ULi M1695 - The next SiS 735?

[voltronX]

Is the Asrock the only board with this chipset?

[Nuno]

For now, yes it is.

One can only expect that all the manufacturers (actually all the major players in the industry) that have adopted their M1689 chipset will also adopt the M1695, faster, brilliantly designed and allowing native AGP and PCI-E on one board. This is the right time for this chipset, as many people have very decent AGP cards and they aren´t willing to buy new PCI-E ones just to upgrade the CPU.

[Nowhere]

Judging from OCWorkbench, ASRock board based on SiS756 is perhaps even better option if not dealing with AGP...

[Nuno]

Judging from OCWorkbench, ASRock board based on SiS756 is perhaps even better option if not dealing with AGP...

Well, maybe, but that´s the whole point. The AGP->PCIe transition was faster than anyone would thought. Ir not - it´s the old let´s-change-pins/socket/bus/voltage-and-make-people-upgrade business. AGP 8x was far far from being a bottleneck and things like SLI or multimonitor craziness appeals only to 1% of the users I guess.

I have a AGP Radeon x800 pro. Its performance will be more than adequate for 1-2 years more. Current games don´t even make it sweat. My CPU is a 2.5 years old Athlon thunderbird. Nice, but I think now it´s time to upgrade it to a mid-range socket 939 CPU. Before, I would have to buy new PCIe graphic card now, or another motherboard next year or so. With something like this "Dual", I can get a socket 939 Athlon64 now, keep the radeon, and in the future, get a X2 when they´ll get cheaper. Need to upgrade videocard? Not a problem, just plug a PCIe card on the slot. I even can keep the Radeon on the AGP slot

I think there´s many people out there with a very similar situation. And that´s why this motherboard is getting a lot of attention.

[voltronX]

exactly.
I could now trade my secondary card (pci mystique) for some nice gaming card and still keep my p for multimonitor stuff
I just hope ASUS will be producing a board with this Chipset as i heard some negative stuff about Asrock quality...

[Nuno]

I just hope ASUS will be producing a board with this Chipset as i heard some negative stuff about Asrock quality...

Personally, I never heard too much negative opinions on Asrock. As I said I owned a K7S8X, a very good board, and more than 2 years later it still is going strong on a relative´s computer, with a Sempron something. You can say their boards lack some features and overclocking abilities, but they seem very reliable and stable boards. They´re actually owned by asus, targetting the lower-end market. That´s why there´s some limitations, as the voltage issue. If it can give 1,55v to a FX, it definitely can give it to a X2. But then an asus M1695 board, costing 50€ more, would be pointless, right? Even so, the 939-Dual overclocking abilities are nothing short of extraordinary for a budget motherboard....




The whole story

[Mikko]

So, how it went?

Everything works just fine if I don't overclock anything, but for some reason, I can't really overclock my components. If I overclock either my Parhelia or CPU, the games will stop responding sooner or later with complete system freeze, depending on a game (5-30 minutes).

I have Antec TruePower 430W PSU, so I don't think it's weak PSU. I did in fact measure all the voltages off the ATX power connector (using multimeter) and everything was right up to the specs: +3.3V, +5.0V, +12.0V. At idle speed, both CPU and motherboard temperatures are also quite low. (~30-35 degrees celsius).

Now I think it has something to do with my Parhelia. It's pretty weird, though, because it could easily stand upto 10% overclocking with a previous motherboard/CPU and I have also improved my case cooling. However, I decided to buy Zalman ZM80D-HP heatpipe cooler with an additional ZM-OP1 fan. I hope I can give you better news soon...

[Nuno]

Be sure that you´re running on Async mode, or your AGP bus will be running out of spec, and the Parhelia may not like it

[Mikko]

Yes, I have Async mode enabled.

[Technoid]

exactly.
I could now trade my secondary card (pci mystique) for some nice gaming card and still keep my p for multimonitor stuff
I just hope ASUS will be producing a board with this Chipset as i heard some negative stuff about Asrock quality...

That really doesent mean anything, I can always find atleast 10 peopel who hate a particular brand/model

There will always be negative stuff about any hardware

That asside , I still remember some ALI chipset that should have stayed in the designers twisted mind and not ended up on motherboards

[Goc]

My worst nightmare was a PCChips motherboard from the PII days. It had a SiS northbridge and ALi southbridge or the other way around. Can't remember the exact model, but that is definitely the worst piece of hardware I ever worked with.

[Nuno]

On the contrary, my worst piece of hardware was a Asus A7V with a VIA chipset. I hardly could get a stable system, no matter what I did. I remember I couldn´t run a G400 faster than AGP 1X and some other tricks... worst motherboard I ever had.

I do run a A7N8X-X now for 2 years and after I troubleshoot a sound card IRQ conflict, the system is pretty rock stable since then...

[Nuno]

Another thing about these ULI chipsets: rumor is that ULI didn´t actually designed them, specially the M1695. AMD did. But as AMD resources aren´t exactly almost infinite, as Intel´s, they don´t make chipsets anymore, and that´s why you didn´t see AMD brand chipsets since the 760.

So, word is that ULI just makes them. That makes some sense, as it´s a bit difficult a company without almost no background to show up with arguably the best chipset for K8´s to the date...

[dZeus]

running the G400 at 1x AGP doesn't really make it any slower in 'real world' performance. There are plenty motherboards around where you need to force 1x AGP because of too much noise on the AGP bus.

[Mikko]

I think I have sorted out my Parhelia heat problems now. I got the new Zalman heatpipe cooler today and went installing it immediately. Now I've been able to play games more than two hours without any problems. Parhelia is currently set to 10% O/C, witch I had already with my previous motherboard/CPU too.

It looks like the original thermal tape on Parhelia's heat sink had been sort of "evaporated or burned" off. There was hardly any tape left between the Parhelia core and the original heat sink. Core must have been running very hot lately and it didn't like the stress provided by a new faster CPU.