Gigabyte MA790FX DQ6

[keithlm]

Haha, same here. Either Ill get a 790FX/SB750, 790FX/SB750 or a 780a board. It depends how the GTX280's and HD4870's are going to perform and if the SB750 is really going to fix things.

Yepper.

OTOH: I figure the new SB750 overclocking stuff probably won't clock that much better than the current 780A is showing... so I could order a 780A at a weak moment.

But since I can get 4-5 hours of Prime95 stable... that allows me to be more patient. (I have another computer for emergency use. Well okay... maybe 5 others. But 3 are portable.)

[bowman]

Oh well, cancelled Phenom order.

I'll just wait till next year and see how 45nm and DDR3 works out for AMD vs. Nehalem instead.

[Daveburt714]

It's rather irritating how much information they leave out of their BIOS update descriptions. However I suppose that saves them from looking like dicks most of the time: ie "Made some random code changes that seem to work in more than 50% of our alpha testing. Yeah we got really lucky this time! However the numbers did seem to go down/plummet in beta testing but we kept the changes in there hoping it will work itself out eventually on consumer systems."

I'm tempted to try the F6 out but my conversations with tech support about tRC BIOS increases have been going down hill. Who wants to guinea it up for us?

Well, I tried the F6 Bios using a 96BE (B2 stepping) and I really thought I had lost another board! I could get into Bios but it would always hang during POST, even using optimized defaults!..

I messed with it for a few hours and finally got it to boot into Vista32 only to find that my Keyboard and Mouse didn't work (PS2). So I switched to a wireless USB Kb/Mouse combination, same sheet, they would work until it booted into Windows, then nothing......

Gigabyte makes boards with killer features, but it seems like they are rushing stuff to market (due to thier war with Asus?)... I don't know...

As soon as I got things stable enough I flashed back to F5. WooHoo same crappy performance as before, but at least the board isn't dead....

dyeager: I tend to believe what they told you is true.. I think there is really a physical problem with the design of the DS5 that can't be fixed with Bios (hence the rushing to market comment...).

BTW, I flashed the bios on my GBT-MA78GM-S2H machine which I use as an HTPC to the F4 bios... It IS dead....

The DQ6 may be a nice board, but my 1st two experiences with Gigabyte have NOT been happy ones.... Plus the fact that thier Customer Support is a joke.

[G0ldBr1ck]

already having a 9850be I just cant see any good reason to buy a 9950 at launch. It seems from what little good info I can find that its realy nothing more then the same phenom's that were working with right now, except for the 2.66ghz instead of 2.6ghz wich seems to suggest HT266 x 10 in wich case would mean they worked out the stability issues with higher HT. No real advantage thow with that as the cpu's top speed is still gonna hit around the same as the 9850.

I may verry well be Way off base with my assuming so feel free to correct me on any of this, but i just dont see a advantage to the 9950. Seems they are just trying to push the remaning 65nm parts out the door before the shrink parts will be ready shortly afterwards. And of course the day they let loose of the smaller fab ill have one heading my way for sure, maybe even 2 of them as I seem to like to kill my first ones.

As for Gigabyte, I think they should make a major board revision and exchange them out for us to make up for these terrable high priced "high end" boards in a effort to regain there good name and guarantee there future standing as a quality high end board manufacturer. but of coarse im sure that will never happen

[Rammsteiner]

'Just' higher speeds won't cut it for me to get the chip. However, if it brings in more L2 cache or some sort of adjustment Ill be the first one to pick it up.

I read somewhere, maybe on this forum or maybe on a column on another site, that it's very well possible that Phenom could do a lot better compared to for example Intel if it had increased L2 Cache amount. Results for at least in single threaded apps would get a nice boost.

In the end current Phenoms only have 512KB/core. While the most common Intel CPU, the Q6600 has 4MB/2 cores (Im not sure architectural wise if it's 'allowed' to say 2MB/core).

From past AMD CPU's, recent Athlon X2's for example, adding 512KB L2 cache to a core was an speed increase equal to 200Mhz.

