Some questions about harddrive on A7V8X
in [Hardware]
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From: Rene on 11 Apr 2008 09:27 "Rene" <my.name(a)is.nobody> schreef in bericht news:MbaLj.90829$833.72336(a)newsfe17.ams2... > Hello everybody, Hello again ;-). As my post did not get any replies in the original ng, I have taken the liberty to post a fu to two other groups. I hope someone will know an answer to my questions. Thank You very much, this is my original post: > I am the very happy owner of an A7V8X motherboard with an Athlon XP3000. > To > the onboard Promise Fasttrak sata controller, one 200 GB drive is > connected. > I use a pata drive as system disk. Now I am considering buying one of > those > very fast Samsung F1 drives of 1000 GB and use that as the system drive > (XP > and Linux). > My questions are: > > - Can You connect two drives to the onboard sata-connectors without using > them in a RAID setup? I mean, just use them as two seperate drives. > > - Has anybody every connected one of those particular drives to the > controller and does it work OK? The drives are much newer than the > controller which is iirc one > of the first consumer sata controllers and apart from that, the drives are > sata 3 Gb/s and the controller 1,5 Gb/s. I know the drive has a jumper but > still... > > - I am also considering buying a seperate controller, this has to be a pci > one as the mobo does not have pcie or pci-x or whatever is modern nowadays > ;-). That way I would still have the best speed possible (though I don't > believe the mechanical speed of the disk reads will be limited by the 1,5 > Gb/s interface, maybe cached stuff will be faster but I don't believe the > heads can actually read faster than 1,5/8 GB/s. Nevertheless, having a > real 3Gb/s controller would be the finishing touch. I was thinking about > this one: > http://www.promise.com/marketing/datasheet/file/1_S300%20TX4_040605.pdf. > It > does however say that it is PCI 2.3 compliant and > http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=13&l3=62&l4=0&model=226&modelmenu=2 > says that the mobo is pci 2.2. It also says the card works at 66 MHz, this > however should be included in the 2.2 standard (it says so on > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect). Will the > card work on the mobo? I can't find out for sure whether it is possible to > put a pci 2.3 card in a 2.2 slot so I was hoping someone over here might > know. By the way, this controller looks interesting as well. > > I hope someone can help me out with those questions. I love this > mobo/proc, am very satisfied and do not intend to buy a new computer very > soon (last year I bought a Geforce 7950 so I can play relatively new games > on it as well ;-)). Having this new and very fast harddisk would be a big > upgrade for me! > > Thank You very much in advance. > Yours sincerely, > Rene
From: kony on 11 Apr 2008 17:39 On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:27:26 +0200, "Rene" <invalid(a)invalid.com> wrote: >"Rene" <my.name(a)is.nobody> schreef in bericht >news:MbaLj.90829$833.72336(a)newsfe17.ams2... >> Hello everybody, > >Hello again ;-). As my post did not get any replies in the original ng, I >have taken the liberty to post a fu to two other groups. I hope someone will >know an answer to my questions. > >Thank You very much, this is my original post: > >> I am the very happy owner of an A7V8X motherboard with an Athlon XP3000. >> To >> the onboard Promise Fasttrak sata controller, one 200 GB drive is >> connected. >> I use a pata drive as system disk. Now I am considering buying one of >> those >> very fast Samsung F1 drives of 1000 GB and use that as the system drive >> (XP > and Linux). >> My questions are: >> >> - Can You connect two drives to the onboard sata-connectors without using >> them in a RAID setup? I mean, just use them as two seperate drives. Yes you can. Logically they would be considered single drive spans, but you don't need to set anything for this to happen, it is a default mode when a drive is added. >> >> - Has