Testing / comparing : Intel D975XBX2 / Asus P5B DX ***56K WARNING***

[C Stat B]

Well, I set 2.8v with RAM @ 3-3-3-12 4:5 divider with CPU @ 400MHz FSB. It posted but then crashed when it got to Window's load screen. RAM doesn't work now, in the two boards I've tried it in. I expected it to last longer than that.

The board's fine though, because my Ballistix is running fine @ 2.1v 4-4-4-12 4:5 with CPU @ 400MHz FSB.

[hotchoc]

Check your SATA setting in BIOS. Is it IDE or ACHI? The reason Scenario 2 fails is because you disabled the secondary controller, which is what the blue SATA ports are on. Make sure you are using a version of Windows XP that has SP2 on it. I ran into some problems installing on my computer too because my Windows disc was before SP2 came out. Also, try hitting the F6 key when XP install is loading all those drivers on the blue screen and load the Intel Matrix Storage drivers on the floppy disk that came with your mobo. Good luck.

Check your SATA setting in BIOS. Is it IDE or ACHI? The reason Scenario 2 fails is because you disabled the secondary controller, which is what the blue SATA ports are on. Make sure you are using a version of Windows XP that has SP2 on it. I ran into some problems installing on my computer too because my Windows disc was before SP2 came out. Also, try hitting the F6 key when XP install is loading all those drivers on the blue screen and load the Intel Matrix Storage drivers on the floppy disk that came with your mobo. Good luck.
------

Hi there,

The SATA settings fals under IDE. I didn't do nethign to it. Scenario 2 failed even before i disabled the secondary controller. I just didn't want the raid splash screen to appear as it's getting annoying.

Am using a copy of Win XP WITHOUT SP2. The SP2 cd comes seperately. Problem now is how do i install SP2 when my dvd drive isn't working at all.

If i were to hit the F6 key, should i load everything in bios as default ? i.e. Enabling the secondary controller? You are referring to a clean reinstall right ?

Many thks

[hotchoc]

hotchoc, I've heard people having trouble with SATA DVD Burners with this board. I thought it was fixed with the 2663 BIOS but perhaps not.

In any case, here's what I do know. The black SATA ports are the Intel RAID. The blue are the Marvell. Most people don't use the Marvell and disable them in the BIOS.

I had to re-install Vista the first time I built this PC (last week ) using the Intel RAID drivers so they would see my SATA drives. I have an IDE DVD burner so it has never been a problem.

Now I boot to Vista with AHCI set in the BIOS.

My best advice, install Windows XP with both the Intel RAID and Marvell RAID drivers and see if it will recognize your HD and DVD burner.

Mine's an IDE dvd burner btw. Where do you install the Intel RAID drivers? DO you do that during the installation of XP where they asked you to hit F6 ? Never tried the RAID thingy before.

Btw, won't there be a conflict in terms of Intel RAID and Marvell RAID if you were to install both drivers ?

Thks

[GamingDaemon]

Mine's an IDE dvd burner btw. Where do you install the Intel RAID drivers? DO you do that during the installation of XP where they asked you to hit F6 ? Never tried the RAID thingy before.

Btw, won't there be a conflict in terms of Intel RAID and Marvell RAID if you were to install both drivers ?

Thks

Well, if you have an IDE burner, I have no idea why it is causing you so many problems. I was just about to send you a link to another forum that discusses how to do this with a SATA DVD burner.

In any event, to answer your question, when you install XP, press F6 during the driver load process. The RAID drivers for Intel and Marvell are also the SATA drivers. With this board, they are tied together, SATA and RAID. I don't have a floppy so I used a USB to load them, but that is with the Vista install which is much nicer than XP. I would try to load the Intel for sure, but the Marvell just in case. HTH

[hotchoc]

Btw, do you do that on the black (Intel) sata connectors or the blue ones (Marvell)?

Do you reckon i should

1. Do a clean reinstall and installing the INtel RAID followed by SP2, or

2. Install SP2 now and install the Intel RAID ?

[gtj]

I've been thinking a lot about some of the different perspectives on overclocking in this thread, and I may have changed my original goals. I bought the parts for the rig a week and a half ago and put it together last Friday night / Saturday morning (3/10). I bought DDR2-800 memory and the E6600 and the BadAxe2 so I could overclock to 400FSB and have 1:1 on the memory.

I can, I did it, it worked. But then I backed off. The temps were high and I was not sure if I had the voltages too high.