So concluding from this, if the 9950 doesn't bring anything else apart from higher clocks, and the 266Mhz HTT bus doesnt fix anything apart from DDR1066 running at their rated speeds out of the box, I wont buy it.

In the end, high HTT's aren't even broken on Phenom. It's most likely just the SB600 ruining high HTT's with Phenom.

[-= rtz =-]

Related to my problem posted on the previous page:

In short,I got a crash after setting latencies via AOD while I was AFK for an hour and a half,maybe more,when I got back the bios started to loop reverting to backup bios,in short,the board went crazy on me.Reflash to F2 helped but after that I got BSOD's in windows "Page fault in non-paged area" mostly...

After taking the RAM to RMA and it was tested stable in memtest and in Orthos for 15 hours I plugged the ram back in...it worked without problems for 2 whole days untill yesterday evening,when I couldnt start CCC anymore after exiting a game (OCR error),I immediatly suspected its the same old problem again,restarted and i got BSOD's and looping of windows loading screen with the progress bar.After one of the restarts the board reverted back to F3 bios again,I proceeded without loading any defaults (everything was mostly on AUTO anyway...) and it worked again fine,I could play a game but upon shutdown I got the "Page fault in non-paged area" again.

Memtest again gives immediate errors. If I dont get BSOD's memtest runs perfectly fine,same as Orthos.
My question is that if the IMC on cpu is damaged here is it possible that it goes crazy occasionally and not constantly? Or is the board's BIOS fcked up in some way?

[Aussie FX]

Yepper.

OTOH: I figure the new SB750 overclocking stuff probably won't clock that much better than the current 780A is showing... so I could order a 780A at a weak moment.

But since I can get 4-5 hours of Prime95 stable... that allows me to be more patient. (I have another computer for emergency use. Well okay... maybe 5 others. But 3 are portable.)

Keith, personally I would hang out for the SB750.
It's only weeks away now.

I think whatever "genie" they have in there will do wonders.
I've heard of 200mhz above the current max stable oc.

[G0ldBr1ck]

-= rtz =- : I realy dont think Its a hardware issue. myself and many others have had the same problems with ram. I once like yourself drove myself nuts trying to work it out and never could untill I started trying diffrent ram. Your problem is most likely the Bios wich has problems setting the correct SPD and EPP settings on allot of Ram and When you try to set them manualy it only gets worse. I would suggest doing some research on what ram others have had luck with and buy yourself some new ram.

Myself, I landed on using the Corsair Dominator 1066 ram and it works perfectly+ OC's well on these boards, I now have it on my DS5 and DS6 but there are plenty of other brands That work well im sure.

Your fighting a uphill battle trying to get your hardware config to work so dont feel bad as most of us have done the same at some point. Also your using a X2 and believe it or not when you drop a Phenom in the issues become even more complicated so I wish you the best of luck.

[keithlm]

Keith, personally I would hang out for the SB750.
It's only weeks away now.

I think whatever "genie" they have in there will do wonders.
I've heard of 200mhz above the current max stable oc.

Agreed. That's why I'm still waiting. (Otherwise I'd have a Crosshair II in my system already.)

My current plan is to see how the new Sb750 chips perform... then I'll make a decision.

Since about 2004 I've had 3 or 4 Nvidia MB. This time I decided to try out another chipset maker. (Hoping their AOD software would be very good and very easy to use; NVidia NTune never worked well for me.)

I know changing settings in the BIOS is the best... but it IS nice to have a tool to mess around with stuff before you change the BIOS. Then you can rule out settings that are REALLY bad.

(And of course: I figure whatever board I buy... a few days after I pay the money and get it delivered and working... Gigabyte will figure out their DS5 problems and release a new bios that might have fixed my current issues. Although as I've said before. I'm a bit "miffed" at them. Even if they released a new bios TODAY that fixed all the problems... it's too late for me to continue using their product. They've already lost me.)

[Daveburt714]

I don't know if you noticed this message or not Keith...

