News SB Live! Asus 6600 Celeron450A LiveWare 2 Viper 550 GF256

News (old):

Problems with stability and overclocking after installing 3d memory module (see the post below) were resolved by swapping two modules in other slots. The cause it seems is that I put two (identical) modules in the first channel and the new in the second channel. So I got two double sided modules on the same channel, which is bad. After swapping modules I got DS+SS and DS combination that works fine.

Installed one more memory module (total to 3G), but got only 2816MB available (It is limit for any 32bit OS due to address space reserved for PCI devices). To get more memory one need to use 64bit OS (but it use twice memory for itself and you will get tough time looking for 64bit drivers for your old hardware) and probable switch on memory remap (which slows down system). So it looks like after 3G you need to start with at least 8G. Also I had to stop overclocking my system as I got two memory modules on one channel which do not allows to overclock memory.

To make CPU Fan noise lower you just need to remove dust out of its heatsink! And to lower noise from HDD vibration (very loud low frequency noise) I had to screw them through rubber strips.

After I have installed new videocard, the noise level of integrated audio became too high, it is even audible without speakers or headphone attached! To be more comfortable when using headphones I "found" the old but still great audiocard Creative Audigy 2.

My old good keyboard have not survive the full glass of compote. I have disassembled and cleaned it out but the water with electricity corroded the spattered conductors so the half of buttons did not work. Working and gaming without keyboard turned out to be very pathetic, and on the next day I have bought the new shining Microsoft USB  Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000!

On the last week I was very impressed when PCI-X 64bit 133MHz SCSI controller fit into the plain PCI (32bit 33MHz) slot on the mATX motherboard and started to work!

Start using wide screen monitor at work. The overall impression is good. It is really wide enough to fit additional panels in Eclipse and our main application structure fits good. But it is a little shorter on vertical side and too wide to view internet pages.

Asus with release of the new bios (0706) for P5B-VM motherboard caused me much troubles to find out why CPU temperature became 10C higher. After month of searching I found out that the reason is disabled by default HECI interface.

Tired to wait for Epson Stylus Photo 950 and BT848 drivers for Vista x64 (64-bit), I have uninstalled it and installed Vista x86 (32-bit). Now I have no problem with drivers (Epson appeared to have Vista x86 only drivers for some months but keeps it almost secret) and program compatibility, although lost the possibility to increase my memory to 4 or 8GB (no big problem for the nearest 2 years).

At last (a year pass) there is a SoundMAX drivers version for Windows XP that supports Stereo mix record source! Now I can use graphic equalizer of my Mozart Media LAB case.

The performance of two modern hard drives in RAID0 even on older system is outstanding - see here.

Today is very difficult to upgrade a computer just replacing one or two parts. Usually you have to buy a completely  new one and find where to dump old one. But after some thoughts I found a way to divide upgrade to some stages: case and hard drive, then CPU + mainboard and some memory, then videocard and more memory. At the new year break I have already replaced the case and added new hard drive.

In spite of the fact that motherboard on my computer is plain old AGP there is still possible to upgrade videocard to the modern Shader 3.0 models. So I got one. It is Gigabyte GV-N76G256D-RH (GeForce 7600GS based). It is cheap, fast (4x faster then my previous Radeon 9500 Pro) and silent (no fan). Supplied with small external fan it became really useful :)

My long way to the real digital SLR camera is finished. Now I am proud owner of late Konica-Minolta Dynax 5D and couple of cheap but great lenses.

After many years of LS120 exploitation have wrote some additions to its review.

Had to lower down bus frequency of my overclocked CPU from 183MHz down to 179MHz to be able to play in the games without crashes.

In spite of the first unsuccessful attempt to upgrade firmware on my digital camera (a year ago), resulted in two months of repair I just have repeated it and this time all was fine. The first try confirmed the rule "If it works don't fix it!". But the new firmware for Minolta A1 supposed to increase its performance with memory cards, so it was difficult to resist to the temptation to upgrade. The first attempt was to write half-official firmware with instruction of the old firmware and seems it was the very reason that camera became corrupted after it. So the second time I used official firmware and obediently used supplied with it installation procedure.

To help my friend avoid digital photo repair service with its long wait time, a lot of money spent and etc., just have repaired Canon A75 myself. It had some pins in compact flash connector broken and bound. Compact flash connector seems to be the big problem, it easily broke.

Have repaired some minor but very annoying problems on my decent mobile phone.

Do not fix what works!

Another present from colleagues - wireless laser mouse Logitech MX1000, the best you can get :)
There is a firmware for Minolta Z2 that adds support for RAW files!

