**Official** Asrock Z68 Extreme4 thread. Share your experiences, OCs & tech issues!

[Sined]

Maybe i should just bite the bullet and install win7 x64 sp1, seems like a little waste to run xp x86 sp3 with this comp O_O, anyone else had the mouse polling issue ive had though, lots of talk about it on esr

[Utnorris]

Thanks Ket for all the help. The screenshot helps and so does the link. I reinstalled W7 so I can figure out what software is causing the pausing. I figure it's either the Lucid, AIDA64 or DVDFab, the latter 2 have given me issues in the pass, particularly AIDA64, but I was getting pauses even with it not running which is why I suspect maybe one of the other two. I may just not be able to take advantage of the Quicksync, but we will see. Kinda sucks since it was one of the reasons I went Z68 over P67.

[Utnorris]

Ok, so I did a fresh install and only installed the drivers needed, i.e. intel chipset, lan, etc. The only real software I have installed is BF2142. I do have Realtemp, CPUZ, MSI Afterburner and Microsoft Essentials installed, none of which caused me any issues on previous builds. I do have 2 x BR DVD players on the Marvel ports and all 6 Intel ports filled. Two GPU's and then the 2500K. I still get a pause, where the machine seems to freeze for a few minutes like it locked up. System is not overclocked. I am using the 1.4a bios. Anyone have any ideas of what might be happening? I am going to install a MSI board later to see if I get the same issue. It's just really weird, at first I couldn't get it to boot and was getting the 64 code for CPU, not sure if that was resolved with the new bios or me swapping out water blocks, but it hasn't happened yet. However if I do restart the box from Windows it will pause at 62 as though it locked up and then continue on. Really frustrated with this.

[Ket]

Its never a good idea jumping straight into a new build on a beta UEFI. From pure DOS flash to UEFI 1.4 and use that as a base. I don't have any SSDs but I have run UEFI 1.4 through its paces with various hardware configs and its deffinately a solid base to build on.

[Utnorris]

Well, I cannot even get it too post now, keeps stopping at AE or A6. I put the MSI in and it came right up, however I still get a pause as though the system is locking up. I am going to swap out the chip and see if that fixes the issue. I have already tried swapping the memory and that didn't help on either board. As far as flashing goes, I will try that once I get the new chip to see if the results are better.
Thanks again for the help.

[anewbie]

I hope this question is acceptable. I'm considering between asrock extreme 4 and gigabyte ud3h-b3. My usage is a bit different than the other folks on this site as I will not be overclocking; rather what is driving me towards these two boards is the requirement of having display port and 7+ sata ports.
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These boards are very similar but the gigabyte has alc-889 and the asrock alc-892 for audio. Not sure if there is a big difference between those two parts. Also I know a few folks have had issues from reading this thread but I'm not sure if there has been anything significant in general.
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This is for a linux box and one thing that is appealing with the 2500k is usage of the igp (display port is required for high resolution). Anyways outside of overclocking has there been much of a diference between these boards and does anyone know the difference (beyond basic specs) between the 889 and 892 ? (the 889 seems to have 6 hardware dac and hte 892 4 but I'm not sure if that makes much of an audio difference).

[Ket]

I can't comment on the Gigabyte board, don't have one. I do remember various people complaining about Turbo mode on Gigabyte boards not working properly though so they wern't getting the Turbo speed they were supposed to. As for the Asrock board, for me its been very solid.

[piquadrat]

I hope this question is acceptable. I'm considering between asrock extreme 4 and gigabyte ud3h-b3. My usage is a bit different than the other folks on this site as I will not be overclocking; rather what is driving me towards these two boards is the requirement of having display port and 7+ sata ports.

Note that you cannot build raid between disks connected to intel and Marvell controllers. And 9120 on Extreme4 does not support RAID at all.

[anewbie]

Thankfully I will be using linux software raid so that should not be an issue; though I might get better performance if I connect the raided volumes to the same controller.

Note that you cannot build raid between disks connected to intel and Marvell controllers. And 9120 on Extreme4 does not support RAID at all.

