2.8 ghz + GA-8I848-PL + Win2000 = not impressed

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Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

Anyone else running this combo? I have to say so far I'm not impressed and
somewhat disappointed.

Machine is a GA-8I848-PL with boxed 2.8, ATI 9800 pro with a WD-360 SATA
Raptor hard drive with 1 gig of Kingston DDR-400 ram. Ran down to my buddies
store yesterday and with his fast net connection and loaded up Win 2000 PRO.

Installed in this order-

1) Win 2000 pro with SP3
2) LAN & chipset driver (from Gigabyte driver disk)
3) Downloaded ALL needed updates from MS
4) Installed Direct x 9b
5) Downloaded and installed newest drivers from ATI

The machine is slower to boot by almost a minute with the Raptor drive and
Win2000 then when I tested it with WinXP home and a 4 year old ATA-66 drive.
I understand that this most likely a problem with the way Win2000 boots and
not an hardware issue but something to note.

The Raptor drive (tested with HD tach 2.70) has a burst speed of 101 mb/s,
the old ATA-66 drive hooked to the IDE channel pops out 61 mb/s! Since the
IBM drive is rate for 66 mb/s I consider that acceptable, I'm annoyed that
the Raptor drive is rated at 150 mb/s and only hits 101 mb/s.

Makes me wonder what a regular ATA-100 or 133 drive would do performance
wise and I'm wondering if I wasted my money on the SATA drive when I could
have had a far larger ATA drive with the same performance.

Anyone have any insights on this? I did a brief search on the net last night
and came up somewhat dry for a clear answer aside from "dude hook up two in
a raid" which really isn't in the program, WD's site wasn't helpful either.

Some programs will lock up and I have to kill them in the task manager,
example-

Throwing a Maximum PC disk in the DVD drive will have the M-PC interface
launch and then freeze. Didn't do it under WinXp with SP1. (I'm trying
Win2000 BTW because I hate the WinXp interface and the way everything is
dumbed down) Even opening the control panel once in a great while will cause
it to hang, something the ATI drivers would cause under XP too. FryCry demo
had some texture issue on the rocks while tooling around, I'm going to try
some different setting later and see if it goes away.

Everything in the bios is set to modest settings, nothing is overclocked,
I'm even running Microsoft's memory testing program for a few hours to make
sure there nothing wrong with the ram.

Am I seeing some quirks of Win2000?

Gary
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

"Gary at SBC" <nospam@my_email.com> wrote in message
news:eU%vc.43$7X5.31@newssvr16.news.prodigy.com...
> Anyone else running this combo? I have to say so far I'm not impressed and
> somewhat disappointed.
>
> Machine is a GA-8I848-PL with boxed 2.8, ATI 9800 pro with a WD-360 SATA
> Raptor hard drive with 1 gig of Kingston DDR-400 ram. Ran down to my
buddies
> store yesterday and with his fast net connection and loaded up Win 2000
PRO.
>
> snip <
>
I'm just about to rebuild my 2 year old setup based on 8IEXP (845 chipset)
around new 8I875 mobo. The old PC ran Win2k for about a year and WinXP Pro
since then. Changed the CPU 3 times, ended up with 2.8/533 running at
3.5/668. The new PC will have two 80GB Hitachi SATA drives and two PATA
drives for video files. My reason for choosing the 8I875 is the CSA gigabit
Ethernet and SATA controllers not sitting on the PCI bus because the present
system suffers from PCI bus overload.
I prefer Win2k to XP but it does take longer to boot. Unfortunately have to
run XP for support purposes. I've made mine look like 2000 killing all the
special effects.
Current system is capable of sustained 49MB/s transfer rate between 2 hard
drives. I'm curious to see what the SATA drives can achieve.
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

How big is your boot partition, and what file format did you use ? Fat32,
NTFS ?

I am unimpressed with HDTach. I know it reports SCSI incorrectly, so it
doensnt have much value to me.

My ata133 Maxtor 8M cache drive burst to at about 85M/s according to HDTach
(65.3/16.0/44.9) with a vax-a, 2500+ Barton.