Have replaced CD-RW and DVD-ROM with single DVD±RW NEC ND-2510A. Now I can record (and read) every modern media.

Update to bad memory module that was refused to work at 166MHz. I've conducted some more experiments and found out that it works very bad at tCAS=2.5T at any frequency below 180MHz and higher 133MHz. And what very strange, the higher frequency - higher stability of the memory! Farther more, it works only in the 3d slot (the one nearest to chipset) and only alone in the channel.

There was information on one of the news site that CD-R disks loose information recorded on them in about 5 years. So I've took one of my CD-R recorded more then five years ago and scan it with Nero CD-DVD Speed CD Quality test. It was superb quality red on 44x speed, with one unreliable zone on sessions border. Disk 2x (yes, 5 years ago there were such speeds), manufacturer was Kodak. Another one was TDK x, recorded 4 years ago. Also superb quality red at 48x speed. So do not believe to all that news site write...

New nVIDIA IDE drivers (4.12) solved my problem with CD-ROM and DVD-ROM working in PIO mode only, now I can freely choose in which mode they will work. But how this drivers support plain HDD I do not know.

I found the reason of problems with memory timings and system stability described by me early. It was the third memory module! Right after the moment I removed it, all start to behave fine. So now I am back to cope with only 512M.

My motherboard support only Athlon XP CPU up to 3200+ (i.e. socket A). But now the fastest CPU are Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 to buy which I need also buy new motherboard, what I am not going to do. So I waited while the fastest socket A CPU price will fall down to 100$. But I tired to wait and decided to but CPU with lower speed and overclock it instead :) So I bought Athlon XP 2800+ (2083MHz internal clock). As I were unable to change it multiplier I had to overclock it by FSB, and succeeded in it! CPU run easily and stable at 180Mhz FSB (2255MHz internal clock). The only problem I had is memory (and probably chipset). System ran very unstable on synchronous mode (FSB clock equal to memory clock) and system fails to boot when I tried to slow down memory access and set CAS latency to 3T, but to my great surprise system run well with memory clock set to 216MHz with the same tCAS=2.5T!

I found out that if you switches off digitized input on nForce2 integrated audio, then also rear speakers will be switched off!

As my scanner produce large images and modern games require more memory to run smooth I have doubled amount of installed memory. Now, for instance, game IL2FF loads mission 5 times faster!

Calibrate temperature of probes, see motherboard review.

I have tested nVIDIA nForce 2 IGP/SPP ATA drivers (nothing special that worse trouble to install them).

To complete my digital photo camera and be able to keep and correct all my photos in one place, I have bought scanner - Epson Perfection 2400 Photo.

Have just downloaded 3DMark 2003 and ran some tests. The first - I have need to increase voltage of CPU up to 1.8V to make my system more stable while overclocked (by increasing CPU bus frequency from 133MHz to 137MHz leading to result of 1780MHz), without that 3DMark simply hanged up computer during the tests. The second - results almost are not changed from overclocking CPU but changed proportionally with overclocking videocard.

And now (many thanks to Luda who agreed to bought old scrap) I have upgraded the rest of my system. Videocard become DirectX 9 compatible - ATI Radeon 9500 Pro (I know that some GeForce4 models are faster and there are Radeon 9700 models that are the fastest till GeForce FX will come, but why should I pay so much money for them?). Also in order to fix problem with high temperature of CPU and other components I have changed case for Codegen 8012 (good case, much better then most ones I have seen, although not ideal). Too speed up CDR/CDRW recording (although I use it very rear) the CDRW drive was also upgraded to Teac W548E.

Two more years passed. New hardware upgrade. New motherboard - Asus A7N8X Deluxe (a lot of features, including 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 FireWare ports, and many others...), with new CPU - AMD Athlon 2100+ (1740MHz) and new memory - PC3200. As it supposed the average performance of the computer is increased on two times, even video system. Also I have received a small present - the glorious Epson Stylus PHOTO 950 printer!

See about BIOS recovery...

While revising links to my hardware devices specification pages at its manufactures sites I found out that many of them are no longer exist. It seems that a device that was produced two or three years ago manufacturers treat it as obsolete and remove any information about one. So I decided to keep my hardware specifications at my site.

I found incompatibility problems on CUSL2 motherboard with Intel Application Accelerator installed and Yamaha CDRW recorder. IAA in spite of its name is just old plain Intel Busmastering driver, and as it appeared has the same problem - it enables DMA transfer on all connected devices and does not allow you to disable it. Although this is good for most systems some (or even almost all) CDROM recorders have problems with DMA mode. In my case Yamaha just read data with errors and even does not report it! Unfortunately the solution to this problems is just uninstall IAA.