Gigabyte told me they were still having issues with the 9850 and the DS5, which were likely "voltage regulation" related. A fix is no longer in their immediate plans. Reliability of the source is unknown, but they certainly have better access to info than I do.

But seeing as how the F5 bios improved stability by lowering the NB voltage all the way down to 1.138 that sounds to me like a reasonable explination. I'm seriously starting to think there is a design problem with the DS5 that can't be fixed with Bios...

My DS5 is now in my HTPC box. It seems to do OK as long as I just run it at stock speeds. Time will tell I guess.

[-= rtz =-]

G0ldBr1ck: U might be absolutely right there. I solved my issues yesterday,whether only temporarily or permanently,I still cannot say. More testing needs to be done,yesterday I began to get BSOD's again,and always the same one,unable to boot into windows,if I could get in i couldnt restart or shutdown. So I restored a ghost image I made after fresh xp install with only CCC and all win updates installed. After that I went to BIOS (cause I suspected same as u) and saw that when switching from auto latencies to manual some of them were weird...one dimm slot was set to 75ns insteaed of 127.5ns and some other latencies were too fast imo. After I've set them all manually to 4-4-4-12 and voltage manually to 2.14v which equals EPP timings and voltage I could restart and shutdown the machine with no problem. We will see if this is a permanent fix. Thx again for your input Only one thing,the last timing doesnt get accepted,I set 12 in bios and its 18 in everest. Might reflash back to F2 altho F3 seems stable now.

Im looking at G.E.I.L. ddr 800 MHz ram with 3-3-3-8 timings. On some reviews they got 900 MHz CL3 and 1000 MHz CL4 with a small voltage bump.

[-= rtz =-]

Board crashed again yesterday during the night,after 6-7 hours of perfect stability while I was asleep,running FTP download. From the link KTE posted about stop errors,my error it says the following:

0x0000008E: KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
A kernel mode program generated an exception which the error handler didn’t catch. These are nearly always hardware compatibility issues (which sometimes means a driver issue or a need for a BIOS upgrade).

So I guess incompatibility with ram is the most probable reason why this is happening.Trying different bios and slower ram timings is the only thing left to do,and after that its either OCZ or GEIL,maybe rather OCZ cause Tony is here

[Fulgore0rb]

...Trying different bios and slower ram timings is the only thing left to do,and after that its either OCZ or GEIL,maybe rather OCZ cause Tony is here

Don't forget about Mushkin. I'm eyeing their newer XP2-8500 2x2GB (model 996599) kit- it has quite low tRC rating and max 2.1v requirement for 1066MHz.

[-= rtz =-]

Delayed shopping for tommorow, Im probably gonna go with G0ldBr1ck's suggestion and dominators since he allready tested it and it works ok,plus for the price of geil ddr800 I can get the dominators + another 250gb hdd for raid.
Might pick up another DS4 or sometn just for testing purposes.

But before I do that,Id like to ask is it possible that incompatibility starts to show with time,cause I remmember in the beginning when i bought all this stuff everything worked fine,even on auto or EPP settings and even with auto express turned on. Starting to think that it could be the mbo/cpu after all...HTT was 1200 MHz with high HTT bus (300) and after Ive set some latencies in AOD for ram all this began to happen. Wouldnt ram incompatibility show immediatly at the beginning,I mean when everything is on stock or it takes some time before it starts to show? (few weeks in my case)

The stop errors Im getting lately all indicate on hardware incompatibility,"PFN_list_corrupt", "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" are mostly showing lately and more frequently then ever.No drivers were ever identified in the stop msg's. Memset on EPP/F2 bios sets slots to different Refresh Row Cycle,DIMM 0 is 127ns and others 75ns. If I try to set all to 127ns it only gets worse.

[LIKMARK]

Delayed shopping for tommorow, Im probably gonna go with G0ldBr1ck's suggestion and dominators since he allready tested it and it works ok,plus for the price of geil ddr800 I can get the dominators + another 250gb hdd for raid.
Might pick up another DS4 or sometn just for testing purposes.

