Asrock 775Dual VSTA Intel Motherboard

[Orbitration]

My first review, please take it easy on me.. ;)

I upgraded last week from a Socket 754 x3400 AMD / Epox system to an e6400 Core2 Duo / Asrock VSTA board.

This board can utilize either DDR ram OR DDR2 ram in the memory department, and either an AGP or PCI-e video card. (reports have it that PCI-e only runs at 4x).

The board uses:

Northbridge: VIA? PT880 Pro/Ultra chipset

Southbridge: VIA? VT8237A

It's a basic ATX-sized board, has 2 SATA-1 ports, 2 IDE ports, Floppy port, a bunch of USBs, and Realtec 7.1 sound, 1 PCI-e, 1 AGP 8x, 3 PCI slots, 2 DDR slots and 2 DDR2 slots (total of 2 gigs only, no mixing)

The main reason I chose this route was so I could use my existing DDR ram and 6800XT AGP card.

There are some reviews out and about on this combo, so I took the plunge.

First off, does it work? A resounding "YES", and quite well, after actually GETTING it to work. The overclocking is a bit limited, but you have a mulitude of ram settings to tweak, and pci lock, and then you just turn up the cpu speed until she crashes. ...basically, then back it off a bit.

So I put up some very basic benchmarks I took from Everest here: http://kensworld.us/e6400

I think I had it turned to 300 CPU, at CAS3 on this set of tests. I've since bettered that by lowering timings and slowing down the o/c to 290. More stable, too.

[ I lucked out somewhere along the line, and my eVGA 6800XT allowed me to unlock all 16 pixel pipes and the shaders. Just by changing cpus/motherboards, my FPS in UT2004 increased anywhere from 50 to over 100 FPS. That was before I unlocked the pipes, also.

Need I say, it plays BF2 like butter, and UT on all high if I wanted the looks over speed.

Just for grins I found an old copy of 3DMark 2001 or something, and ran that before and after unlocking the vid card... around 21,500 marks before and close to 24,000 marks after. heh, that was cool, seeing those numbers. I remember when breaking 10,000 was considered quite the feat. ]

I had issues with the following:

1:) Getting the stupid heatsink clips to 'click' into the mobo. I think I spent a good 15 minutes of trying, and double, triple checking those pins. Got to be one of the stupidest hsf fastening schemes I've come across. (too used to AMD, I guess)

Those first few seconds of booting the first time, before making it to the power section of the bios are always a little nerve-wracking, but this was way more so. I must have gotten it on good enough, the temps (with AS-5) are around high 30's to low 40's ususally. Very acceptable. I'm using an ok Scythe Samurai heatpipe hsf, nothing special, really, but a little better than AMD stock. However... the stock HSF that comes with the Conroe looks to be of some pretty good quality, I wouldn't hesitate to use it. It's copper, too, unlike AMD's usual fare.

2:) Getting the SATA drive to work. Supposedly there are no drivers needed for XP if you're not using the RAID function. In reality, there is no booting from a single SATA drive, at least from what I'm getting from Asrock's limited tech support.

(They DO write back, but it's not very good English, and some of the expressions they use don't translate quite right.)

According to the latest email I received, I can ONLY use 4 drives total, whether they're 2 SATAs and 2 IDE's, or 2 Sata's and 2 DVD/CD's. You're not supposed to use IDE 1 if you use the SATA drives, so that limits you to either severely slowing down your IDE drive if you mix it with a DVD/CD on the same channel, or only using SATA and IDE or SATA and DVD.

Pretty limiting if you like your drives, like I did.

I settled for a 250 Gig SATA Seagate as my program and data drive, and then booting off a single 160 Seagate IDE drive.

Now, I've been doing this a few years, have built a number of systems, repaired hundreds, and this little deal with getting the SATA to be recognized took me over 15 hours and about 7 complete installations of XP before I gave up and just used the IDE drive as the boot drive)

I DO have a single IDE in the first IDE channel, and a DVD and a CD-rw in the second IDE channel, and a single SATA drive. for my total of 4.

Somehow I don't think I'm understanding the tech emails quite right.

Doesn't seem right you can only have 4 drives total, but he said it was an Intel/Via thing or something to that effect)

Luckily, huge drives are pretty cheap, so I'm just going to get a 320 to 400 gig SATA and go that route. grrr.

So... I spent a total of $400 for the e6400, the motherboard, 250 gb drive, and Arctic Silver 5.

I already had $230 worth of ram, $140 worth of video card, the case, dvd/s etc, so I think I got a heck of a deal.

Just a mention of why I have ddr and agp still. I built a computer for a company last year. We had all the parts spec'ed out, and at the last minute, they wanted to upgrade the CPU, and I mistakenly ordered a S754. That was quite the $250 shocker.

They ended up giving me the CPU as a 'tip' and buying a Socket 939 cpu.

So, I bought a 754 board, and that's how I got into 64 bit processors, by accident.

I then upgraded to a newer S754 board, and it had AGP, so I kept my AGP card.

In all reality in my experience, the biggest and most impressive upgrade I've ever had was going from a 266 P-II with a whopping 64 megs of ram, to my first AMD 1 gig cpu with 256 megs of ram.

The speed difference was phenomenal, to say the least.

Every one of my other upgrades were never ever close to being like that speed difference, and I've always been a bit disappointed with the final results.

The only way I could really tell if it was faster, was by benchmark tests, and maybe I'd knock off a few seconds in rendering a flash movie or something.

But, hey, it's fun being fastest on the block, if not the whole neighborhood for awhile.

I must say, while the speed difference of this upgrade isn't as noticeable as the 266 to a gig, it IS the second most noticeable upgrade I've done in the last 10 years.

I've been working on a Flash movie for the last 3 months that took over 3 minutes to render each time with the AMD.

It now takes a minute and 45, almost half the time.

And THAT's noticeable.

We're at that point where how much faster than a 32nd of a blink of an eye is a 64th blink ?

Photoshop still opens just as slowly. hahahaha... what IS it with that program, anyway?

So. Quickly summarizing:

Yes, the 775Dual-VSTA DOES work well if you don't have a ton of drives.

The use of DDR ram works very well.

The AGP slot idea works very well.

and you still get to have the fastest cpu on the planet in your system.

Bragging rights alone are woth the cost of this upgrade..;);)