ISA bus is almost dead. When I released that many of new motherboards have not ISA slots I understand that must find a new modem, as old mine was internal ISA. After market investigation I bought Acorp 56EMS external. I hope that COM ports will live some years more...

I get and slightly "hacked" (rewrite INF file to include my soundcard revision to allow to install) the newest drivers for Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value series soundcards, the version that is shipped with new OEM cards. In contrary to the version that is marked as latest driver for Windows ME at official Creative site, this one is the real WDM driver, that mean it contains emu10k1.sys the same type that used in Windows 2000, instead of older type emu10k1.vxd. What most useful this newest driver give to me is the possibility to use hibernation mode under Windows ME (and Windows 2000). And what is give the hibernation mode? It gives you the possibility to power off your computer with the power button and the after some time to restore its previous state after cold start. This looks like the plain standby mode, but the great difference is that computer is completely powered off - no noise, no unexpected wake ups, no worries about powered on devices in your house while you are far away, etc. But unfortunately hibernation works on my hardware with current drivers unreliably - I had to disable Aver TV Phone (as it no longer supported and has not WDM drivers) and periodically after wake up from hibernation computer refuses to execute any game. Note: if you need to determine which device prevents your system (WinME) from hibernation support look for file nohiber.txt in the Windows directory.

In order to catch runaway train of progress I have bought a new motherboard (Asus A7V) and CPU AMD Duron 700. Upgrade was fine. I have easily overclocked CPU up to 875 (just shortened L1 pins with pencil) but spent almost a day to make Windows work with my USB mouse (the solution was simple - disable USB Legacy option in BIOS, but it was difficult to find - just try & see method).

Time goes, new games (e.g. Diablo II) work on systems with 128M of memory with periodic delays and moderate disk activity. So I decide that some more memory would be very useful and indeed after adding of 64M DIMM module to the system all became fine. Now I have 192M of memory, you may think that this amount is uncommon, but when why should I spend more money only to set "common" size of memory? By the way, today many resellers offer memory modules marked as PC133, but that almost always is not true - if the memory module is able to work at 133MHz clock it is not mean that it completely satisfy to very strict standard PC133. Also some salesmen in order to convince you that specific module is PC133 they show you last digit (that follows dash) in model number printed on the memory chip and said that -6 (-7 or -8) means that it have 6ns (or whatever they want) and so it PC133 that allows them to grab more of your money. But it is not true! So to be sure that you buy best possible memory module - check it model number on the producer web site, it must have tCAS=2 at 133Mhz frequency.

There was a discussion on Riva News concerning whether Windows 98SE halts the CPU when it is idle automatically or special program is required. I have checked it myself and find out that on any Windows 98 (and on Windows ME) temperature of CPU in idle mode (when no heavy calculations performed) is falling down but only in ACPI mode (when the root device in devices list is "ACPI BIOS") and is not changing in PnP BIOS mode. If you interested in cooling quality tests see this article (russian).

As my old Genius EasyScroll mouse refused to work in Windows ME in ACPI mode I decide to buy a new one. The best mouse at the market now is Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer mouse. So let it be mine.

I bought myself the gift - newest videocard Asus 6600 Deluxe based on the most modern and fastest graphics chip today - GeFORCE 256. So take a look at my notes.

I have bought the 3D glasses - Asus VR100! It is miracle! I write review of them, the draft (russian) available here (update: it was separate upgrade product, now I use embedded in Asus6600 Deluxe version). Some people asked me which speakers I use, the answer is Jazz Hipster JS-300. Unfortunately webmaster of www.jazzspeakers.com decide that this product is old and removed JS300 description, so I made my own.

Prices on hard drives constantly drop down, and very quickly, so when by chance I sough how much is average price for 13G, I immediately have bought it.

Some disappointments about DIMM manufacturing appeared at the end of Celeron review. Read my translations on Russian of articles about Dolby Digital General and FAQ and Dolby Digital and soundcards (also published at iXBT), on Russian. English speakers can read original documents here.

At the top of this page, in the list of links you see the new link to the newest drivers page. There I am planning to post info of and links to the latest drivers and software for hardware with that I have deal.

I have added some paragraphs to my Viper 550 review with overclocking. Also some new word-links add/updated.

My old hardware

Other:

Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer

There are some problems with this mouse and my computer. The first is OS and mouse drivers - I was unable to make it see all five buttons. The second is the lack of free interrupts - BIOS assigned the same interrupt for TV tuner and USB controller, so when I switch on TV all system freezes forever. This problem I have solved by manually adjusting interrupt number for TV tuner card.

