good ram advice to BURN an old slot A Athlon TB

[Jose]

Hi. Sorry PC related ...Not that familiar with PC hardware, but know the basics.

I happend to have got hold of a SlotA Athlon Thunderbird at 1Gz. Yeah  8-) :lol:
Got it as a cheap upgrade to be able to Play DVDs at full speed, wich the old 600mhz Athlon couldn't (amazing). Maybe it was just the Gfx card, an old Riva128Zx. :-D

 I haven't tried the 1Ghz TB yet. Yeah, I could've got a new mobo but that would mean new processor and memory too.
This  is a rare processor as AMD only realeased the Thunderbird slot A versions to OEMs. The 1Ghz version is even more rare.

The motherboard is a good old Asus K7M with irongate chipset.
I'm planning to overclock it and see what it gets, after all this motherboard was famous for overclocking stability at it's time, and the Thunderbirds with it's faster L2 cache (at bus speed) and copper interconnects or something, is much more easier to overclock from tests I've read on the net.

So, what ram brand etc. would you recommend considering the bus is 200Mhz and the motherboard accepts pc100 modules (though I have a 133 128mb one in there and it works fine at 100mhz but the other one is a pc100 64mb). With the Athlon600 (older non TB version) I could raise the bus only to about 105mhz stable!!!

Do you think it's worth it ?  :-D  Anyone had any experience with a similar system, I know there's some AMD users out here too..

[Jose]

@Crystall

Hmm, but I want to overclock it 8-) As for the Ram, well there's still eBay, I'm sure I could find a few bargains there (or hope...)

@Zac67

The mobo I have can go up to 150mhz FSB, wich steps of 1mhz from 100 to 125 (or 133 can't remember).

"Beware that o'cing the board will o'c the PCI and AGP as well - not all cards handle that well, and the Riva's probably not one of them."

Yeah, maybe that was the problem with my Athlon600..
"The TBird most probably could handle 1300-1400 MHz with proper cooling - but does it run on the K7M? The reason AMD did not release the Slot TBird was lacking compatibility with existing boards..."

I didn't buy it without doind some research and I knew about that, my motherboard is fully compatible. There were faster chipsets lauched after the Irongate (Apollo etc..) that were not compatible..

"O'cing the CPU w/o running the board beyond specs means changing the multiplier, so look for a goldfinger device or try to do it yourself (should be somewhere in the web)"

The Thunderbird was locked.. dunno if there's anything will have to check it out, but I prefer to overclock the bus too.

"But - is it really worth it? Much higher clocked Semprons are available cheaply and you can get cheap mbs, too."

You're probably right, and that was my dillema before buying it. Even having to get another mobo would probably be worth it and not make much difference. But if it can play DVD's all the way, I'll be satisfied as the Athlon 600 already did most things I want (PC gaming is not worth it IMO, just get a console and play on the living rooms big TV).

[Jose]

@Tomas

Already checked that! It still missed frames. I'm using PowerDVD BTW. I was assuming the Gfx card has the bandwith to do it and the blame's on the processor. If it'snot I'll have done something really stupid :-o

[Jose]

Hi. I just checked the Bios and the stupid asshole where I bought the DVDRom installed it as Primary Slave. I was out of time and asked if they could install it for free if I bought it there. Thanks! The secondary channel is not being used at all. Will that disable DMA ? I'm not using the HD while the DVD is playing...

[Jose]

Hi. Thx for all replies. I changed the DVD drive to master on the secondary bus but had the same result. I also made a benchmark with a DVD (Iron Maiden's Rock in Rio :-D ) and Sisoft Sandra said my drive was up to 6MB/s.

The OS is W2KPro. I have the latest drivers from AMD for the AGP port and Via ones for the south bridge. BTW isn't this the same southbridge as the A1's ? :-)

I want to solve this before overclocking the Thunderbird.
Any clues of what else could be? The Gfx card ?

BTW, I'm thinking about getting a good Vortex cooler, cause I want the overclock to be silent but also take it to extrems. If I burn it I'll probable make a video of me smashing it :-P

[Jose]

@Zac67

Yeah, but 6MB/s should be more than enouph anyway, MPEG2 is around 3.5MBits/s IIRC, unless the machine is unstable.

@ billchase
Hi.

"It still sounds like a possible DMA issue. I assume you have already enabled it in the windows device manager or whatever 2000 calls it. In XP, the properties tab also tells me what mode it is currently running. Maybe the w2k IDE channel properties tab will report the status as well. Try the following link to enable DMA if PIO is stuck on.
http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDMA.htm"

Properties tab  reports Ultra DMA as the current mode.