[hema]

is there any one here suffer from blue screen after resume from S3 with this mobo.
I have this prob. with my z68-pro3
I think we need anew bios to solve this prob.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...8asrock-P67%29
ket any news from your contact about this

[jpm]

I hope this question is acceptable. I'm considering between asrock extreme 4 and gigabyte ud3h-b3. My usage is a bit different than the other folks on this site as I will not be overclocking; rather what is driving me towards these two boards is the requirement of having display port and 7+ sata ports.
-
These boards are very similar but the gigabyte has alc-889 and the asrock alc-892 for audio. Not sure if there is a big difference between those two parts. Also I know a few folks have had issues from reading this thread but I'm not sure if there has been anything significant in general.
-
This is for a linux box and one thing that is appealing with the 2500k is usage of the igp (display port is required for high resolution). Anyways outside of overclocking has there been much of a diference between these boards and does anyone know the difference (beyond basic specs) between the 889 and 892 ? (the 889 seems to have 6 hardware dac and hte 892 4 but I'm not sure if that makes much of an audio difference).

i don't own the gigabyte board, but have done some reading about it and the impression i get from reviews is that either board should be a solid choice for use at standard clock. overall feature set is similar with the asrock board having the edge in several small ways. presumably asrock's broadcom chip is better than gigabyte's realtek (but this remains yet to be proven). asrock's 1394 chip is PCIe vs. gigabyte's PCI, which should provide better isolation (avoid interference with other devices due to PCI bus sharing) but costs you one of your PCIe lanes (mitigated by the presence of the PLX PCIe bridge). regardless, both chips are made by viacom, another peddler of cheap low-grade silicon, so neither will have great performance or compatibility. similarly i wouldn't worry too much about the difference between realtek's ALC892 vs. ALC889; all of realtek's motherboard audio chips are designed to boost specs at the lowest possible cost. lastly, asrock has a new UEFI BIOS with a more modern look and feel, whereas gigabyte has built some sort of "Hybrid EFI" BIOS, meaning you get the functionality of EFI (specifically the ability to use 3TB+ drives) but with the same old award BIOS UI slapped on top of it.

when it comes to overclocking, i think the asrock has a significant advantage with a 12-phase voltage regulator vs. this gigabyte board's 7. broadly speaking this means that the asrock board should be able to stabilize at a higher clock with less voltage, and the current reviews out there confirm this. but if you have no plans of overclocking i expect your overall experience with both boards will be the same. with that in mind, i would point out that the gigabyte board is significantly cheaper.

[jpm]

Thankfully I will be using linux software raid so that should not be an issue; though I might get better performance if I connect the raided volumes to the same controller.

unless performance is completely irrelevant for you, i would avoid software RAID altogether, and i would definitely avoid trying to span RAID across multiple controllers, even if the software somehow allows it. if you don't need a RAID array larger than 6 disks then using the built-in intel RAID controller is definitely the best option with this board, for both performance and reliability.

[Sined]

Alright then, i installed Windows 7 x64, and now the USB2.0 port is nice and smooth at 500hz, after doing the little usb tweak :]

Now, to get used to 7 after being on xp for so long (also, it uses 800mb ram idle?!, sure i got 4gigs..but man thats alot =\)

[piquadrat]

unless performance is completely irrelevant for you, i would avoid software RAID altogether, and i would definitely avoid trying to span RAID across multiple controllers, even if the software somehow allows it. if you don't need a RAID array larger than 6 disks then using the built-in intel RAID controller is definitely the best option with this board, for both performance and reliability.

Soft raid in Linux is better than almost all fake raids you can find on todays motherboards.

[Ket]

is there any one here suffer from blue screen after resume from S3 with this mobo.
I have this prob. with my z68-pro3
I think we need anew bios to solve this prob.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...8asrock-P67%29
ket any news from your contact about this

Disable Internal PLL Overvoltage in the UEFI, see if that stops the BSOD.

Alright then, i installed Windows 7 x64, and now the USB2.0 port is nice and smooth at 500hz, after doing the little usb tweak :]

Now, to get used to 7 after being on xp for so long (also, it uses 800mb ram idle?!, sure i got 4gigs..but man thats alot =\)

Start>Run>services.msc

[hema]

Disable Internal PLL Overvoltage in the UEFI, see if that stops the BSOD.



Start>Run>services.msc

is there any sound of anew bios
may be we need new one to solve this prob. and also to unlocked the limitation of cpu on the new z68 board
(unlike the P67 u can use cpu voltage up to 1.6 but with z68 only 1.55 at max.)

[Sined]

Disable Internal PLL Overvoltage in the UEFI, see if that stops the BSOD.



Start>Run>services.msc

did that, im down to 26 services in all when show all is checked, still high as all hell for some reason >>

[jpm]

Soft raid in Linux is better than almost all fake raids you can find on todays motherboards.

the performance characteristics are mixed so i guess i should shy away from making blanket recommendations... but i was trying to keep things simple.

motherboard "fake raids" do have some minor advantages over OS-specific software RAIDs. since the motherboard RAIDs are recognized by the BIOS you can boot from the RAID array. also the format of the array is not OS-specific, and since intel provides drivers across platforms this enables access to the RAID array across operating systems.

that said, RAID functionality for motherboard chipsets such as intel's ICH10R are ultimately implemented in the OS driver, so they are functionally the same as an OS-specific software RAID, the question is who has the best software. i've seen a number of good things written about intel's implementation. for basic read performance, particularly in RAID 0 or 1, intel's controllers actually outperform some well-respected discrete cards. (reference)

but once you start using RAID5/6, which requires constant XORing, especially in the case of a degraded array, a good dedicated controller will win over any software solution.