BIOS recovery

Bad experience - good experience. The repair of damaged BIOS.
This story began when I saw a link to the German FTP site of Asus with the latest revision 1006 of BIOS for A7V motherboard. Of course I have downloaded it. It was dated 15.02.2001. And write it down into my motherboard. But when I restarted my computer and entered into BIOS setup instead of clocks I saw the garbage. This is wrong BIOS though I and tried to boot Windows ME to reprogram BIOS for the older version. But Windows have not boot. Bad. I tried to boot from recovery diskette - successful. But when I tried to reprogram BIOS the flash program constantly wrote me that verify (read after write) failed, and this repeated many times. In the end I had to power off computer but when I switch it later on it was able only to show me start BIOS screen and hang up :(
So I damage my BIOS and need to fix it! I take my phone and start searching for someone who has the similar motherboard, fortunately I found one in only a hour of travel with brand new A7V133 motherboard. The recovery process was not very hard as it seems although we do it the first time in our life but I had some experience on working with flash chips. At first I boot A7V133 with its BIOS into DOS, then carefully unplugged flash chips from the my motherboard and from the good one. (You can do it as on modern motherboards flash used only on boot time when BIOS itself is uncompressed and stored in the shadow RAM area. But you should be there very careful as you can not use metallic instruments as motherboard is running at full speed! Also you must extract chip from both sides by the turn as if you pull it from one side at once you will certainly bind the pins or even broke them!) Then I inserted (not firmly - just to make contact) my flash chip with damaged BIOS onto the socket on working motherboard and run flash write program and successfully program it with old BIOS version (of course program warned me that it is BIOS for other motherboard). After powering off system and replacing flash chips back on their proper places both systems work fine.
The story ends successfully. At the end I want to thank Yaroslav Bogatov for his time and motherboard.

Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value

(For Russian version go here)

First opinion: nothing so much special to talk about :(.

Second view: After a month of thoughts and purchasing of the second pair of speakers I should say it's great! At my opinion you have the following advantages when you change your old ISA soundcard onto the new PCI one (Sound Blaster Live! Value of cause):

To see detailed specifications of this board look here.

LiveWare 2.0

ASUS 6600 Deluxe (GeFORCE 256)

I wrote (and constantly update) short review of this product:

This videocard from Asustek Inc. is based on the most modern and the fastest graphic chip today (on PC market of cause) GeFORCE256 (GF256) designed by nVIDIA. More ...

Who's made your DIMM?

I always suspect that when you bought the memory module and hear that is made by X is not mean that entire module made by it. In most cases it mean that only chips themselves made by X. And of cause you can always check it by investigating memory chip part number. But who made the PCB and soldered the chips was unknown to anybody until present time.

So when I got a link to the program that claimed to show the content of SPD (special ROM that keeps memory parameters) on the DIMM SDRAM modules I downloaded it as soon as possible and run. The result was very disappointed: no one of all memory modules I have (in my home computer and some on work ones) was from the specified manufacturer and only one has right information about chips installed on it and realistic serial number. And taking in consideration that tCAS and other timings programmed in the SPD also may be incorrectly written by unknown man assembled this modules, don't be very happy when you see in BIOS that your memory can support CAS=2 at 100MHz (as I did :( ), but better check chip parameters at its manufacturer site.

You can download this very useful program named DIMM_ID from my site there.

Intel Celeron 450A

In some Moscow computer shops you can buy usual Intel Celeron 300A, but it successfully can be overclocked upto 450MHz. For example visit firm "Oldi" and buy Celeron300A model SL32A and see what I get from it here.

OK. Some time ago, when Intel Celeron 266 have appeared, many people began to abuse it because of one had very bad performance in office applications, like usual Pentium MMX 200. Time passed and curious people found that Celeron 266 can be easily run on some 440BX chipset based motherboards at 100MHz of system bus and so had Celeron 400! They run tests and found that overclocked Celeron compared by its performance in games with expansive (at that time) Intel Pentium II 300. To see performance graphics visit Tom's hardware site and look at this.

In the summer of 1998 Intel have began to sale the new version of Celeron - Celeron 300A, while to the name was added only a letter, to the performance was added significant burst due to 128Kb level 2 cache on chip running on the CPU frequency! (Pentium II has 512Kb L2 cache running the half of CPU freelance and plain Celeron had no cache at all). Celeron 300A have about the same performance like Pentium II 300 in them most applications. But due to its onchip cache running full CPU core frequency it inherited plain Celeron's high ability to overclock.