anybody every connected one of those particular drives to the >> controller and does it work OK? The drives are much newer than the >> controller which is iirc one >> of the first consumer sata controllers and apart from that, the drives are >> sata 3 Gb/s and the controller 1,5 Gb/s. I know the drive has a jumper but >> still... It should make no difference that the drive is newer, just jumper to 1.5GB/s and you'd be fine. Actually that's not entirely correct, the motherboard will bottleneck the hard drive performance because that SATA controller chip is sitting on the PCI bus so there will be bus traffic contention and at most you'd approach about 125MB/s burst, not even 1.5GB/s that the drive would run at in a board with southbridge intergral raid or at least SATA controller. Even so, it may stil be a good performance upgrade without having to change the motherboard... depending on your use. >> - I am also considering buying a seperate controller, this has to be a pci >> one as the mobo does not have pcie or pci-x or whatever is modern nowadays >> ;-). That way I would still have the best speed possible (though I don't >> believe the mechanical speed of the disk reads will be limited by the 1,5 >> Gb/s interface, maybe cached stuff will be faster but I don't believe the >> heads can actually read faster than 1,5/8 GB/s. Nevertheless, having a >> real 3Gb/s controller would be the finishing touch. No, it would not be the finishing touch, it would be redundant and pointless because of issues mentioned above. IF you were instead using this as a fileserver to a lot of concurrent users, maybe then the SATA300 NCQ feature would boost performance a little, but in that case a more expensive caching controller would help. For your desire to boost performance, after replacing the drive the next thing you need to replace is the motherboard itself, which of course also means upgrading other parts to support the new board. If you don't want to replace the motherboard you might even think about getting a PATA drive instead of SATA because A7V8X uses a Via southbridge and Via never did very well at maximizing the PCI bus performance. Especially if you had other PCI cards like Gigabit ethernet or a Creative Labs sound card, you would do well to use the PCI bus and/or the onboard SATA as little (otherwise) as possible. >>I was thinking about >> this one: >> http://www.promise.com/marketing/datasheet/file/1_S300%20TX4_040605.pdf. >> It >> does however say that it is PCI 2.3 compliant and >> http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=13&l3=62&l4=0&model=226&modelmenu=2 >> says that the mobo is pci 2.2. It also says the card works at 66 MHz, this >> however should be included in the 2.2 standard (it says so on >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect). Will the >> card work on the mobo? I can't find out for sure whether it is possible to >> put a pci 2.3 card in a 2.2 slot so I was hoping someone over here might >> know. By the way, this controller looks interesting as well. It's fairly irrelevant whether it would work or not, your board has 33MHz PCI bus that in best case tops out at about 125MB/s as mentioned above, and that only in a benchmark where there's isolation. In real uses it will be even more detrimental. >> >> I hope someone can help me out with those questions. I love this >> mobo/proc, am very satisfied and do not intend to buy a new computer very >> soon (last year I bought a Geforce 7950 so I can play relatively new games >> on it as well ;-)). Having this new and very fast harddisk would be a big >> upgrade for me! I hate to say it but I would not have bought the 7950, your board and CPU are bottlenecks to gaming and your board to a hard drive upgrade. If you really really want to keep using the board I'd get a cheap PATA hard drive, something like a 500GB size and put the rest of the money in the bank to upgrade the other parts sooner. Get SATA drive instead if you wanted to carry it over to a newer system since current generation boards have more SATA than PATA ports.