- NuTs

"Gary at SBC" <nospam@my_email.com> wrote in message
news:eU%vc.43$7X5.31@newssvr16.news.prodigy.com...
> Anyone else running this combo? I have to say so far I'm not impressed and
> somewhat disappointed.
>
> Machine is a GA-8I848-PL with boxed 2.8, ATI 9800 pro with a WD-360 SATA
> Raptor hard drive with 1 gig of Kingston DDR-400 ram. Ran down to my
buddies
> store yesterday and with his fast net connection and loaded up Win 2000
PRO.
>
> Installed in this order-
>
> 1) Win 2000 pro with SP3
> 2) LAN & chipset driver (from Gigabyte driver disk)
> 3) Downloaded ALL needed updates from MS
> 4) Installed Direct x 9b
> 5) Downloaded and installed newest drivers from ATI
>
> The machine is slower to boot by almost a minute with the Raptor drive and
> Win2000 then when I tested it with WinXP home and a 4 year old ATA-66
drive.
> I understand that this most likely a problem with the way Win2000 boots
and
> not an hardware issue but something to note.
>
> The Raptor drive (tested with HD tach 2.70) has a burst speed of 101 mb/s,
> the old ATA-66 drive hooked to the IDE channel pops out 61 mb/s! Since the
> IBM drive is rate for 66 mb/s I consider that acceptable, I'm annoyed that
> the Raptor drive is rated at 150 mb/s and only hits 101 mb/s.
>
> Makes me wonder what a regular ATA-100 or 133 drive would do performance
> wise and I'm wondering if I wasted my money on the SATA drive when I could
> have had a far larger ATA drive with the same performance.
>
> Anyone have any insights on this? I did a brief search on the net last
night
> and came up somewhat dry for a clear answer aside from "dude hook up two
in
> a raid" which really isn't in the program, WD's site wasn't helpful
either.
>
> Some programs will lock up and I have to kill them in the task manager,
> example-
>
> Throwing a Maximum PC disk in the DVD drive will have the M-PC interface
> launch and then freeze. Didn't do it under WinXp with SP1. (I'm trying
> Win2000 BTW because I hate the WinXp interface and the way everything is
> dumbed down) Even opening the control panel once in a great while will
cause
> it to hang, something the ATI drivers would cause under XP too. FryCry
demo
> had some texture issue on the rocks while tooling around, I'm going to try
> some different setting later and see if it goes away.
>
> Everything in the bios is set to modest settings, nothing is overclocked,
> I'm even running Microsoft's memory testing program for a few hours to
make
> sure there nothing wrong with the ram.
>
> Am I seeing some quirks of Win2000?
>
> Gary
>
>
>
>
>
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

> How big is your boot partition, and what file format did you use ? Fat32,
> NTFS ?

Just one drive and letter, NTFS.

> I am unimpressed with HDTach. I know it reports SCSI incorrectly, so it
> doensnt have much value to me.

Stopwatch agrees with it though as far as speed goes loading programs, just
not impressed with the SATA Rator drive. After doing more research I found
several hardware sites noted the same thing. In a RAID config it kicks butt,
as a single drive it's not much better then other units. It is dead quiet
though and has 5 year warrentee so it does have some saving graces.
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

a boot partition that large is a nasty thing to do to windwos...

-NuTs

"Gary at SBC" <nospam@my_email.com> wrote in message
news:I2hwc.5811$Hu4.1043@newssvr32.news.prodigy.com...
>
> > How big is your boot partition, and what file format did you use ?
Fat32,
> > NTFS ?
>
> Just one drive and letter, NTFS.
>
> > I am unimpressed with HDTach. I know it reports SCSI incorrectly, so it
> > doensnt have much value to me.
>
> Stopwatch agrees with it though as far as speed goes loading programs,
just
> not impressed with the SATA Rator drive. After doing more research I found
> several hardware sites noted the same thing. In a RAID config it kicks
butt,
> as a single drive it's not much better then other units. It is dead quiet
> though and has 5 year warrentee so it does have some saving graces.
>
>
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

Gary,

You seem to have some issues.