"...
 One more note about memory, I have never had any luck running 1-sided memory in my K7M. Only recognizes half the capacity. Stick with double-sided if at all possible."

I'll take that into account.

"BTW, are you using the w2k ide driver or VIA's? Stick with
the generic w2k drivers, but if you are running the VIA
set, check their site for the DMAtool, it might be required
to enable DMA if nothing else does."

VIA's, but W2K reports Ultra DMA as the current mode so it's working. I've also found some references on the net advicing to remove DMA tool before installing VIA drivers so I assume the drivers substitute it.

Still the same... :-)

[Jose]

Hi. Got bored and installed the 1Ghz Athlon. CLearly makes a difference but still not smooth!! Lowered the resolution to 800x600. Got a bit better but still not completely smooth.
Do you think getting a better video card would make a difference ? My current one is old and has only 8MB, but PowerDVD docs say 8MB is enouph. Also the card supports overlay and works in AGP 2x mode.

What the heck is going on  :-?

ACPI is working, but (weird) when I overclock the FSB to 110 (+10%) a blue screen with white font appears complaining the BIOS is not ACPI compatible.

[Jose]

I got Nero and run the Infotool. DMA is active, at least it says so. I also run SiSofSandra and compared my system to a few on the list... My system is practically equivalent to a P4 at 1.6Ghz! I bet it will beat the crap out of it when I overclock it.

Anyway, I'm gonna take it to a friends PC store and ask to try it out with a different Gfx card, WITHOUT hardware decoding of course...

:pint:

[Jose]

After checking in device manager and also NeroInfoTool that DMA was on,  I wasn't even gonna run CD-DVDSpeed but I decided to give it a go...

Speed: Cpu Usage:
1x     12%

2x     22%

4x     98%:-o

8x    100% :-o  :-o

Still, DVD playback is 1x and running other tests it never dropped below that. The graph for speed wasn't regular but the peaks it had seem to be related to the kind of drive.

100% @ 8x is weird isn't it ? Now I have to determine if this the systems fault or not. Suggestions...(I checking for similar problems with this drive model now...)

[Jose]

The drive is a Samsung DVD-Rom SD-616E BTW...

[Jose]

@Floid

Oddly enouph, I'm using the latest beta BIOS and ACPI seems to work fine, but I'm using Win2K wich seems to have a way better implementation than Win98.
I remember when I was running Win98 the system wouldn't even be able to shut down ALOT of times :lol: That disappeared when I got Win2K.

@Zac67

Yes, but at 1x the CPU load, though too high for normal DMA, shouldn't overload the CPU enouph to prevent MPEG2 decoding at a decent speed.
So, I noticed PowerDVD has some other tests and I decided to run the System Diagnostic and then do a diagnostic to test my Gfx card (which was being reported as having overlay and everything).
Didn't pass ANY of the YUV tests or any...! So it's the Gfx card too...

Looking on eBay for a Radeon 9700 right now, the fastest AGP2x compatible one. Before anyone says anything, the card will still be useable if I upgrade in the future so I don't mind if it's a bit overkill for my current system. And its going cheap on eBay. I think I'll get the Gigabyte one that has way better colling.

Still, I'd like to resolve the DMA issue if possible ...    

[Jose]

@bloodline

Still plenty AGP boards out there selling for 64 bit systems :-)

[Jose]

Can someone recommend a test program that will test CPU load under DMA transfers to HD ? From SisSoftSandra (trial version here) results my HD manages 33MB/s, not bad since it's an ATA66 controler.

I'm assuming that if HD transfers don't have high CPU load then the fault for high cpu load in DVD accesses would be in the DVD itself or it's drivers..

[Jose]

Hi. Be amazed!

Just runned Quick Bench...

Sequential Speed: Read- 39.2 MB/s
        Write- 33.8 MB/s
...
...
Average CPU- 2%  !!!!!!!

The average CPu was a bit higher when I first launched the program (>10%), lowering right after if I kept idle, but I think that was due to other task having just been terminated. If I kept idle and stoped the test in the middle and restarted again the CPU load would be 2% in the very beginning.

Now what it could be? The DVDROm drive, it's drivers, or the cable...?

[Jose]

BTW, [stupid joke]... seems like I won't need an April fix on this system after all :roll:

I'll check the cable next...