From: Rene on 14 Apr 2008 05:52 "kony" <spam(a)spam.com> schreef in bericht news:umlvv3ds6p7fj4jtn39dk7tbtki0jagspv(a)4ax.com... > On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:27:26 +0200, "Rene" > <invalid(a)invalid.com> wrote: > >>"Rene" <my.name(a)is.nobody> schreef in bericht >>news:MbaLj.90829$833.72336(a)newsfe17.ams2... >>> Hello everybody, >> >>Hello again ;-). As my post did not get any replies in the original ng, I >>have taken the liberty to post a fu to two other groups. I hope someone >>will >>know an answer to my questions. >> >>Thank You very much, this is my original post: >> >>> I am the very happy owner of an A7V8X motherboard with an Athlon XP3000. >>> To >>> the onboard Promise Fasttrak sata controller, one 200 GB drive is >>> connected. >>> I use a pata drive as system disk. Now I am considering buying one of >>> those >>> very fast Samsung F1 drives of 1000 GB and use that as the system drive >>> (XP > and Linux). >>> My questions are: >>> >>> - Can You connect two drives to the onboard sata-connectors without >>> using >>> them in a RAID setup? I mean, just use them as two seperate drives. > > Yes you can. Logically they would be considered single > drive spans, but you don't need to set anything for this to > happen, it is a default mode when a drive is added. Hello Kony, First of all, thank You very much for Your extensive explanations, they helped me a great deal forward in my understanding of things that were previously unclear to me. The first thing You mention (above) is good news to me. >>> - Has anybody every connected one of those particular drives to the >>> controller and does it work OK? The drives are much newer than the >>> controller which is iirc one >>> of the first consumer sata controllers and apart from that, the drives >>> are >>> sata 3 Gb/s and the controller 1,5 Gb/s. I know the drive has a jumper >>> but >>> still... > > It should make no difference that the drive is newer, just > jumper to 1.5GB/s and you'd be fine. That was the major uncertainty, I was afraid that, because this controller is that old (one of the first sata controllers), later on maybe some small imperfections (bugs) might have come to the surface rendering it not 100% compatible. In the past I owned an Asus A7V and there the ATA100 controller, also a brand new standard when that mobo came out, was not perfect either. I have tried to locate that problem by means of a search engine (to be able to give You a link, just to show which problem I mean, it wasn't solvable anyway) but I can't find it anymore, too many recent finds show up, this problem is already quite old. > Actually that's not > entirely correct, the motherboard will bottleneck the hard > drive performance because that SATA controller chip is > sitting on the PCI bus so there will be bus traffic > contention and at most you'd approach about 125MB/s burst, > not even 1.5GB/s that the drive would run at in a board with > southbridge intergral raid or at least SATA controller. Yesterday very late when riding my bicycle I realized this as well, thinking about the pci-bus being 32 bit and 33 MHz (4*33 being only 132). > Even so, it may stil be a good performance upgrade without > having to change the motherboard... depending on your use. My use is really nothing special, the usual things. The most important one, at least the acitivity where I think the invention of the computer has been the greatest blessing, is still word processing ;-). Sometimes a game and maybe some cad and emulation stuff that in the past might have been considered "heavy" but that runs fine on this computer. And programming. It's just that I like this system very much and I want it, within the limits the basic components of it set, to be as "slick" as possible. May sound a bit silly but I want to make as long use of it as possible and I must say, apart from the very slow boot (due to the extremely old installation of XP, I have to do a clean install soon, probably on the new hard drive), the speed of it is still amazing to me. I have always been slow in upgrading, still used a 486 (AMD model at 166 MHz, was a great machine, I still have it in the attic) when everybody else had PII's and even PIII's. I then upgraded to an Ahtlon 700, a big jump for me. >>> - I am also considering buying a seperate controller, this has to be a >>> pci >>> one as the mobo does not have pcie or pci-x or whatever is modern >>> nowadays >>> ;-). That way I would still have the best speed possible (though I don't >>> believe the mechanical speed of the disk reads will be limited by the >>> 1,5 >>> Gb/s interface, maybe cached stuff will be faster but I don't believe >>> the >>> heads can actually read faster than 1,5/8 GB/s. Nevertheless, having a >>> real 3Gb/s controller would be the finishing touch. > > No, it would not be the finishing touch, it would be > redundant and pointless because of issues mentioned above. I understand what You mean. > IF you were instead using this as a fileserver to a lot of > concurrent users, maybe then the SATA300 NCQ feature would > boost performance a little, but in that case a more > expensive caching controller would help. I am not using the pc as a server. > For