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Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2001 6:11 am Post subject:

Well, I have setup my 'new' machine which was destined to crunch some massive WUs, just to find out it is slower than the 350 I was running on. Here are the facts

Slot A AMD 750 - new
MSI K7 Pro motherboard, used with the amd chipsets
384 meg CAS 2 Crucial Memory
6.5 Gbyte HD 'seagate or samsung' don't remember
Running W2K sp2

The system seams to fly until it gets into loading windows. I ran SiSoft Sandra on it and recieved a rating of 182 on my CPU. My work pc, running a 750 Duron, is scoring in the 1000 to 2000 range (don't remember wetstone, or drystone)

My WU times went from 24 hrs on my home pc to 31 hours.

I completed a fresh install of w2k and did not recieve any real boost in performance. I have not changed any of the bios settings, ok, I did - but I set them back.

What am I missing!!! This is ridiculous.
Really need this WU cruncher, that and I want what I paid for.

Thanks.

"Slimy? Mudhole? My home this is." ~ Yoda

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2001 6:57 am Post subject:

If it only slows down whilst loading Windows I would think that it is either a driver or hard drive problem.

Run the drives benchmark in SiSoft Sandra and see if there are any problems. Take a note of which mode the drive is running in (PIO/DMA/UDMA). It is possible that you disabled UDMA support in the BIOS, but also check that options such as 'IDE prefetch mode' and 'IDE HDD block mode' (if available) are set to auto or enabled (sorry, I'm not at all familiar with MSI boards).

I would also suggest removing the 128Mb stick of RAM and seeing if the system is any quicker with just the 256Mb or just the 128Mb - though I doubt mis-matched memory is the problem if both sticks are Crucial CAS 2.

If all else fails try downloading the latest set of drivers for your mobo from MSI's web-site, or downloading a SMART status checker from the manufacturer of your HD.

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2001 10:38 am Post subject:

Well, I worked on the machine last night and solved the problem. At some point during install, I had adjusted the processor speed from 100 mhz to 110 mhz (and a couple other variants), as well as the cpu voltage. I had set them all back to the original condition. But the problem persisted, next i went into the bios and reset all values to thier default, making my necessray changes but leaving the two mentioned settins alone. And badda boom badda bang, she worked great.

go in make those changes again, and i suddenly have a 486.
What I don't understand, is that the two offending settings were manually set to the correct settings by me, but did not correct the problem till i hit reset settings in the bios. (which left them at the same setting).

I don't know, but that 750 is a whole lot better than the 350 it replaced! (and cost less than $75!!!! :hapfac01:

Can we say, crunch more WU's. coming up on 200... no one noticed when i hit 100 [ Sad

]

"Slimy? Mudhole? My home this is." ~ Yoda

Edited by - spitdriver on 11/14/2001 13:41:22

Edited by - spitdriver on 11/14/2001 13:42:21

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2001 12:57 pm Post subject:

I know that on mu asus board with a slot a 700 it cant act like a slower comp if i reset the values ( i think it defaults to 350) but your times should definetly improve now. On my slot a 700 oc'ed to 735 i get about 10-11 hours per wu with win 2k.

Extreme Computers

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2001 2:47 pm Post subject:

download the new bois and flash it so you start with a clean one.....

-g