Anyone with Asus P3V4X experience

[paulcs]

Dwright, I've been using the 4.17 drivers that shipped with the board. I think the secret to increasing performance is to use only the 4.17 AGP driver. I installed the 4.20 ACPI Registry and Busmaster drivers and got back the 20 FPS I lost in Quake3 when I transitioned to the P3V4X from a BX platform.

Sandra memory benchmarks improved, although they still fall far short of the marks I got with the BX board.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[dwright]

Thanks Paul,
I will give 4.20 with 4.17-apg a try and see if there is any improvement. I have tried the P3V4X with a P600e FC @ 800 and its stable (retail hs and default voltage). With this I still score only 2900 marks with 3dmark2000. The P500e @ 667 in on my son's machine a P3B-F with a gefoce sdr, the score is 3900.
HD-Tach (hard drive test utility that tells us ultra66 is not operational) fails on my system in win98se but is ok in win2000. Did you have a chance to try it in win98?
Thanks
David

[paulcs]

UTA 66 is not enabled yet. I think we're going to have to wait for a BIOS update.

I haven't benchmarked my hard drive performance. The drive I have in this machine is a couple of years old, and I don't think it's worth it. I'll be upgrading it next week.

I'm getting lockups in the weirdest places. Not in games, but when exiting the DOS window I run SETI clients in. I'm going to try to install the DOS BM driver and see if it helps.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[paulcs]

This is my first VIA board, and I feel like I'm in motherboard kindergarten again.

There are DOS drivers on Asus's site. I downloaded them in their own directory, booted into DOS, and ran the setup program. It expanded the file, shot me back into Windows, ran a Windows setup routine, and claimed it was installing the VIA busmastering drivers. After the installation, it prompted me to reboot.

I'm still getting lockups when closing down the DOS window, hitting Ctrl-Alt-Delete and shutting down the window from there seems to work. It's not the most elegant solution.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[dwright]

The latest discovery:
I am running bios 1003.001 and read that performance is improved, and there is no more need for 4.16. I loaded 4.20 agp drivers and tested. 3DMark2000 scores were the same as 4.16. QIII would not run (matrox 5.52 no turbo) it hung the system black screen, and I had to reset twice. I unistalled 4.20 agp and restarted then verified driver was removed (no viagart.vxd in the registry or windows\system). Just for fun I ran QIII to see what would happen and scored 76.7 fps in demo1 normal vs 59.1 fps with the 4.17 agp driver.
The problem is without 4.17 agp the system will not shut down (hangs black screen) and programs like asus probe also hang the system.
I think VIA and ASUS have alot of problems to resolve - mostly performance related for me
1. agp performance
2. memory performance
3. ultra66
4. some apps crash and hang the system (hd-tach)
5. usb mouse stutters at time (related in some way to #4)
6. suspend to ram does not turn off the power and case fans (it does with the P3B-F)

I plan to swap back to the P3B-F @133 and place this board to the guest pc that runs win2000. When fixes are made it give it another try.

[paulcs]

I'm having some odd experiences with my board. I upgraded to BIOS ver. 1003 beta 1, installed all four of the 4.20 drivers and, while they were faster than 4.17 alone, they were slower than the 4.17/4.20 combination I'm currently using.

I'm now using the 4.17 AGP driver along with the three other 4.20 drivers, and this brings Quake3 and 3DMark2000 up to the levels I was getting with my BX board.

I get lockups entering Windows after I do anything with the 4in1 or video board drivers: installations, uninstalls, registry edits, etc. I contiue to get lock ups when exiting the SETI client DOS window, although I have a couple of work arounds at my disposal.

No doubt about it. It's a really fussy board, and I'm not sure it was ready for prime time when they released it.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[dwright]

Hello,
Bios 1003.002 beta is available. It enables ultra66. I have flashed, tested and verified with win200 - ultra66 is functioning now.
Thresh's FiringSquad @ http://www.firingsquad.com/ has posted QIII tests on the G400max and other cards. I used the results to compare to mine on the P3V4X with win2000. I am slightly higher in high quality but have a faster cpu. They used a BE6-II and PIII750 for the tests.
I will try with win98 but I think they will be lower unless the new bios changes something.

[MaXi]

IceStorm... What sort of problems do u have with the Maxtor 40+ ? I'm planning on buying one of those soon...

[dwright]

Beta 1003.002 test show no performance change in win98se as far as I can tell. Tried with via 4.17 agp drivers and then the 4.20 (agp 4.0). QIII would not run with the via agp 4.20 driver - the system hangs and reset is the only way out. I tried various agp sizes in bios but could not make it go.
DirectX tests work perfectly though. I switched back to 4.17 agp drivers with the others at 4.20. I discovered that QIII with via 4.17 drivers hangs the same way as with the 4.20 drivers if the agp is not set to 256mb in bios.