your desire to boost performance, after replacing the > drive the next thing you need to replace is the motherboard > itself, which of course also means upgrading other parts to > support the new board. If you don't want to replace the > motherboard you might even think about getting a PATA drive > instead of SATA because A7V8X uses a Via southbridge and Via > never did very well at maximizing the PCI bus performance. > Especially if you had other PCI cards like Gigabit ethernet I have an integrated network interface on the mobo, it is capable of 1Gb/s but my network works at 100 Mb/s. > or a Creative Labs sound card I do. > , you would do well to use the > PCI bus and/or the onboard SATA as little (otherwise) as > possible. Look, I was looking for confirmation, not someone telling me that my plans are not good... (just kidding, I am gratefull for Your advice!) >>>I was thinking about >>> this one: >>> http://www.promise.com/marketing/datasheet/file/1_S300%20TX4_040605.pdf. >>> It >>> does however say that it is PCI 2.3 compliant and >>> http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=13&l3=62&l4=0&model=226&modelmenu=2 >>> says that the mobo is pci 2.2. It also says the card works at 66 MHz, >>> this >>> however should be included in the 2.2 standard (it says so on >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect). Will >>> the >>> card work on the mobo? I can't find out for sure whether it is possible >>> to >>> put a pci 2.3 card in a 2.2 slot so I was hoping someone over here might >>> know. By the way, this controller looks interesting as well. > > It's fairly irrelevant whether it would work or not, your > board has 33MHz PCI bus that in best case tops out at about > 125MB/s as mentioned above, and that only in a benchmark > where there's isolation. In real uses it will be even more > detrimental. That was something I was unsure about. It is a PCI 2.2 compliant board and the 2.2 standard says that 66 MHz was introduced with it (on wikipedia). So I was unsure whether this board would maybe support that higher speed. In that case I could have gained something. From what You wrote, I draw the conclusion that it doesn't. >>> I hope someone can help me out with those questions. I love this >>> mobo/proc, am very satisfied and do not intend to buy a new computer >>> very >>> soon (last year I bought a Geforce 7950 so I can play relatively new >>> games >>> on it as well ;-)). Having this new and very fast harddisk would be a >>> big >>> upgrade for me! > > I hate to say it but I would not have bought the 7950, You do not have to feel bad about saying it, almost everybody would have said that. > your board and CPU are bottlenecks to gaming I think You would be highly surprised if You would see what the GPU is able of doing in my computer without being hindered by the "old" CPU, at least I was. I am also the happy owner of a 22" CRT (yes, I am quite conservative ;-)) that supports very high resolutions and for that, the CPU is not important, neither is it for high levels of AA and AF. But apart from that, the bottlenecking by the CPU is not that strong as often is read, well, off course it very much depends on the game one wants to play. I know there are many RTS games nowadays (which I find terribly boring) that support many highly detailed little men running around having complicated movements and having very detailed activities the calculation of which requires a fast processor and also advanced physics support is out of the question for me, but a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. can be played at very high settings. I used to own a GF6800GT with only 128 MB RAM (at the time I bought it, more RAM was not used by any game and this model was within my budget, the one with 256 MB wasn't and for the rest, it was exactly the same so I thought it would be a good choice) and that was a major disappointment to me, though when looking at the technology itself, that one should have been more "on par" with the rest of the system than the one I have now. When I had bought stalker, I could only play it as a slide show, between 2 or 3 FPS and when I went to the outside in the beginning of that game, it fell back to 2 or 3 seconds needed for one frame! It got a little better when completely turning down the quality of the grahpics but it remained unplayable. I do not know how many fps I have now but they are more than sufficient, and the graphics are almost at the highest quality. I decided to buy this card when AGP cards became more scarce (except from the very simple ones which are not suitable for gaming), it was the best that I could still buy at that moment and the price was very reasonable. I have not regretted it for one moment and hope to enjoy it for a long time. > and your board to a > hard drive upgrade. If you really really want to keep using > the board I'd get a cheap PATA hard drive, something like a > 500GB size and put the rest of the money in the bank to > upgrade the other parts sooner. Get SATA drive instead if > you wanted to carry it over to a newer system since current > generation boards have more SATA than PATA ports. Hmmm, difficult choice. I think I am going to keep my money in the bank for a while. Thanks again for Your reply, taught me a lot! Yours sincerely, Rene
