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Good Morning All,
Sarkazztic, You are doing just fine. You are not "hogging" the thread. In fact we all learn by what each other posts. Think of it this way. We have to talk about something and we can't build BT until the components all come in.
Jaak, I believe this new PCI card for the Compaq will go right in without much problem. The installation wizard will look at it as an additional piece of hardware and detect it as such. Just follow the manual I would think. Well actually an instruction sheet.
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sarrkazztic,
The 1.81 voltage reading you are seeing is likely not "real". It is likely being overstated somewhat (as much as 5%). The sensor/software combinations are generally not perfect (not for temp readings either). Fortunately, the readings tend to be on the high side. In any case... Even at 1.81 you are within the Athlon Spec. If it were me though, I might tend to lower it a bit just to reduce heating some (not that you have a heating problem).
With your overall setup the likelihood of being able to go above the 111mhz FSB speed was/is small. In fact, you should consider yourself lucky you can keep it stable at the 111mhz speed you have it (many can't).
Your problem is not the voltage, so I would not raise that any. Your limiting factor is the fact that in overclocking the FSB you are not only overclocking the clock frequency used in deriving the cpu's speed, you are also overclocking the memory, ISA, PCI and AGP buses. The timings (speeds) of these buses is a direct fraction (or multiple in the case of memory) of the FSB. As examples, with 200mhz DDR systems such as yours the AGP bus is timed at two thirds the FSB, and the PCI bus is timed at one third. The upward tolerances of these other buses (really the devices on them) is fairly small. The cpu you have could likely handle a bus speed much higher than 111. But your isa/pci/agp devices cannot.
Now with some bioses you can adjust (some) the ratio of the other buses to the FSB. But on yours you cannot alter any timings except the memory (and only to 100 or 133mhz). What that means is at your current 111mhz fsb your PCI bus is running at about 37mhz and your AGP bus us running at about 74mhz. And with your setup that's all the devices on these buses can deal with (without errors/lockups).
Bottomline: the board you have is not well suited to overclocking. It's too restrictive in terms of bios settings. At 111mhz you're sqeezing about all you can out of things using front-side bus overclocking.
Another problem with your board (the bios actually) is that you cannot set/change the cpu multiplier (as I remember). If you could you might well be able to squeeze some more out of the cpu. Many of the 1.2 Athlons (with certain cores) are not multiplier locked. If your's was/is one you could try upping the multipler (from 12). But as I say, on your board that isn't viable.
Note: When the QOH built her machine she used FSB overclocking also to get a little more umph from her machine. In her case she only raised it by like 8 mhz (to 108mhz) as I remember. It ran fine for months. Then one day she started getting errors while playing a particular game. In her case it was evident that the problem was with the overclocked effect on the AGP bus (and thus her graphics card). But until the graphics subsystem was exercised in a particular fashion everything was fine. She ended up setting her FSB back to normal and the problems went away. The point: sometimes it can take a while for a problem with an overclocked system to surface. So keep an eye on things and factor in the overclocked FSB when diagnosing any problems that come along.
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[This message has been edited by DrMDJ (edited 09-19-2001).]
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Jaak (et al),
The 128mb (or other number depending on how you calculate it) limitation is an ATA specification limit, not simply a bios limitation. As such, at this point it in time it applies to any situation that would require addressing (through LBA) space above this, in a RAID situation or not.
As a side note... The most recent update(s) for Windows is needed in order to handle partitioning and formatting of drives above 64 gig (or thereabouts). It should be noted though that while these will allow, and do provide, the capability to partition and format the latest large drives, the number of cylinders shown will never appear greater than 99. This is because there are only 2 digits provided for showing the number of cylinders. The true cylinders are see, just not reflected.
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[This message has been edited by DrMDJ (edited 09-19-2001).]
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DrMDJ, As always just in time with a timely comment. That explains something I was curious about on barriers concerning hard drives. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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No problem Goose. I just say some of the posts, including Jaaks, and... A few months ago I went through this with a guy here who was trying to use something like 2 70gig drives in a raid arrangement. Couldn't get it to work right, even though the system could handle the individual large drives. He was surprised to find that problem was the combined capacity and the ATA limitation. Swapped the drives for 2 60s and all was well.
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[This message has been edited by DrMDJ (edited 09-19-2001).]
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I wish we could give everybody info like this. It could save them big bucks if they have an idea of what hardware will interface with what hardware before they spend the money.
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By the way...