As I read thru the posts here, I started thinking about balance between high performance, the thrill of overclocking, and what I really wanted to do with this PC. I use it mainly for work (software development) and gaming (that's why I bought the 8800GTX).

Given that, I think I like where I'm at now. Can someone (gtj?) tell me if this is a good setup? I am at 350FSB, with 1:1 on memory at 4-4-4-12 and temps at 50C under load (32C idle) at stock vcore and 2.04 voltage for memory (G.Skill 2x1GB sticks). I'm a little worried about the 50C temps, but then I don't have the big 250mm side fan for my Enermax Chakra (didn't work, RMA'ing it) so all I have is the Zalman 9700LED and 2 120mm fans.

I could probably overclock higher, but I think this is a good balance for me. So, are my core temps too high under load? Are my memory timings good? Are the voltages ok? Thanks in advance...

I think that's a great compromise and wouldn't worry about the 50C load temps especially since you'll be getting that big fan back again.

[GamingDaemon]

Btw, do you do that on the black (Intel) sata connectors or the blue ones (Marvell)?

Do you reckon i should

1. Do a clean reinstall and installing the INtel RAID followed by SP2, or

2. Install SP2 now and install the Intel RAID ?

The blue ones need the Marvell RAID/SATA drivers while the black ones use the Intel RAID/SATA drivers. I would do a fresh install and use the Intel RAID drivers. When you install XP, you should see a message that says something like "Pres F6 to load additional drivers".

[gtj]

Btw, do you do that on the black (Intel) sata connectors or the blue ones (Marvell)?

Do you reckon i should

1. Do a clean reinstall and installing the INtel RAID followed by SP2, or

2. Install SP2 now and install the Intel RAID ?

Double check that your IDE HDD and the IDE DVD aren't both jumpered to master.

Use the Intel (black) SATA ports for your SATA devices.

Disable the Secondary SATA Controller (Marvell, blue).

Set the SATA mode to IDE.

Make sure the drives are in the correct boot order.

Install XP, no F6.

[GamingDaemon]

I think that's a great compromise and wouldn't worry about the 50C load temps especially since you'll be getting that big fan back again.

Thanks gtj! Hopefully I will get the fan next week 'cause I'm gonna bug them 'till they send it to me

[hotchoc]

Double check that your IDE HDD and the IDE DVD aren't both jumpered to master.

Use the Intel (black) SATA ports for your SATA devices.

Disable the Secondary SATA Controller (Marvell, blue).

Set the SATA mode to IDE.

Make sure the drives are in the correct boot order.

Install XP, no F6.

OMFG IT"S ALIVE !!! WOOHOOO. It was the damn master jumpers on the dvd drive alright. How the hell did it affect the whole thing? Care to explain. It works on the black ones but have yet to try the black sata ports.

Gonna try a clean reintall again w/o the RAID files and see how it goes.

Many many thks all for ur kind help. Next stop OCing

p.s. Might be getting an identical sata hd. Might experiment with RAID since i've never tried a RAID before. AFAIK, i will be limited to raid 1 and 0 due to my budget. What's the main diff of 0 and 1? Pros and cons ?

[slappynutz]

I believe you'll get more bang for your buck at 266/667 rather than trying to tighten your timings. You'll probably have to loosen your timings to 5-5-5-15 to run at DDR2-902 but that's what I'd do. Grab Sandra or Everest and run the benchmarks both ways.

First crack at overclocking the ram:

4GB OCZ Platinum Rev 2 6400 (800mhz) DDR2 results

Everest Memory Benchmark:

@ 1:1, 360.3mhz, 4-4-4-12, 1.96v (722mhz)

Read
8585

Write
6558

Copy
6511

Latency
58.3

@ 4:5, 450.4mhz, 5-5-5-14, 2.04v (902mhz)

Read
8751

Write
6652

Copy
6644

Latency
54.4


The overclock booted and ran the benchmark right away. Didn't do any further stability testing. Tried 266/667 at 4-4-4-15 and got screen corruption during boot. Had to pull the maintenance jumper to go back down.

Read boost: 1.9%
Write boost: 1.4%
Copy boost: 2%
Latency decrease: 6.7%

All of which mean ... not that much, to me. Going to try something like 3dmark instead and see what kind of a difference it will make.