I suggest you start at the top and sort each one out in turn.

First, you seem to have hardware / driver problems. Running a memory tester
is a good idea - I suggest the extended tests. I would also try prime95 and
other diagnostic / problem highlighting tests including ensuring that your
graphics card is 100% with stable drivers. Check hardware in the control
panel for missing drivers.

W2K should boot quickly off a raptor. A recent benchmark indicated that of
all HDD's available at the moment, boot test for XP (yes XP does boot a lot
faster) indicated the 74 gig raptors booted fastest. The tests included
ultra320 SCSI drives too. The small raptor came in not too far behind its
big brother. You could do a HD suface scan just to rule out a duff drive.

Run sigverif.exe to feret out any non MS certified drivers.
Check each driver related file listed by sigverif to see if there are WHQL
certified drivers available from the manufacturers or chipset vendors.
Check your bios version, reset it, clear cmos properly and reload defaults.
Consider reflashing with the same bios - check the bios version with others
since once in a while a bios is released that should never have been.

I would consider stripping the system down to PCI vid card & Raptor only
with the bios set for all devices not needed disabled. If that doesn't have
the system starting as it should then there is a big problem. Do you have
any IDE cables dangling? Any suspect PSU connections?

Are you getting any BSOD's? If so these need sorting out. All h/w these days
should be 100% stable.

Lastly. If you don't like the look of XP then thats not a good excuse for
not using it. Compared to W2K it is extremely good. If you don't like how it
looks then change it. Once the looks have been changed there is sod all
difference between it and W2K apart from all the new functionality which is
really handy.

- Tim


"Gary at SBC" <nospam@my_email.com> wrote in message
news:eU%vc.43$7X5.31@newssvr16.news.prodigy.com...
> Anyone else running this combo? I have to say so far I'm not impressed and
> somewhat disappointed.
>
> Machine is a GA-8I848-PL with boxed 2.8, ATI 9800 pro with a WD-360 SATA
> Raptor hard drive with 1 gig of Kingston DDR-400 ram. Ran down to my
> buddies
> store yesterday and with his fast net connection and loaded up Win 2000
> PRO.
>
> Installed in this order-
>
> 1) Win 2000 pro with SP3
> 2) LAN & chipset driver (from Gigabyte driver disk)
> 3) Downloaded ALL needed updates from MS
> 4) Installed Direct x 9b
> 5) Downloaded and installed newest drivers from ATI
>
> The machine is slower to boot by almost a minute with the Raptor drive and
> Win2000 then when I tested it with WinXP home and a 4 year old ATA-66
> drive.
> I understand that this most likely a problem with the way Win2000 boots
> and
> not an hardware issue but something to note.
>
> The Raptor drive (tested with HD tach 2.70) has a burst speed of 101 mb/s,
> the old ATA-66 drive hooked to the IDE channel pops out 61 mb/s! Since the
> IBM drive is rate for 66 mb/s I consider that acceptable, I'm annoyed that
> the Raptor drive is rated at 150 mb/s and only hits 101 mb/s.
>
> Makes me wonder what a regular ATA-100 or 133 drive would do performance
> wise and I'm wondering if I wasted my money on the SATA drive when I could
> have had a far larger ATA drive with the same performance.
>
> Anyone have any insights on this? I did a brief search on the net last
> night
> and came up somewhat dry for a clear answer aside from "dude hook up two
> in
> a raid" which really isn't in the program, WD's site wasn't helpful
> either.
>
> Some programs will lock up and I have to kill them in the task manager,
> example-
>
> Throwing a Maximum PC disk in the DVD drive will have the M-PC interface
> launch and then freeze. Didn't do it under WinXp with SP1. (I'm trying
> Win2000 BTW because I hate the WinXp interface and the way everything is
> dumbed down) Even opening the control panel once in a great while will
> cause
> it to hang, something the ATI drivers would cause under XP too. FryCry
> demo
> had some texture issue on the rocks while tooling around, I'm going to try
> some different setting later and see if it goes away.
>
> Everything in the bios is set to modest settings, nothing is overclocked,
> I'm even running Microsoft's memory testing program for a few hours to
> make
> sure there nothing wrong with the ram.
>
> Am I seeing some quirks of Win2000?
>
> Gary
>
>
>
>
>
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

> First, you seem to have hardware / driver problems. Running a memory
tester
> is a good idea

Already done for several hours.