Train, I see where you bought a controller card a short time ago along with a 40 gig drive and had some problems. This causes me to (re)raise an issue that has come up over on the Win98 (and this) forum several times in the last few months.
I have seen problems similar to your's (as well as other manifestations) with drives above 32gig under both Win98, FE and SE. I know the write-up on the MS site regarding a patch for these drives only references issues with Scandisk. But, the problems are more general than that. Sometimes the problems show immediately, sometimes down the road. But they seem to show sooner or later. As a result I encourage anyone with a (or buying) a drive larger than 32 gig to apply a/the patch available from MS.
As I say, the write-up on the patch talks about only scandisk. But the fix itself addresses (replaces) modules beyond simply Scandisk. It includes and update to ESDI_506.PDR, the protected mode driver for IDE type devices. So again, any time a 32+ gig drive is being used the patch should be applied. I have seen a lot of problems go away once it was in place.
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GG1,
It can be tough. There is a lot of hardware (and software) out there these days. And people get caught up in it all and just buy stuff. The problem is that there are interactions between all of what's available. The vendors (generally) really do try to do their best to have everything "get along" well. But there is just so much (and I repeat, software plays a role in this)and there can be so many complexities that it can be difficult to cover all the bases. And in some cases it just isn't possible. So part of the responsibility lies with the buyer/user. They need to put more of an effort in to understanding how this stuff works (alone and together). They need to do some homework. It isn't a matter of having to become an expert, it's matter of just not being guided by impulse to buy alone. Granted, problems/issues will still happen, but...
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Well said DrMDJ. And that's where sites such as VirDr comes in. But initially most peoples first computer will be off the shelf from lack of knowledge. Mine was also. Then you start learning. My Compaq failed and was upraded and repaired at the same time. And as all know I am building what I want now. Again that knowledge needed for me to do so came from members of forums.
There has been a tremendous increase in the number of people improving there hardware in their computers as well as outright building on VirDr in the past year and they are sharing their experiences. And that is pretty neat as people will enjoy there individual computing experiences more. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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[This message has been edited by greengoose1 (edited 09-19-2001).]
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huh, weird, isn't it?
if I read this right
one could do four times 128 normal, non raid
two disks 128 raid mirrored (128)
four disks 64GB resulting in 128 striped-mirrored)
but not four times 128 in any kind of raid
is that correct?
weird.
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Kind regards, Jaak
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DrMDJ
I have the upgrade and both the 30 and the 40 did the same, changed brands of harddisk and had success. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
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Jaak,
The idea is that under the current ATA specification, such as is used to communicate with IDE type drives, there are 28 bits to work with for addressing sectors (the smallest addressable unit) on a given volume (a "volume" being one or more drives that are seen and treated by the system as one unit, efectively one drive). The 28 bits give you 2**28 of addressability, with a sector being 512 bytes. This amounts to the 128GB (or 137gb depending on how you define a "gig") limitation.
Not to worry though, the new schemes to expand on this are being worked. After all, we all know that 128gb is simply not enough space to collect all the worthless and unnecessary stuff we accumulate on our drives. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
PS. remember, we're just taking ide drives here, not scsi.
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Train,
30 gig was a problem as well? Interesting. Just chalk it up to another one of those subtle nuances between devices.
I had an experience a while back where I had two identical Maxtor drives (same size, model) I was putting on a Promise Ultra100 card. I merrily tried booting up to a dos/command prompt to fdisk and format the drives. No matter what configuration I used, at the DOS level (operating system didn't matter), only one of the drives (didn't matter which one) would be recognized/seen, and only when it was attached to the primary controller on the card. The resolution was indeed strange. I fdisked and formatted one drive, got windows installed on it, then from a dos prompt in windows I was able to fdisk and format the second drive. Once all were fdisked and formatted there were no subsequent problems seeing and accessing either/both drives regardless of whether is was in windows or dos prompt. Like I said, odd. But both drives continue to function without incident.
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[This message has been edited by DrMDJ (edited 09-19-2001).]
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I know what an LED is but why have a connection on the PCI card?
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GG1,
If I didn't know better I would have sworn your question was posted by jaak. https://discussions.virtualdr.com/
Are you referring to your new controller card? If so, the connector is there so it can be connected to the led that shows drive activity, otherwise disk activity on drives attached to the controller card will not produce the blinking led display. On the case before me now I have two activity LEDs. So I connect one up to a promise ultra card and the other to the mainboard connector. If you only have one LED you'll have to decide which you want to hook up.
If the above has nothing to do with what you were asking then I didn't understand the question correctly.
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