that the five values listed in the BIOS are not available under all conditions, and only the DDR rates supported by the above mentioned ratios would show up. So, for example, if you set the processor clock to 250MHz, then I would expect to see DDR500 offered in the P4P800SE, instead of the bogus "DDR400" 1:1 seen in a P4P800 BIOS. The rest of your symptoms could be due to the SPD programming of the OCZ memory, and its interaction with the BIOS. There are two ways to parse the SPD. One way is to use fixed point math, rounding and calculations etc. Another way is to if-then-else for fixed values you would expect to find as the result of following the JEDEC standard. For memory above DDR400, there is no JEDEC standard defined for DDR433, DDR500 etc. And, as a consequence, no expectation of a sane parsing of the SPD. Many memory manufacturers fix this, by only showing DDR400 timings in the BIOS, in the hopes that the SPD won't upset the BIOS. It is then the user's responsibility to set the params manually. A result of this, is a badly written BIOS will "throw up its hands", if it doesn't understand what it is reading. The absolute safest BIOS setting it could use, is a 3:2 ratio, and turning off dual channel (although the latter part seems like overkill - for dual channel, it should be enough to find two identical sticks!). I tried searching on abxzone.com, for more concrete examples of how the P4P800 SE BIOS works. You may want to give that a few tries, as I haven't turned up anything interesting yet. One tidbit I did find, suggests that AMI writes the early BIOS for boards, and then at some point Asus stops paying for that service, and takes over support for themselves. If they cannot understand or follow the AMI code, that might result in some quirks in later BIOS. There are too many boards in that family, to follow how the BIOS on all of them work. The attempt to use actual frequency on the P4P800 SE came as a surprise to me. I didn't think Asus would ever step away from the "ratio" method of the P4P800. Abxzone has many threads on the family, including some interesting hacks, where you flash a P4P8X BIOS onto a board, then flash the non-boot-block portion of the real board BIOS, to get some different chipset initialization code. User "Bigtoe" figures prominently in some of these efforts. It is possible that if you pick up a BIOS Savior for $20-$25 and flash a different board BIOS, you might end up with a more predictable overclock behavior. Just depends on how "risk averse" you are. I saw the writing on the wall over there, and bought a P4C800-E instead. The thing is, 1:1 overclocks are not guaranteed to be free of video artifacts on the 865PE chipset. Search on p4p800 and artifact for more interesting results, including the abxzone poll that was taken, which shows what percentage of 865PE boards work well at 1:1 ratio plus overclocking. http://www.abxzone.com/forums/search.php http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showth...ighlight=p4p8x http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showth...rtifact+p4p800 Paul "zzipper" wrote in message .. . I've had some trouble getting my new sytem up and running right and would like some help. Here's the scoop. I bought a P4P800SE and a P42.6C, had it running fine, no problems. The only ram I had when I got it was a single stick of Kingston DDR3200 Valueram. I started testing how far I could get the processor clocked up to once I'd burnt it in for about a week. I was able to easily get to 3250 but needless to say, I wasn't running sync. I bought a dual-channel 2x256Mb OCZ DDR4000 on a recommendation from a friend and tried it out. It works fine, but here is where I discovered that the fsb/memory ratio can't be locked on this board either, there isn't an option. I tried all the suggestions in the forum. No luck, I appeared to lose dual-channel mode as soon as I raised the FSB over 200 on the P4P800SE but on the P4P800 board it stays in dual-channel mode. It runs fine async on either board. But this isn't why I bought the ram is it? A colleague at work is running a P4P800, not the SE and he's got it running sync and he has the ratio setting in the bios. It's even in the manual, I checked before buying the board. Sure enough, I have a similar problem, no ratio setting in the bios of the new P4P800 I've bought. I flashed up to rev 1017Beta from 1014 one rev at a time. No change. The system runs great with everything at auto, even runs fine with the cpu at 3250 but this automatically clocks my ram back to 2700 no matter what I do. I also crash running 3D Mark2001SE if I'm overclocked. None of this happened with the old single stick of 3200? I'm not sure where to go on this from here. I've always had perfomance mode set to standard, spread spectrum is the first thing I disable on every motherboard I touch. Setting the mem timings to 3-4-4-8 doesn't change anything and if you leave it set to By SPD the board tries to push the memory to 2.5 timings (I noticed that mention elsewhere in the forums too). On the P4P800SE I can see and set my DDR speed to 500 but it won't post. On the P4P800 it doesn't offer me the 500 speed option at all, it's like it doesn't detect it's full speed. I check with all the different bios rev's I tried. I've reseated the memory twice, cleared the bios numerous times as well, installed one stick at a time. Nothing has helped so far. I don't use Asus AI software, everything I work with is in the bios. Here's the configuration: Asus P4P800 Intel P4 2.6C, stock Intel cooler 2x256Mb DDR4000 OCZ, dual-channel kit, OCZ500512ELDC-K should be the part number, I can check the modules if needed but that's what I ordered. ATI Radeon 9000Pro 2x120Gb Seatgate 7200.7 SATA150 as RAID1 volume (boot drive) Western Digital 120Gb BB series (misc data temp data storage, being removed soon) on Primary Master LiteOn DVD-RW on Secondary Master LiteOn DVD-CDRW combo on Secondary Slave ATI TV-Wonder Soundblaster Audigy Antec SLK2650BQE with Antec 380W PSU from a Sonata 80MM Vantec Stealth mounted on an IceSystems T-Bone fan bracket to cool chipset and memory So here are the questions: Do you need to hit a key sequence with this board to get more bios options like my GA-7VAX? Did I miss something really simple here? Is the Audigy or the TV Wonder a problem? (I doubt it's the Radeon 9000Pro?) Is it because I'm running RAID1? There were no extra options there before I connected the drives Is it a memory compatability issue? Why doesn't the new P4P800 offer me the manual DDR speed setting for 500? Any help appreciated, thanks in advance Mark |
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