But before I do that,Id like to ask is it possible that incompatibility starts to show with time,cause I remmember in the beginning when i bought all this stuff everything worked fine,even on auto or EPP settings and even with auto express turned on. Starting to think that it could be the mbo/cpu after all...HTT was 1200 MHz with high HTT bus (300) and after Ive set some latencies in AOD for ram all this began to happen. Wouldnt ram incompatibility show immediatly at the beginning,I mean when everything is on stock or it takes some time before it starts to show? (few weeks in my case)

The stop errors Im getting lately all indicate on hardware incompatibility,"PFN_list_corrupt", "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" are mostly showing lately and more frequently then ever.No drivers were ever identified in the stop msg's. Memset on EPP/F2 bios sets slots to different Refresh Row Cycle,DIMM 0 is 127ns and others 75ns. If I try to set all to 127ns it only gets worse.

Sorry for not reading all the posts, I'll rather ask you a question. Are you running Phenom/intend to run Phenom?

I have the 2*2gb 1066MHz Dominators. They work exellent with my X2 and 590SLI Chipset, but they did NOT work good with Phenom and AMD 770 chipset in 1066 memclk mode. They barely booted at 7 7 7 28. (using the Abit AX78 board that is not known for good mem performance, so it might be the boards fault)

Ps: The DS4 does not support the Phenom 9950 with it's 140W TDP.

[-= rtz =-]

I have the 2*2gb 1066MHz Dominators. They work exellent with my X2 and 590SLI Chipset, but they did NOT work good with Phenom and AMD 770 chipset in 1066 memclk mode. They barely booted at 7 7 7 28. (using the Abit AX78 board that is not known for good mem performance, so it might be the boards fault)

Ps: The DS4 does not support the Phenom 9950 with it's 140W TDP.

I probably wont be running phenom on this chipset,ATM phenom is not in my plans.Waiting for 45nm.. But from what Ive been readin alot of ram has problems to work with phenom on 1066 mode. I would buy DS4 if I will get the same BSOD's with the dominators. So,it will just be a test platform since RMA-ing my own DQ6 could take a month and maybe more. And they will charge me if it proves stable. When I transfer to phenom Ill probably exchange everything,mbo and ram too.

PS
Is it normal that reported cpu speed in memset is jumping up and down? 3.4 GHz,2.6 then 1.7 and CnQ is turned off. I guess just a memset bug but a friend of mine has same cpu and board as mine and his reported speed isnt variating. In everest its ok tho..

[LIKMARK]

If you're waiting for 45nm Phenom you'll probably be best suited changing both mobo and ram for DDR3, as you say.
Memset gives wrong speeds for me too, I'm only using it to read timings wich it does exellent

[-= rtz =-]

Phew thats good to hear,that im not alone
Might be jumping to conclusions here,better wait with buying a week or more,cause the IRQL_not_less_or_equal msg Im getting lately is accompanied by a small pink square,and doing some googling revealed that the catalyst drivers might be the reason. So I need to make more thorough testing to be sure its not driver related.So far I aimed only at amd drivers,but in whatever combination (default win cpu driver,amd driver,updated win driver,and also the method described in Best of AMD forum) had nothing to do with the BSOD's. Also tried to remove SB Live! 5.1 but it didnt help.

Does memtest 2.01 show errors of video RAM also or just system RAM?

[Fulgore0rb]

Phew thats good to hear,that im not alone
Might be jumping to conclusions here,better wait with buying a week or more,cause the IRQL_not_less_or_equal msg Im getting lately is accompanied by a small pink square,and doing some googling revealed that the catalyst drivers might be the reason. So I need to make more thorough testing to be sure its not driver related.So far I aimed only at amd drivers,but in whatever combination (default win cpu driver,amd driver,updated win driver,and also the method described in Best of AMD forum) had nothing to do with the BSOD's. Also tried to remove SB Live! 5.1 but it didnt help.