From: Rene on 14 Apr 2008 05:57 "Rene" <invalid(a)invalid.com> schreef in bericht news:4QFMj.14269$ck.942(a)newsfe30.ams2... >> I hate to say it but I would not have bought the 7950, > > You do not have to feel bad about saying it, almost everybody would have > said that. > >> your board and CPU are bottlenecks to gaming > > I think You would be highly surprised if You would see what the GPU is > able of doing in my computer without being hindered by the "old" CPU, at > least I was. I am also the happy owner of a 22" CRT (yes, I am quite > conservative ;-)) that supports very high resolutions and for that, the > CPU is not important, neither is it for high levels of AA and AF. But > apart from that, the bottlenecking by the CPU is not that strong as often > is read, well, off course it very much depends on the game one wants to > play. I know there are many RTS games nowadays (which I find terribly > boring) that support many highly detailed little men running around having > complicated movements and having very detailed activities the calculation > of which requires a fast processor and also advanced physics support is > out of the question for me, but a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. can be played > at very high settings. I used to own a GF6800GT with only 128 MB RAM (at > the time I bought it, more RAM was not used by any game and this model was > within my budget, the one with 256 MB wasn't and for the rest, it was > exactly the same so I thought it would be a good choice) and that was a > major disappointment to me, though when looking at the technology itself, > that one should have been more "on par" with the rest of the system than > the one I have now. When I had bought stalker, I could only play it as a > slide show, between 2 or 3 FPS and when I went to the outside in the > beginning of that game, it fell back to 2 or 3 seconds needed for one > frame! It got a little better when completely turning down the quality of > the grahpics but it remained unplayable. I do not know how many fps I have > now but they are more than sufficient, and the graphics are almost at the > highest quality. I decided to buy this card when AGP cards became more > scarce (except from the very simple ones which are not suitable for > gaming), it was the best that I could still buy at that moment and the > price was very reasonable. I have not regretted it for one moment and hope > to enjoy it for a long time. I wanted to but forgot to insert the link to http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/10/agp-platform-analysis/ , it is about this matter, I thought it was interesting reading (though I did not read it before buying my card, I already had it when I stumbled across this info). Rene
From: kony on 14 Apr 2008 10:33
On Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:57:27 +0200, "Rene" <invalid(a)invalid.com> wrote: >> I think You would be highly surprised if You would see what the GPU is >> able of doing in my computer without being hindered by the "old" CPU, at >> least I was. I am also the happy owner of a 22" CRT (yes, I am quite >> conservative ;-)) that supports very high resolutions and for that, the >> CPU is not important, neither is it for high levels of AA and AF. Well that explains it, I had assumed you were playing at lower resolutions. >> But >> apart from that, the bottlenecking by the CPU is not that strong as often >> is read, well, off course it very much depends on the game one wants to >> play. That is true, but even in situations where it seems like the higher resolution or eyecandy is effected by video card the most, CPU and memory can still account for a few FPS one way or the other. Plus, looking forward you will still play at same resolution till the monitor is replaced but games will become more and more CPU intensive, including the effects newer games have which aren't so well handled in hardware by the older 7xxx series cards, like stuff that's shader intensive. Since you had a CRT and could pick resolution without suffering a lost dropping out of native resolution as one would with an LCD, I would have still replaced the motherboard and CPU before getting the video card. That doesn't mean it's the only way, you seem to be right that for your use it was right to get the card when you did. > >I wanted to but forgot to insert the link to >http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/10/agp-platform-analysis/ , it is about >this matter, I thought it was interesting reading (though I did not read it >before buying my card, I already had it when I stumbled across this info). It is interesting, though now a bit dated and gaming requirements went up again. Now a 8600GT PCIe video card that can be had for about $55 after rebate can hit scores about double what the 7600GT did in those 3DMark charts... providing a little faster system to put it in. Having a CRT you can drop resolution to get FPS as needed, but you can't do much when CPU is the bottleneck on a game which puts a bit of a cap on how long the combo will be viable before it all has to be replaced at once. |