Hey Jiminator

[ME BIGGD01]

After fiddling with this DFI board some more and trying set it up for my Avid editing suite, I have almost come to the realization it sucks in some areas that other Nforce 4 boards would be a better choice. It seems that the company has put together a board basically for over clocking but the chipset is not a full fletched nf4 which hinders performance in certain areas where you need full bus. I am not happy at this point that it can not run my digi002 along with mojo together as it gives me blue screen of death. I am going to have to call AVID to see why I am continous running into these problems but I already assume the answer. I will have to look into this further but as far as editing goes, I think I need to use the dual processor opteron system for this because I can not get this stable on the DFI board. I am not overclocking either and I am having a hell of a time. I may also try this on the Asus board a8n because it has the full fletched pro chipset.

Anyway, I may throw this board up for sale or offer to my brother. No matter what, I am not happy with it for what I wanted to do. Also I have to give you props for understanding all those bios settings. Some times easier is better. I do think that the memory bandwidth runs well on this board at defualt but overall, between the controllers such as sata and firewire not using the nforce4 chipset, I am not happy with it overall.

[JIMINATOR]

yeah, i have something that works with a different board, but overall I am not impressed. The boards have a lot of potential, but require too much testing and or tweaking. Tech support is really half-ass. There are forums for the board, but if nobody knows anything you are ignored, say except maybe for other people saying they have the same problem. I think I may stick with asus next time around.

[ME BIGGD01]

Jim, I am mistaken after further investigation and due process. I actually feel like a retard because I made claims that were untrue out of frustration.

so what's the deal? Simple, The DFI board we have is pretty good in fact it has the same most of the same features as the higher end boards except does not have the additional sata connections. Who cares, it can still run a raid 5 if we wanted. As far as the firewire controller, I screwed up looking at the other controller that is installed in the unit which I thought was a pyro but was a via firewire card. Yes I feel like a jerkoff and wasted lots of hours. So the firewire controller is built into the southbridge which makes the unit supported for this hardware I am using. The reason the system was crashing to blue screen had to do with the DEP of sp2 from the os which a driver update has fixed. So I guess I will keep the system together and be satisfied with it overall. I do not intend to oc but from speaking with others, it has all the features you need to get what you want. I spoke with some that had the opteron chip as you and this guy said he has had his running at 3ghz stable. He said add some more voltage. He is also doing this on defualt heatsink. I guess for the price and power, I will rate this board close to number one considering the board cost 130 many months ago when the rest of them were selling close and past the 200 dollar mark.

Bottom Line, Disregard all I said from first post. we got a great board that has more features bios wise then most othersand all the other goodies needed for gaming and editing. A good investment.

[JIMINATOR]

Hey Biggs, if you were testing the editing on a dual core proc, did you get both the amd drivers and also the xp patch? There is an issue where xp splits the load between the two cpus, then when it sees that they are not being fully utilized, throttles them back, making for real choppy performance. Look at http://www.thehotfix.net/kb/KB896256.htm. Mikeysoft won't give the fix out, but it is available @ http://www.perambula.net/res/WindowsXP-KB896256-v3-x86-ENU.exe

Note, I had a BSOD after first booting with the patch, but then booted normally, so i'll have to see....

[ME BIGGD01]

Although I am not running the x2 chip in this system I am familiar with this bug which was not only for Amd system but with even the P$ with hyperthreading. From what I remember the updated driver from AMD's website was all you needed. Also I think it had to do with the power now scheme of the AMD chips which the driver fixed. I do not use thatas I want my systems including laptop running as fast as possible all times. I could care less about battery unless I need to check an e-mail on the fly with the laptop.

Now since you and I have a 3500 on hand both the same revision, I want you to notice that memeory bandwidth of the chip and then compare it to the dual core chip or even any Venice core. There is something strange going on in the newer core which actually slows or hinders the memory bandwidth. With the 3500, I get avg 5900 and higher but with venice core I get between 5600 and 5800 which may not be too bad but only goes to show they give ya but they taketh something away. I have told the AMD reps their PR ratings suck ass and they are going to shoot themself in the foot. I also tell them they need to start giving a little more for their chips because I do not feel the price is fully worth the chip. Way too expensive and this is going to anger many that I think will hurt in the long run.

By the way, remember the sempron 3100 and nforce3 I told you about in the pm? You may recall the price from outpost for 89 bucks for both. LOL, what a f'ing investment. The chips had 64bit support which suprised me. They were not the fastest chips and the chipset was somewhat outdated compared to socket 939 but:) that baby worked some miracles and was just as fast as a 3000 athlon 64 s754. Overall performance is better then any socket a or xp setup. 89 bucks, I will jump on that deal every time. You have to watch out for those specials because they even sell p4 combos that are a little more expensive but for the price anyone can have a nice little upgrade and 64 bit capability if they need it. Only problem with the amd combo deals is that the chips is oem and no heatsink comes with it. I wont complain though becuase it still worth it. I think those make great media center pc's.

[BlackWolf]

BTW if u got dual cores and have Nvidia cards there is some issues with the 8x.xx drivers
its something with the dual core optimization of the drivers that make games crash

[ME BIGGD01]

Black, where have you heard that and what games have you heard are crashing. I am not familiar with the problem unless you are referring to the 7800gtx 512 cards in sli mode? I would like to look up on this and see whats going on.

[BlackWolf]

its from Nvidia them self if u read for eksample the release notes from the new beta 84.12 in the open issus section

i heard something about they will release a driver at some point where u can disable the dual cpu optimization

[BlackWolf]

Here it is this is from the 81.98 release:


NVIDIA Issues—Single GPU
• There are intermittent application compatibility issues with dual core
CPUs.
This issue can be worked around be toggling off multi-thread optimizations
using the following instructions:
1 Launch regedit and determine the current primary display card by
looking in
HKey_Local_Machine\Hardware\DeviceMap\Video
and note the GUID (global unique identifier assigned by Windows),
which is the long string in brackets { } at the end of the entry
ʺ\device\video0ʺ.
2 Look in
HKey_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Video\
{GUID}\0000
where {GUID} is the number derived from the previous step.
3 Open the ʺ0000ʺ directory and create a new DWORD called
OGL_ThreadControl and give it a value of 2.
This will disable multithreading in the driver for all OpenGL applications.
4 If you want to disable driver multithreading for all Direct3D applications–
In the same ʺ0000ʺ directory, create a new DWORD called WTD_EXECMODEL
and give it a value of 0.
• All GPUs: When adding Custom Resolutions, the user is not allowed
to select the ʺmonitor scalingʺ option.