Ack! I'm jumping ship to the dark side!

[SteveC]

As you may or may not know, I've been a devout 'Intel'lian since the days of yesteryear when I had a cyrix P150+ on A Via Mainboard (Back when they were called Motherboards! )

Anyway, I've just ordered a 1 Gig Tbird and an Asus A7V.... Please God! Forgive me!

So, I thought at first (for 0.68 seconds - but for an andriod, that's an eternity Guess the film), need I bother overclocking, but then I woke up! So, what do I do, and how do I do it?

And, any comments on the A7V - any pitfalls I might encounter?

PS: The main, Haig himself convinced me as he has the same board.

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[This message has been edited by SteveC (edited 13 December 2000).]

[The PIT]

Not the only one considering it now that you can buy a 1gig thunderbird for £180.
However I keep looking at the abit vp6 and twin overclocked processors at 1gig.

[EchoWars]

Get a decent magnifying glass (or whatever you call it over there and join the L1 bridges with a mechanical pencil using HB lead (or graphite, if ya wanna get picky). I say mechanical pencil because a regular pencil won't stay sharp long enough to do more than one bridge. Bloody bridges are SMALL! Then you are free to set the multiplier in the BIOS to whatever trips-yer-trigger. BIOS should also allow you to crank voltage up to 1.85V, which you will need to do if you want to get the max out of the chip. BTW...seems most T-Birds max out at around 1100-1150@1.85V They could do more, but 1.85V is IT in all the BIOS's I have seen. Did I mention that a REALLY GOOD heat-sink-fan-assy is a prerequisite? I favor the GlobalWin FOP32 or Alpha 6035...

Echowars...typing on a Abit KT7 / T-Bird 900@1.1GHz@1.8V..

[EchoWars]

BTW..know how you feel...just dumped my PIII 933 for the T-Bird setup after building a couple of Duron systems for customers. They flat-out ROCKED, so I figured the T-Bird must be a hellova chip. So far I have not been disappointed..

[Technoid]

Still on the light side!

I have just recently changed from IBX and p3550 to I815 and P3c 800 and untill MSI or Asus releases a Dual Tbird Mboard with DDR I'm staying put.

SteveC: Beware of "Warp 10+ Effect"

[superfly]

Well i finally upgraded my dual 667 p3 to a nice round dual p3 1ghz matched with 512mb of memory.

All i can say is that this system will absolutely rape any single processor system,even if it has a pentium 4(have the benchmarks to prove it too... ).

[DuRaNgO]

"Bicentennial Man"

[DarkSyd]

Steve
Welcome to the darkside
The A7 series are really nice boards...I have the A7Pro...same thing as the A7V minus the Promise controller. The only trouble I had was that Asus ships the boards with the I/O voltage set higher than the spec'ed 3.3v...my vid card didn't like it and kept dropping to desktop. I knocked the voltage back to where it should have been, and all is good

DS

[HedsSpaz]

Well i finally upgraded my dual 667 p3 to a nice round dual p3 1ghz matched with 512mb of memory.

You finally upgraded? Finally? What's this finally crap? I'm sitting here with an Athlon 650 and you're busy talking about finally uprading from a dual PIII 667?

Heh. Sorry, I'm just ribbing ya. That must be damn sweet. I'm quite happy with my 650 for the moment, although I do envy you. As soon as those dual proc ddr ram athlon boards come out then I am going to be all over that action.

Steve, "you cannot even begin to imagine the power of the Dark Side". Although, I suspect you are going to find out shortly.
Oh, and the film was Star Trek, um, damnit, I can't remember the title. It was the one that came after Generations. The one with the Borg. Back in time to earth and the first warp test and all that. Data is talking to Picard after they killed the scary head Borg lady, iirc, and Picard asks him if he seriously considered accepting the offer of the scary head Borg lady. And Data replies with the quote that you stated above. (for those who are wondering, I spelled this out in case someone didn't know where it came from). So, does this irrevocably solidify my geekdom?

Ian

[aaroncgi]

Star Trek: First Contact

Excellent flick, especially on DVD in 5.1 surround. (is there any other way to watch movies??)

Cheers,

Aaron

[superfly]

It's my fourth smp system so far,(first one was a dual pentium 133),once you see just how kickass smp can be,there's no going back... .

Try to imagine a situation like this...

I can be playing q3 while burning a cd-rom and defragmenting one of my hard drives(all scsi)and dowloading game demos or other large files all at the same time...with no performance loss at all(one cpu handles Q3 while the other handles the remaining tasks)

Then of course there's programs like photoshop and 3d studio max(among others)that actually use both cpu's(if available).

Just for kicks i also ram q3 in smp mode(using a Geforce 2 64 meg),and i'm actually beating pentium 4 scores even though they have a much faster bus.

SMP RULES!!!!!.... .

[Ali]

Kryton (sp?) from Red dwarf also used that line years ago (the android thing). I remember thinking that it was a bit low of Star Trek to steal it.

[Kosh Naranek]

SUPERFLY
What are your SMP scores ?
I ask because all the Q3 SMP scores i have seen is far worse than single cpu scores due to some video driver issues.

Steve
You know...The Dark Side ALWAYS gets beaten...in the end !

[superfly]

In my case actually,the problems with running q3 in smp were/are related to the way i set my network.

If i use the linksys hub(has pppoe support built in for dsl connections),i have no problem in running q3 in smp and enjoy a seriously good boost in the fps departement.

I tried the above setup with pretty much all of the 6.xx and 7.xx series of drivers and smp in q3 works everytime.

If i switch to a standard hub,in which case i have to install a pppoe access manager on my system,q3 in smp is a definite no go,to the point of locking up as soon as the intro screen shows up and it does the same regardless of which driver i'm using.

Go figure....

Ahhh...but on to the benchmarks

Now as fast as a Geforce is there is no point in benchmarking with it past 800*600(it just can't keep up)

Here's the actuall settings that i'm using in both the q3config file and the q3 setup screen.

first the config file

swap interval "0"(sets vsinc off)

com hunkmegs "256"(sets the amount of memory that q3 is allowed to use)

seta max fps 400(just in case... )

I'll also submit the benchmark numbers with both sound enabled and disabled as well(a la tom's hardware... )

As for the q3 setup screen,i'll post two sets of results with all the options enabled and afterwards disabled.

so here goes...
fastest(sound disabled)
640*480--->251 fps

fastest(sound enabled--HQ)
640*480--->237 fps

fastest(sound enabled and all options enabled)
640*480--->221 fps

--------//---------
normal(sound disabled).
640*480--->248 fps

normal(sound enabled--HQ).
640*480--->232 FPS

Normal(sound and all options enabled)
640*480--->213 fps.

-------//--------

High quality(you know the drill... ).
640*480--->234 fps

640*480--->223 fps

640*480--->206 fps.


As far as the 800*600 numbers go,they're anywhere from 20 to 60 fps lower(again depending on the settings that are enabled).

All i need now is a dual chip G800 to see if it can keep up with the cpu's... .

[superfly]

Almost forgot...

these results are only possible with my video card seriously overclocked(to near gf2 ultra speeds)

Anyone got some liquid nitrogen they can spare... .