Where to now?

[Andrew Leigh]

Thanks to you all once again.

Cheers
Andrew

[Andrew Leigh]

Hi all,

just an update on the drive size limitations.

Recieved my ATA board yesterday, but it was the Promise ATA 100 board which also does not support drives over 131Gig, I should have got the ATA 133 version.

Anyways, last night I went browsing the Seagate site and found their software patch for the problem. I installed the patch and tried to format in W2000P. Right at the end it kicked me out with a message "Drive to large". I installed SP4 for W2000P and tried again with the same message.

I then formatted using Partition Magic which worked. I am now able to see the entire drive and am able to access it without any problems.

This has been an interesting process and I have learnt through it. Like for instance that my mobo bus speed is currently 100MHz, that the drives are running at ATA66 or DMA mode 4. My Ram is @ 133Mhz. Now i'm starting to really drool because if the theory is correct then,

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe (bus speed 8X faster)
PIV 2,8Gig (4X faster)
All my drives will now increase in speed by 50% ( from ATA 66 to ATA100 as they are all ATA100 compliant)
Not to mention the increase in Ram speed.

The most unfortunate part of this is that I am unable to source the board locally and will have to get it elsewhere, the same will also probably apply the the matched pairs of Ram.

So much for not spending lot's of money.......

Glen that was a great link....the swopping mobo's one.

By the way I am confused. If the P4C800-E Deluxe has onboard RAID does this mean that I am able to have 4 drives plus an additional 4 IDE devices or do the same rules apply for my current board....a max of 4 IDE devices in total?

Thanks all
Cheers
Andrew

[Bogdan Vaglarov]

Andrew, have a look at the motherboard section of tomshardware.com:

You can read this very extensive review on the current trend of motherboards.
www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030707/index.html

I think if you can spot the top MSI or Gigabyte boards you will be fine.

I'm also having problem to find decent price for a matched pair of memory here in Japan. I wonder is it big problem if you lets say just buy two 512MB modules. What are the possible negatives?

[Andrew Leigh]

Hi Bogdan,

can't answer on the memory side of things.

Went to tomshardware.com and took a look at the showdown of 24 boards with the intel 865/875P chipsets. I noticed that the fastest board for encoding from DV to MPEG-2 was the MSI 865 PE Neo2, it was also the fastest board for encoding MP3's.

Why this is of particular interest is you will remember that I mentioned the difficulties of obtaining the top ASUS boards here in S.A. Well my old business partner and friend happens to be the Technical Director of the business that locally distributes MSI product. This would mean a good price and the necessary backup, could be a great solution for me.


Anyone know of these boards with a DVRaptor???

Mike Rehmus any thoughts?

Cheers
Andrew

[Glenn Chan]

Recieved my ATA board yesterday, but it was the Promise ATA 100 board which also does not support drives over 131Gig, I should have got the ATA 133 version.

A lot of or all drives larger than 137GB come with an ATA adapter card (fits in PCI slot) to allow your computer to see more than 137GB.

I'm also having problem to find decent price for a matched pair of memory here in Japan. I wonder is it big problem if you lets say just buy two 512MB modules. What are the possible negatives?

When running a pair instead of a single stick of RAM the maximum RAM speed goes down a bit, on average by around 8mhz (this is from an ?OCZ? RAM FAQ and I forget the URL). If you buy sticks of RAM that barely meet specs (200mhz by itself) then pairing them up will mean they will not work at all or your system will be unstable. Matched pairs are guaranteed to work as a pair (otherwise the manufacturer is sleazy and your RAM is defective). Most RAM has headroom (maybe 30mhz?) so matched sticks of RAM will not be an issue. It should not be an issue at all if you buy quality RAM.

Went to tomshardware.com and took a look at the showdown of 24 boards with the intel 865/875P chipsets. I noticed that the fastest board for encoding from DV to MPEG-2 was the MSI 865 PE Neo2, it was also the fastest board for encoding MP3's.

The MSI Neo2 is the fastest because it "cheats". It dynamically overclocks when your CPU is stressed. If you don't plan on overclocking this is ok.

This has been an interesting process and I have learnt through it. Like for instance that my mobo bus speed is currently 100MHz, that the drives are running at ATA66 or DMA mode 4. My Ram is @ 133Mhz. Now i'm starting to really drool because if the theory is correct then,

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe (bus speed 8X faster)
PIV 2,8Gig (4X faster)
All my drives will now increase in speed by 50% ( from ATA 66 to ATA100 as they are all ATA100 compliant)
Not to mention the increase in Ram speed.