[piquadrat]

but once you start using RAID5/6, which requires constant XORing, especially in the case of a degraded array, a good dedicated controller will win over any software solution.

Yep.. on my cheap low-end HighPoint 2640 controller (and it has only hardware assisted, not full hardware engine) rebuilding four drive raid-5 volume takes about 20 minutes. On intel ICH10 it takes two hours (the same setup).
And if anyone opting for soft raid with advanced redundancy (like raid-5) the linux approach is the best by far. But I agree with you basically. Especially booting and os independency arguments.

Now I have Asrock Z68 Extreme4 and Asus P8Z68-V Pro right before me. On Asus:
- no problem with booting with password protected drive connected to the motherboard
Still have to investigate compatibility with my SAS controller working in PCIe 4x mode.

[Ghostleader]

did that, im down to 26 services in all when show all is checked, still high as all hell for some reason >>

Reason is Windows 7, it wants more ram then XP but because it uses more necessarily doesn´t mean that it´s bad


If you want some more free memory you can disable "Superfetch" but even though it´s still hard to get below 800MB of ram use.

With my Asrock test rig I get ~775MB after a reboot with ~45 processes running, I have notice that after a typical fresh install of Win 7 by me (with Superfetch disabled), it use a bit more ram but after a few days a running it get a bit lower before it settles for ~800MB.


What do you get with your 26 services running?

[Ket]

is there any sound of anew bios
may be we need new one to solve this prob. and also to unlocked the limitation of cpu on the new z68 board
(unlike the P67 u can use cpu voltage up to 1.6 but with z68 only 1.55 at max.)

Early batch CPUs didn't support PLL Overvoltage which is why some systems wake to a BSOD when its enabled, it has nothing to do with there being a bug in the UEFI.

did that, im down to 26 services in all when show all is checked, still high as all hell for some reason >>

Even with a bunch of stuff running in the background my system isn't seeing more than 30% mem usage. If you are using something like AVG that thing is a massive resource hog and would go a long way to explaining your memory usage. I used to be a die-hard fan of AVG but their new version is slow, resource hungry and it pissed me off all the false positives it kept complaining about. I now use the free version of Avast, equally as good and isn't a resource hog or keep banging on at me about all those false positives.

[Sined]

Reason is Windows 7, it wants more ram then XP but because it uses more necessarily doesn´t mean that it´s bad


If you want some more free memory you can disable "Superfetch" but even though it´s still hard to get below 800MB of ram use.

With my Asrock test rig I get ~775MB after a reboot with ~45 processes running, I have notice that after a typical fresh install of Win 7 by me (with Superfetch disabled), it use a bit more ram but after a few days a running it get a bit lower before it settles for ~800MB.


What do you get with your 26 services running?

Just after reboot, its at 735mb, just before i rebooted it was at 1.53gb
edit here; Oh yeah, im on 4gb ram (2x2 corsair vengeance ones)

[anewbie]

The reason I use linux software raid is so that I can easily move the raid volume from one machine to another. No concern with regards tot he new hardware. Also the volume is raid 1; and the bit rate off the volume is close enough to what the disk can theoretically support I'm not overtly concern about potential gain from hardware or intel raid.
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Since there is not much computation taking place here I'm not overtly concern abuot cpu load.
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Just hope linux supports suspend ok.

[anewbie]

The reason I use linux software raid is so that I can easily move the raid volume from one machine to another. No concern with regards tot he new hardware. Also the volume is raid 1; and the bit rate off the volume is close enough to what the disk can theoretically support I'm not overtly concern about potential gain from hardware or intel raid.
-
Since there is not much computation taking place here I'm not overtly concern abuot cpu load.
-
Just hope linux supports suspend ok.

[noddi]

Everything seems to be working fine for me. I tried out 1.4a bios yesterday and i kept getting problems, it wouldn't boot properly. So i had to go back to 1.4 and everything was all good
System resume from sleep works fine for me also. I recommend updating to bios v1.4. It was the first thing i did when i first got this extreme4

Here is an update of my overclock and the voltages I'm running. Hope this will help other people when it comes to overclocking for them.