Well this is a bit of a far shot but I just had this problem recently so here goes:

Are you using COMODO firewall? If so update it. This BSOD was a problem with it's rootkit protection that has now been fixed.

The possible BSOD problem was aparently around for about a month but I didn't have it pop up till a few days ago (after the fix was already released- I just hadn't updated yet).

[-= rtz =-]

Yes Im using Comodo firewall But I think it is not the reason in my case.
Before I went to sleep I left memtest running for 8 hours and when I woke up not a single error. I went to windows,and noticed that my backup ghost image is borked, the MS UAA HDMI audio driver/hotfix was not installed. I needed to mess arround quite alot with uninstalling of both realtek hd audio drivers and CCC to get it just right. Now I installed both hotfixes and for now...it seems ok. The rig is running windows since 11h AM and its now 19h PM and not a single crash...it was also Idling for quite some time,played some games and did alot of downloading.

If I get another BSOD by any chance Ill be sure to update comodo,thx for pointing it out

Update: It crashed at arround 20h,first WSFTP 7.0 crashed and then it brought down windows with it...couldnt boot into win anymore, anyway,COMODO is now completely removed from the system and we will see how it goes. Is there a specific order which needs to be followed when installing realtek hd audio drivers and ATI catalyst,also Microsoft UAA bus driver or it doesnt matter?

Update 2: Kept getting BSOD's after restoring backup ghost image even with comodo completely removed,and after running memtest from a bootable cd immediate errors...monday getting new memory and probably a test mbo.

[-= rtz =-]

I went to check capacitors and found something suspicious on the HD3870,can someone pls tell me if this is ok or not? I think u should notice on the pics what I mean.. the top of the capacitor is not bloated,its flat and I dont notice any leaking but still,I thought I should show u this.







Yesterday I left everest running for the first time with WSFTP pro + firefox browsing,it crashed pretty quickly and the weird thing was,before it started crashing everest showed a cpu temp of 81 degrees I know this is not possible,cause i have pretty good cooling and before I started to have problems load temp in prime even on 3.3 GHz never passed 46c. Any tips? What could cause this behaviour?

[G0ldBr1ck]

I went to check capacitors and found something suspicious on the HD3870,can someone pls tell me if this is ok or not? I think u should notice on the pics what I mean.. the top of the capacitor is not bloated,its flat and I dont notice any leaking but still,I thought I should show u this.

Im far from an expert at answering your question, however I have had a good few physicly damaged Caps. on cards and Mobo's with no evendent problems derived for it. If that damaged were to cause a failure and start swelling then I would suspect a problem but from the looks of yours im guessing no problems with the card at the fault of the capacitor.

[-= rtz =-]

Im far from an expert at answering your question, however I have had a good few physicly damaged Caps. on cards and Mobo's with no evendent problems derived for it. If that damaged were to cause a failure and start swelling then I would suspect a problem but from the looks of yours im guessing no problems with the card at the fault of the capacitor.

Well guess I will find out soon...just picked up Dominators today and plugged them in...however,my TRUE is blocking DIMM slots 1 and 2,so Im using slots 3 and 4,no problems so far and everest benchmark shows same scores as old ballistix in slots 1 and 2, but just curious about the auto EPP timings,if they are correct now. Can u please check with memset or AOD and tell me if u have the same results on 800 MHz EPP?

[G0ldBr1ck]

I can do that for you but not till probly 8 eastern time.....BTW I think if you look in CPUID it will tell you what the epp's are for 800 mhz.

That looks right from what I remember as tRAS is 15 on SPD at 800Mhz so the fact that its 12 says its using EPP. I think you can set The CL to 4 as long as your not going over 800 by much. Also I have read about plenty of isues with using slots 3-4 only so If you do run into some new problems you might need to find a way to get them into slot 1-2

[G0ldBr1ck]

-= rtz =-: Ok, I confirmed those timings on my system. those are the EPP. If you Overclock to around 1066 you should be able to go with 5 5 5 15 2t and 22 on tRC