You mobo will run at a variety of speeds. For the Pentium2.4c your mobo should be running at 200mhz (that's the front side bus speed). Marketing people multiply the FSB by 4 because it makes larger numbers. Your processor speed is a fixed multiplier of the FSB speed. If you increase it your processor will go faster (it becomes overclocked).

Your drives and PCI cards are supposed to run at 33mhz. If they run out of spec then strange things can happen. Their speed is linked to the FSB speed. Hence if you want to overclock it is desireable to keep the FSB speed constant so your system stays stable. ATA XX refers to the theoretical maximum bandwidth of the interface. ATA 66 is 66MB/second. Drives are much slower so the interface is not too important. Faster interfaces will have slightly less overhead (not worth worrying about).

RAM speed is linked to the FSB speed. Normally RAM speed and FSB speed are in a 1:1 ratio, but if you want to overclock you can change it to 3:2 or 5:4.

[Mike Rehmus]

Andrew. Re: mobo compatible with the Raptor. I really don't know but if you slide over to the Canopus forums they should be able to help you.

http://forum.canopus.com/ubbthreads.php

Will get you there.

[Andrew Leigh]

Hi Mike,

I posted under "General Forums" with the thread being called "MSI 865PE Neo2 and DVRaptor" my user name there is Bataleur.

See you there.

Cheers
Andrew


Hi Glenn,

thanks again for the info. The software solution may enable me to see the 180 gig drive but it does not allow me to copy large file to it. I have just written a Premiere project to an .avi on a seperate drive. The .avi is 12gig's and will not copy an paste yet smaller files will. Is this drive issue or a size issue? As I will be buying a new mobo I am loathed to spend on an ATA card to fill a one or two week void.

With regard to overclocking I am generally not a big fan but this does not sound to bad. So the board will sense when it needs to be faster and for that period only will overclock and return to normal when less stressed?

All a bit confusing, I understand that with a 200 FSB and a 2,4gig processor one would use a multiplier of 12X. Why then do they claim 800 as a FSB, is this misleading advertising?

With regard to drive speed are you implying that although I have ATA100 compatible drives that I will not benefit from the ATA100 controller card as the drives cannot run that fast anyway. If so why have I bought ATA100 compatible drives?

Cheers
Andrew

[Bogdan Vaglarov]

<<With regard to overclocking I am generally not a big fan but this does not sound to bad. So the board will sense when it needs to be faster and for that period only will overclock and return to normal when less stressed?>>

Glenn, if you see the data for the other boards you will find that most of the brands do overcklocking rising slightly the bus speed and voltages permanently. What's clever with the MSI board is that they are may be overclocking a bit harder at certain moments but leaning back to normal when not high resources are needed. You can chose the level of overclocking which is nice. Without "dynamic overclocking" the Neo2-FIS2R still sports top places in the most benchmarks and the bundle is very nice.

Of coarse I don't say that the differences are big and the result on tomshardware are achieved using top of the cream memory, video card and newest drivers all requiring skills and knowledge.

[Glenn Chan]

thanks again for the info. The software solution may enable me to see the 180 gig drive but it does not allow me to copy large file to it. I have just written a Premiere project to an .avi on a seperate drive. The .avi is 12gig's and will not copy an paste yet smaller files will. Is this drive issue or a size issue? As I will be buying a new mobo I am loathed to spend on an ATA card to fill a one or two week void.

Maybe you formatted the drive to use the FAT32 file system and you're hitting the 2GB limit? Try NTFS in that case.

With regard to overclocking I am generally not a big fan but this does not sound to bad. So the board will sense when it needs to be faster and for that period only will overclock and return to normal when less stressed?

It will overclock itself when it senses that the CPU is stressed. That's what I understand of it. It overclocks very mildly so unless you are using very poor RAM or your system is really hot then you shouldn't have a problem with that. If you are concerned then you can check system stability by running prime95 under torture test (free).

All a bit confusing, I understand that with a 200 FSB and a 2,4gig processor one would use a multiplier of 12X. Why then do they claim 800 as a FSB, is this misleading advertising?

Advertisers advertise the FSB speed at 4X of what it is because the bus is quad pumped or something like that. Anyways it's easy enough to differentiate between the marketing number and the real number.

With regard to drive speed are you implying that although I have ATA100 compatible drives that I will not benefit from the ATA100 controller card as the drives cannot run that fast anyway. If so why have I bought ATA100 compatible drives?

ATA100 compatible drives are more future proof? Usually the motherboard makers like to stay ahead of hard drive technology advances so they implement interfaces with plenty of headroom. You still might run into the 137GB limit in which case you might need an ATA adapter card or something like it to see the drive's full size.