> Check hardware in the control
> panel for missing drivers.

No missing drivers nor conflicts.

> W2K should boot quickly off a raptor. A recent benchmark indicated that of
> all HDD's available at the moment, boot test for XP (yes XP does boot a
lot
> faster) indicated the 74 gig raptors booted fastest.

I have a 36 gig Raptor, a single not RAID configuration.

> The small raptor came in not too far behind its
> big brother. You could do a HD suface scan just to rule out a duff drive.

I will do so later today, still it has been noted on a few review & hardware
sites that the single Raptor may not be the hot setup. Figures, I find this
out after the fact ;-) Still as I mentioned before, noise and warrentee
coverage make up for it.

Win2000pro from what I'm told & read does boot slower then XP, I expected it
to boot faster though then my P3-700 WinSE machine with ATA-33 drives. It
smokes to the desktop in under a minute with network login after clearing
the dos boot menu.

> Run sigverif.exe to feret out any non MS certified drivers.
> Check each driver related file listed by sigverif to see if there are WHQL
> certified drivers available from the manufacturers or chipset vendors.

Will do so, the only drivers that did not install from the win2000pro disk
were the LAN drivers (direct from Intel) and ATI drivers (latest NON-BETA
9800pro drivers)

> Check your bios version, reset it, clear cmos properly and reload
defaults.

Done.

> Consider reflashing with the same bios - check the bios version with
others
> since once in a while a bios is released that should never have been.

Will look into it.

> I would consider stripping the system down to PCI vid card & Raptor only
> with the bios set for all devices not needed disabled. If that doesn't
have
> the system starting as it should then there is a big problem. Do you have
> any IDE cables dangling? Any suspect PSU connections?

No and no- Everything is tight and well routed with no excess or loose
cables.

> Are you getting any BSOD's?

Nope, just the odd program lockup which then needs to be killed in task
manager. The problems with FryCry are gone by changing some of the graphics
options in the control panel, dropping down the AA level seems to have fixed
that oddly enough.

> All h/w these days
> should be 100% stable.

I agree, hence my careful selection of name brand parts and not quite
"cutting edge" pieces.

> Lastly. If you don't like the look of XP then thats not a good excuse for
> not using it.

It's not just the look but also the fact MS hides everything it can from the
end user, I'm used to digging into the OS a bit more direct. MS has really
"dumbed down" XP in my opinion making it difficult sometimes to do things.

Gary
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

> It's not just the look but also the fact MS hides everything it can from
the
> end user, I'm used to digging into the OS a bit more direct. MS has really
> "dumbed down" XP in my opinion making it difficult sometimes to do things.

Change the theme, and change the default viev on a couple things (like
control panel ) and it will look and feel just like 2000 (but better). I
used to make the same arguments when i was afraid of XP and I was
comfortable with 2K.

Adapt.. overcome..

- NuTs
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

NuTCrAcKeR wrote:
> a boot partition that large is a nasty thing to do to windwos...

Why is that? Ah, that depends on which version of Windows then. XP Pro
SP1 doesn't have any issues yet with a FAT32 160 gig drive as one
partition. Perhaps the drive controller? The right drivers installed
on first boot to desktop for mobo/chipset and onboard controller gave me
no problems at all.
McG.

