PC building - where did I go wrong?

[sinij]

I would check the Asus website under your motherboard to see if there's a bios update that might address it.

^^ First thing I did when I got MB.

Funny story:  CD Rom issue turned out to be old keyboard drivers. My keyboard has special buttons that I re-mapped to something else (but still use rarely)... hitting them occasionally produced old function of ejecting CD. LOL!


Another question - I have 100$ of tigerdirect credit to burn (my video card just dropped 100$ and I got price-matching) and I am considering improving my SO's PC. It is Athlon X2 6000 on M2N-SLI MB and 9800GTX video card.  To me motherboard is clearly a bottleneck, so what would be good upgrade? (It can cost more than 100$)

[Trippy]

How is that MB the bottleneck? You trying to do SLI machine on that machine too?

[sinij]

Nope, no SLI on that machine. I was under impression that M2N-SLI MB is too old to support PCI-E2, and runs that card at half bandwidth.

[Trippy]

Again, it's the same issue as your machine. It's not clear that at the resolutions and settings your SO runs her games at that the GPU is actually the bottleneck. Moving to PCI-e 2.0 might give a performance increase, or not. Here's a slide presumably from AMD showing what the differences are on one of their cards:



Ignoring the fact that vertical axis is skewed to exaggerate differences and ignoring that it's an apples to oranges comparison, if she runs at a high enough resolution/settings it's likely she'll see some benefit, at least on paper, from switching to PCI-e 2.0, unless of course her CPU is actually the bottleneck. Whether or not she would actually notice the improvement is another issue entirely. E.g. if she's getting, say, 30 fps at 1920 x 1200 in a game and moving to PCi-e 2.0 gives a 10% speed up, it's not likely she's going to notice she's now running at 33 fps.

[sinij]

Interesting. I was under impression that PCIe 2.0 is much bigger deal than this chart indicates. Real reason to upgrade is so I can donate old motherboard to my friend, college student without means to adequately upgrade his computer. So he gets M2N mobo, old Athlon64 2x CPU and my old 7900x2 video card.

I need to buy a motherboard and I have tigerdirect credit to burn that I can't turn into cash without much hassle... I might as well upgrade SO's computer, regardless of how trivial this upgrade would be. Considering my old MB choice was less than ideal, this time around I am asking for a recommendation.

[Trippy]

I haven't studied NVIDIA MBs in a while. I would say a 750a chipset board is probably your best bet. The 780a is way overkill. If you don't care about SLI and you can find one a 730a board would probably work just as well too.

[sinij]

Can you explain to me in general terms as to why motherboard is important? My primitive understanding is that aside from maximum FSB, memory support (i.e. DDR2 Dual-Channel) and various bus standards (i.e. AGP or PCI-E 2.0, SATRA or SATA3.0) there isn't much to motherboards. Why care about motherboard's chipset if it supports all standards you need to?

[sinij]

I can't seem to find motherboard that works for me.

1. Single PCI-E 2.0 slot, no need for SLI/Crossfire
2. No built-in video card
3. AM2+ socket

Are they not making non-SLI/Crossfire motherboards these days? Something like MSI K9A2GM-FIH but with PCI-e 2.0 support.

[Trippy]

I can't seem to find motherboard that works for me.

1. Single PCI-E 2.0 slot, no need for SLI/Crossfire
2. No built-in video card
3. AM2+ socket

Are they not making non-SLI/Crossfire motherboards these days? Something like MSI K9A2GM-FIH but with PCI-e 2.0 support.

You want the 730a chipset then, which nobody including Newegg seems to have, in which case the 750a (which does have SLI) is your best bet.

[Trippy]

Can you explain to me in general terms as to why motherboard is important? My primitive understanding is that aside from maximum FSB, memory support (i.e. DDR2 Dual-Channel) and various bus standards (i.e. AGP or PCI-E 2.0, SATRA or SATA3.0) there isn't much to motherboards. Why care about motherboard's chipset if it supports all standards you need to?

The chipset determines the overall capabilities of the board. For some features you can add additional controllers, like for an extra Gigabit Ethernet controller, if the chipset doesn't provide it but for the primary ones like the memory controller (if needed), and primary expansion slots including for the video card are determined by the chipset. To put it another way if you are looking for certan features like PCI-e 2.0 then that immediately narrows down which chipsets will work for you.

The chipset also affects performance -- i.e. chipsets from different manufacturers with the exact same feature set may still benchmark differently. E.g. the latest Intel chipsets handle RAID much better than the NVIDIA ones do so if that's important to you and you happen to be using an Intel CPU (which you aren't) that might mean you would prefer, say, an X38/X48 MB over an NVIDIA 790i MB.

[Murgos]

In very simple terms the chipset allows the CPU to talk to the other components.  There are a multitude of ways to make these interfaces and it's really up to the manufacturer on how it's done.

Maybe the DDR RAM spec dictates a bus with a nominal 1.8 volts (just pulling numbers out of my ass).  One chipset maker may produce parts that are poorly engineered so that it operates at 1.790V, which is pretty close to 1.8 and so it generally works but with intermittent parity errors causing a double fetch of the data and a CPU stall but nothing really noticeable to a human.  But maybe, after a long play session, your board has gotten pretty hot and now the bus is only operating at 1.785V (heat causes a decrease in conductivity) and now you get more and more errors until eventually something is totally FUBARD and you crash.

Does the board work?  Yea, but it doesn't work well.

[sinij]

How harmful is on-board video these days? Back when I looked last you actually had to solder-off connections to prevent on-board card from interfering. Anything changed since then? Vista seem to have some Frankenstein-hybrid going where on-board card and your main GPU combined for boosted performance. Considering that I don't plan to switch to Vista anytime soon, is getting motherboard with built-in video card (and never using it) would be Very Bad Idea?

[Trippy]

How harmful is on-board video these days? Back when I looked last you actually had to solder-off connections to prevent on-board card from interfering. Anything changed since then?

You can disable them completely (hide them from the OS) in the BIOS.

Edit: actually some might still use jumpers (I doubt NVIDIA's are like that). Check the manual.

[sinij]

What about Asus M3A?

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3514704&CatId=2320 ?
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=149&l3=592&l4=0&model=1934&modelmenu=1

[Trippy]

No clue about that chipset.

[Trippy]

Considering that I don't plan to switch to Vista anytime soon, is getting motherboard with built-in video card (and never using it) would be Very Bad Idea?

As long as the rest of the chipset has the features and performance you need and you don't mind potentially paying a bit extra for a GPU you might never use (though some of the latest NVIDIA onboard GPUs can work together with plug-in NVIDIA GPUs) it doesn't matter.

[sinij]

Thank you for patiently answering my questions.