So, let's begin my story. As I said in the hardware news section, I have bought some Intel Celeron 300A processors in the Oldi computer hardware sale firm. Their number was "98420239-SL32A, 300A/66 MALAY". And what was great they started to work as 450MHz without any special efforts like voltage changing, extra cooling, on my Asus P2B motherboard. When I try to run it faster at 103x4.5 462MHz, it boot successfully, but Windows 95 does not have a chance :(. By the way, I use good PC100 SDRAM memory: LGS72V661641CT7J (CAS=3T) and HY57V658020ATC10S (CAS=2T), with memory timing settings in the BIOS set as fast as possible (2-2-2, etc).

Some overclocking recommendations. The first question is your motherboard type. If it is based on the 440BX chipset and does not have auto system bus frequency determination, you can just set 100MHz and get 450MHz CPU. If you motherboard has auto 66/100 switcher, you should block some special pins on the cartridge with scotch. And if you do not have BX chipset, I recommend you try to set 75MHz, this settings does not harm your system stability, nor warm too high your CPU, but you get extra 12% of overall performance. And do not forget to use good memory!

If your computer do not only used as game machine, but also as internet browser and or you often run office application, infrequently used processor at full scale, you should run special "cool down" utilities like CPUIDLE. They sit as Windows idle process and stops the processor when it is not used by HLT command. It help me cool down the temperature of my processor running at 450MHz from 41ВєC to 32ВєC while I write this article.

LiveWare 2.0

Well, we, the owners of Creative SoundBlaster Live! and Live! Value, waited long time and now get latest drivers updated named LiveWare 2.0. I will try to shortly describe my impressions of what have been declared and what we finally get when downloaded 28MB and installed it:

Resume: download and install it immediately.

Diamond Viper 550 AGP review

This was news someday

TNT in Moscow

Starting 02 October 1998, some Moscow computer hardware sale companies, announced nVIDIA RIVA TNT based 3D video accelerator cards. The first was IMPULSE company, they said that will sell Creative Graphic Blaster TNT AGP/PCI for $198. But at present moment (05 October) they have nothing :(. Also at Reactor Critical was a news that well-known as advanced hardware supplier Moscow company IP Labs plans 06 October to start sell Diamond Viper 550!

Short specifications (for a whole list see nVIDIA or Diamond Multimedia sites):

I waited this card for a long time, actually from the first time when I heard about it. Some time ago I was very impressed by its predecessor - nVIDIA Riva128 (Diamond Viper 330). Before Riva128 I has very poor 3D in the card of the same vendor (Diamond Multimedia, it seems like starting with Diamond Stealth SE I bought, buy and will buy production of only this company), based on S3 ViRGE/VX. Riva128 introduced to me fantastic 2D and 3D speed (comparing w/ ViRGE) and possibility to play great number of new games, due to it DirectX native support. But comparing to leaders of that time among 3D accelerators 3DFX Voodoo and Voodoo2 it was very slow and Of cause does not support Glide based games and all new games made was Glide based at first and then possibly DX or OGL ... Times go on, and now I think the Voodoo line is dying, why? See Tom's article at this theme, he described it better then I could do.

What I have now, after changing Riva128 by RivaTNT on my computer (was at that time PII-300/64M)

Words about Diamond drivers:

Overclocking TNT:

I began to overclock my hardware about a year ago and did not find any bad sides of that, so I can recommend you to try it - you will like it! Of cause you have to think how to do it right - good cooling and do not use maximal available settings for your usual work, try to find compromise with performance and stability of work (and after all set them, a little lower :).

You can overclock RIVA TNT based video cards (and many other) by very useful program PowerStrip by EnTech. Also very difficult to find use of the great number of its features and it requires to register, I do not know what to use instead of it to overclock Viper 550. PowerStrip allows you to set independently the frequencies of core and memory. Set memory settings as fast as possible until you do not see randomly flashing dots and your computer does not hang up running 3D graphic programs (I used Half-Life to test :), slowing down as needed. Then increase the core frequency, test, and slow down until your computer stops to hang up. Default clocks for Viper 550 are 110MHz memory and 92MHz core.

After some months of experiments I found out ideal settings for my configuration. Memory clock is 120MHz, core clock at 100MHz. Although maximal working settings was 123MHz memory and 112MHz core, the current parameters seems to me more stable in all programs I use. This cause average 5% performance improvements in hicolor (16bit) in most games, while in truecolor (32bit) it even greater. Note: before overclock my Viper 550 I have installed additional medium-size fan into the my computer case (miditower) just below videocard and remove slot cover near it, thus greatly reducing temperature of the videocard and slightly of the entire system.

Latest version of PowerStrip you can get there or from my archive here.

If you interested in more detailed overclocking guide read the article at Reactor Critical (Russian).

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