>
> -NuTs
>
> "Gary at SBC" <nospam@my_email.com> wrote in message
> news:I2hwc.5811$Hu4.1043@newssvr32.news.prodigy.com...
>>
>>> How big is your boot partition, and what file format did you use ?
>>> Fat32, NTFS ?
>>
>> Just one drive and letter, NTFS.
>>
>>> I am unimpressed with HDTach. I know it reports SCSI incorrectly,
>>> so it doensnt have much value to me.
>>
>> Stopwatch agrees with it though as far as speed goes loading
>> programs, just not impressed with the SATA Rator drive. After doing
>> more research I found several hardware sites noted the same thing.
>> In a RAID config it kicks butt, as a single drive it's not much
>> better then other units. It is dead quiet though and has 5 year
>> warrentee so it does have some saving graces.
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

"NuTCrAcKeR"

> a boot partition that large is a nasty thing to do to windwos...

Explain please how a drive that size (37 gig) is a problem with Win2000Pro
and NTSF?

Win 95/98 perhaps.
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

Gary at SBC wrote:
> "NuTCrAcKeR"
>
>> a boot partition that large is a nasty thing to do to windwos...
>
> Explain please how a drive that size (37 gig) is a problem with
> Win2000Pro and NTSF?
>
> Win 95/98 perhaps.

No actually I didn't have problems with even a 60g hd and 98SE.
McG.
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

> Change the theme, and change the default viev on a couple things (like
> control panel ) and it will look and feel just like 2000 (but better). I
> used to make the same arguments when i was afraid of XP and I was
> comfortable with 2K.

It's more then that- In Win98SE you can setup anything you want the way you
want- In XP it's all about MS Wizards directing you to do what they want. XP
Pro might be different, have not had a chance to look into it.
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

Gary,

Is your raptor drive running as an IDE drive? IE in bios you can set the
SATA controllers to impersonate an IDE interface. This negates any need for
drivers as they appear as plain IDE. If this is the case, you may want to
look at reconfiguring the drive as SATA, or if the controller provides for
it as a RAID ready SATA configuration - this applies to Intel ICH5R
controllers and no doubt others too.

Tell tail signs would be your disc drive hanging off IDE in device manager,
and no SATA or SCSI devices.

Check your bios manual and drivers.

- Tim



"Gary at SBC" <nospam@my_email.com> wrote in message
news:3kwwc.1987$GQ1.530@newssvr15.news.prodigy.com...
>
> "NuTCrAcKeR"
>
>> a boot partition that large is a nasty thing to do to windwos...
>
> Explain please how a drive that size (37 gig) is a problem with Win2000Pro
> and NTSF?
>
> Win 95/98 perhaps.
>
>
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

> Gary,
>
> Is your raptor drive running as an IDE drive? IE in bios you can set the
> SATA controllers to impersonate an IDE interface.

The Gigabyte board did so automatic, it remaped the drives.

> drivers as they appear as plain IDE. If this is the case, you may want to
> look at reconfiguring the drive as SATA, or if the controller provides for
> it as a RAID ready SATA configuration - this applies to Intel ICH5R
> controllers and no doubt others too.

Thanks, I'll look into that.

I was rather surprised that no drivers were required for boot up.

> Check your bios manual and drivers.

I did, endlessly and looked at Gigabytes website too. Almost no info at all.
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

All the desktop OS's i use are the pro versions, since workstation 3.51. I
havent done the consumer desktop stuff since 3.11 for workgroups.

-NuTs

"Gary at SBC" <nospam@my_email.com> wrote in message
news:SMDwc.5752$n65.3426@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com...
>
> > Change the theme, and change the default viev on a couple things (like
> > control panel ) and it will look and feel just like 2000 (but better). I
> > used to make the same arguments when i was afraid of XP and I was
> > comfortable with 2K.
>
> It's more then that- In Win98SE you can setup anything you want the way
you
> want- In XP it's all about MS Wizards directing you to do what they want.
XP
> Pro might be different, have not had a chance to look into it.
>
>
 
Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

"Tim" <Tim@NoSpam.com> wrote in message news:c9s67b$qd2$1@lust.ihug.co.nz...


> W2K should boot quickly off a raptor.

I remapped the SATA drive so it was configured as an SATA and not a remapped
IDE, no change at all.

Spent a few hours using it and it ran well, all the bugs seem to be
settling. HD speed is still a disappointment though.

The DDR-400 ram gets hot! 120F under full load! I'm going to get some
heatsinks on those puppies.
 
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