[GamingDaemon]

Well at least Everest is consistent. My settings are a little less than yours and my scores reflect that. My memory timings are 2x1GB G.Skill DDR2-800 1:1 350MHz at 4-4-4-12 and 2.04v. Here are my memory scores:

Read: 8172
Write: 6329
Copy: 4925 (ouch!)
Latency: 55.5

[scorpion]

gtj. keep getting fatal error when ruType: Blend - stress CPU and RAM Min: 8 Max: 4096 InPlace: No Mem: 1789 Time: 15
CPU: 3600MHz FSB: 266MHz [266MHz x 13.5 est.]
CPU: 3600MHz FSB: 266MHz [266MHz x 13.5 est.]
3/17/2007 12:28 PM
Launching 2 threads...
Using CPU #0
Beginning a continuous self-test to check your computer.
Press Stop to end this test.
Test 1, 4000 Lucas-Lehmer iterations of M19922945 using 1024K FFT length.
Torture Test ran 0 minutes 41 seconds - 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Execution halted.

Type: Blend - stress CPU and RAM Min: 8 Max: 4096 InPlace: No Mem: 1789 Time: 15
CPU: 3600MHz FSB: 266MHz [266MHz x 13.5 est.]
CPU: 3600MHz FSB: 266MHz [266MHz x 13.5 est.]
3/17/2007 12:29 PM
Launching 2 threads...
Using CPU #0
Beginning a continuous self-test to check your computer.
Press Stop to end this test.
Test 1, 4000 Lucas-Lehmer iterations of M19922945 using 1024K FFT length.
Test 2, 4000 Lucas-Lehmer iterations of M19922943 using 1024K FFT length.
Test 3, 4000 Lucas-Lehmer iterations of M19374367 using 1024K FFT length.
Test 4, 4000 Lucas-Lehmer iterations of M19174369 using 1024K FFT length.
Test 5, 4000 Lucas-Lehmer iterations of M18874369 using 1024K FFT length.
Test 6, 4000 Lucas-Lehmer iterations of M18874367 using 1024K FFT length.
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.
Torture Test ran 8 minutes 12 seconds - 1 errors, 0 warnings.
Execution halted.

Type: Blend - stress CPU and RAM Min: 8 Max: 4096 InPlace: No Mem: 1789 Time: 15
CPU: 3600MHz FSB: 266MHz [266MHz x 13.5 est.]
CPU: 3600MHz FSB: 266MHz [266MHz x 13.5 est.]
3/17/2007 12:44 PM
Launching 2 threads...
Using CPU #0
Beginning a continuous self-test to check your computer.
Press Stop to end this test.
Test 1, 4000 Lucas-Lehmer iterations of M19922945 using 1024K FFT length.
Test 2, 4000 Lucas-Lehmer iterations of M19922943 using 1024K FFT length.
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.
Torture Test ran 3 minutes 0 seconds - 1 errors, 0 warnings.
Execution halted.

nning orthos. help please.

[Gunnz Akimbo]

Hope this board supports the 1333FSB Duo/Quad cores.

Anyway, ive had mine for about a month now, and with this latest set of drivers for the marvell controller, it can now read SMART data from the drivers when using MBM5.

Which leads to a question, is there a config file for the XBX2 ?
The only readings im not sure of is the temp sensor for Zone1 & 2.
All the others are working.

[hotchoc]

Audio: Sigmatel 92XX [5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K]

Which one should I choose?

Option 1:
If you use AC'97 front panel audio ports and you want to use the Intel® Audio Studio audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_AC97FP_IAS.EXE

Option 2:
If you use AC'97 front panel audio ports and you want to use the SigmaTel* Audio Control Panel audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_AC97FP_STACGUI.EXE

Option 3:
If you use Intel® High Definition (HD) front panel audio ports - OR - you do not use front panel audio ports and you want to use the Intel® Audio Studio audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_IAS.EXE

Option 4:
If you use Intel® High Definition (HD) front panel audio ports - OR - you do not use front panel audio ports and you want to use the SigmaTel* Audio Control Panel audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_STACGUI.EXE


Which option should i go for ??

[mucker]

First off, thanks for the calaculator GTJ, makes life easier

My experience with BX2 so far hasn't been that easy. I've got a good line-up for a core too:

Xeon 3060 631B
Ballistix Tracer PC2-8000

I wanted an easy OC of 3600 MHz at 1:1 or 4:5 but I am having problems. I have confirmed the cpu is capable of 3.6 and the memory is capable of 1000 Mhz, however, the cpu is too hot at 3.6 (70C + orthos) and the memory won't do anything between 900 and 1000 MHz (5-5-5-18) when the cpu frequency gets cranked up.

