My New Setup

Discussion relating to Socket 7 hardware.
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Wiggy
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Location: Surrey, England

My New Setup

Post by Wiggy »

Hello there peeps.

I must admit I haven't been terribly active of late. :oops:

But anyways, I now live with my GF, and now I'm King of the Manor, so I can use all my old PC's again. Yay.

The previous setup included a P5A-B - which I loved, but it has become so flakey and the FDD refuses to work now. And I never really had the opportunity to test/bench it.

The new setup:

Soyo SY-5EMA+ V1.1 (1mb cache)
AMD K6-2+ 450
Alpha PAL-6035 (It's the daddy)
256 PC133 CL3
Geforce 2 GTS DDR 32mb <- I may change this to a Geforce 4 Ti4200 that I have.
Diamond Monster MX300 sound.

This board appears to be pretty nice. It has 112 and 124 fsb options, and a divider for the RAM should you require. Also it has plenty of voltage options. The Alpha fits really easily too. No probs with capacitors.

Has anyone owned/had experience with this board, as I'm hopeful of some hidden DIP settings or some performance comparisons?

Is there much more of a better graphics card than a GF 4 that'll work in SS7?

Also, can anyone recommend a few couple of benching programs. I know the latest versions of various progs aren't always suitable for such an old platform?

Now I've stuck it together, I'm gonna find out what this board/chip will really do.

Cheers. :D
SOLTEK rocks!
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Stedman5040
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Post by Stedman5040 »

hi Wiggy,

From your avatar shouldn't it be Zippy? Anyway I'm from Leicestershire and have a three socket 7 boards plugged up and a few others I can swap in and out of machines as and when necessary. I do have one of the AT soyo boards you are using but I never had much luck with mine running Win98SE. I kept having ICQ routing problems. i tried a number of things, but gave up on it as a bad job. The Gigabyte GA-5AA proved much easier to work with. I could try plugging it in again and having another go.

Anyway as far as benching is concerned people tend to use Everest home edition 2.20, Superpi 1M, and I also use hotcpu tester lite edition. Sandra 2004 edition is also useful. For the VIA chipset that your board has wpcredit is useful for tweaking the chipset. There are lots of pointers in the forums for what to do to tweak your board to get the optimum results.

Anyway I am sure we all will be pleased to see some results for your set up.

Stedman :)
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Wiggy
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Post by Wiggy »

Hello man.

Actually my board is a ATX. I got a bit frustrated with AT to be fair. And my lack of spares started to become a problem, so I switched to ATX. Although the system is set up on the floor at the mo! I'll 'liberate' a case from work.

I'm very happy with it so far, apart that it seems to undervolt. It just won't boot at 2.0v, so I had to bump it up a smidge.

WPCredit is my next port of call. At the mo it's a little beyond me.
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Stedman5040
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Post by Stedman5040 »

I am surprised that your cpu does not boot at 2.0V. for that cpu I would have thought it would boot at about 1.75V or even less. Looking at your motherboard switch layout you have for switches 1-5

2.0V off on on on on
2.1V on off off off off

This switch layout is similar to the Epox MVP3G2. So for 2.05V you have

2.05V on on on on on

The lowest voltage setting will most likely be

1.30V off off off off off

with switch 5 at off position switches 1 through 5 give the following when on

sw1 sw2 sw3 sw4 sw5
0.05V 0.1V 0.2V 0.4V off

With switch 5 on voltages are

sw1 sw2 sw3 sw4 sw5
0.1V 0.2v 0.4V 0.8V on

It doesn't look like you have voltage monitoring on your board, but did you use the correct 2.0V setting or did you use the 1.30V setting thinking it was 2.0V

Stedman :)
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Wiggy
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Post by Wiggy »

Hmmm, I thought I was being silly and doing exactly what you said. But it seems I'm not.

According to the manual it appears that:

sw1 sw2 sw3 sw4 sw5
0.1V 0.2V 0.4V 0.8V off

With a base voltage of 2.0V. So for Eg. 2.5V means that sw1 and sw3 would be on.

I don't know what sw5 does. It's off for every setting.

I have the problem that even at 2.2V the system won't run Super Pi or complete 3DMark. It's odd.......

Looks like I'll have to measure the voltage manually and see what it reads as.
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Wiggy
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Post by Wiggy »

There's so many different manuals for this board!

However, according to the latest one I've found sw2-5 needs to be on and sw1 needs to be off for 2.0V. Strange. I'll try that then.
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Wiggy
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Post by Wiggy »

Ok I still can't get this board/CPU to bench.

The processor used to work fine. The voltage is 2.0V, and it's underclocked to 400MHz. It's a totally fresh Win 98 install, and I've swapped the RAM. Oh, I've got the latest BIOS too.

I just don't understand why Super Pi won't go for more than 20 seconds without producing an Illegal Operation.
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Stedman5040
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Post by Stedman5040 »

Are you using Superpi 1.1e or superpi mod 1.5 ? I can only get 1.1e to run with win98 or win me

Stedman :wink:
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Wiggy
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Post by Wiggy »

You were exactly right. That was the prob. Nice one.

Ok, results:

4 x 100 = 7m 20s <- Just for reference.
6 x 100 = 5m 49s
5 x 112 = 5m 53s
5.5 x 112 = 5m 28s
5.5 x 112 = 5m 16s <- Fastest RAM timings.

Not bad I think for a K6-2+.

Just experimenting now with programs to change the FSB in windows. On board settings of 100 112 and 124 isn't the greatest of help.
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Stedman5040
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Post by Stedman5040 »

I think you can improve on that score with wpcredit tweaks. With all tweaks on the Epox MVP3G2 at 550MHz (5.5x100) I think I was getting around 5m15s for a K6plus cpu

Stedman
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