Example, it won't do 928 (2.2-2.3v) at 3330 Mhz. The Xeon is totally solid but I am now having doubts about the ram or board or combination of the two.

The BX2 seems overly sensitive too, I have never owned a motherboard that gave so many cold boots from simple changes. I am positively sick of throwing the maintenance jumper on this board. So, here I sit at 3420 MHz @ 1.400v @65C orthos and 761 Mhz on the memory (2.28v). Not my expected result, but great performance nonetheless.

The Xeon scales well with voltage, and will do 3.6+ with 1.475v stable DDR2-800, however, I don't have the cooling to handle it. At least I know the chip is solid. The memory or the way the board handles memory is giving me a headache...........

[hotchoc]

Audio: Sigmatel 92XX [5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K

Which one should I choose?

Option 1:
If you use AC'97 front panel audio ports and you want to use the Intel® Audio Studio audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_AC97FP_IAS.EXE

Option 2:
If you use AC'97 front panel audio ports and you want to use the SigmaTel* Audio Control Panel audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_AC97FP_STACGUI.EXE

Option 3:
If you use Intel® High Definition (HD) front panel audio ports - OR - you do not use front panel audio ports and you want to use the Intel® Audio Studio audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_IAS.EXE

Option 4:
If you use Intel® High Definition (HD) front panel audio ports - OR - you do not use front panel audio ports and you want to use the SigmaTel* Audio Control Panel audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_STACGUI.EXE


Which option should i go for ?? Am using the Antec P180 casing btw

[heikis]

Audio: Sigmatel 92XX [5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K

Which one should I choose?

Option 1:
If you use AC'97 front panel audio ports and you want to use the Intel® Audio Studio audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_AC97FP_IAS.EXE

Option 2:
If you use AC'97 front panel audio ports and you want to use the SigmaTel* Audio Control Panel audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_AC97FP_STACGUI.EXE

Option 3:
If you use Intel® High Definition (HD) front panel audio ports - OR - you do not use front panel audio ports and you want to use the Intel® Audio Studio audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_IAS.EXE

Option 4:
If you use Intel® High Definition (HD) front panel audio ports - OR - you do not use front panel audio ports and you want to use the SigmaTel* Audio Control Panel audio control software, download and install 5.10.5208_XP32_XP64_MCE_2K_STACGUI.EXE


Which option should i go for ?? Am using the Antec P180 casing btw

avoid the sigmatel thingies- so dont go for option 2 and 4. IMO they felt crappy. the intel software si better.

[chaotic646]

Ive been very busy and havent had a chance to keep up with this thread since page 90 or so - can someone tell me if the C1E issue has been fixed with the latest bios?

[MuttonFlanks]

Well at least Everest is consistent. My settings are a little less than yours and my scores reflect that. My memory timings are 2x1GB G.Skill DDR2-800 1:1 350MHz at 4-4-4-12 and 2.04v. Here are my memory scores:

Read: 8172
Write: 6329
Copy: 4925 (ouch!)
Latency: 55.5

Here are my scores:

Read: 7900
Write: 5756
Copy: 6036
Latency: 56.2

Wonder why they are so much lower than yours (except for the Copy, not sure what happened there with you). My RAM is at 4-4-4-12 @ 667MHz 2.12v and 320FSB.

[GamingDaemon]

I let Orthos run for 2 hours and twenty minutes with the timings below. When I came back, the temps were at 54C and 55C. Is that too hot? I thought 60C was the upper limit.

[gtj]

Ive been very busy and havent had a chance to keep up with this thread since page 90 or so - can someone tell me if the C1E issue has been fixed with the latest bios?

Not yet.

[gtj]

I let Orthos run for 2 hours and twenty minutes with the timings below. When I came back, the temps were at 54C and 55C. Is that too hot? I thought 60C was the upper limit.

You're fine with 55C under load. Worry when you start hitting upper 60s, low 70s.

[chaotic646]

Not yet.

I hope they're working on it.

[slappynutz]

Here are my scores:

Read: 7900
Write: 5756
Copy: 6036
Latency: 56.2

Wonder why they are so much lower than yours (except for the Copy, not sure what happened there with you). My RAM is at 4-4-4-12 @ 667MHz 2.12v and 320FSB.

Been doing some more testing. Everest returns numbers that fluctuate from test to test. Most likely some Vista background services messing things up.

At 360fsb, 266/667 and 5-5-5-14 at 2.04v, I average about:

w: 8769
r: 6524
c: 6859
l: 54.02