Stablest soft menu settings for dual 500's w/ AGPCLK at 1/1?

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jakfr02
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Stablest soft menu settings for dual 500's w/ AGPCLK at 1/1?

Post by jakfr02 »

I've got to make some softmenu changes and I know only enough to be dangerous about overclocking. I sure would appreciated some advise on setting softmenu for dual 500's.

See, I need to change the AGPCLK/CPUCLK setting to 1/1 in order to get my video card to play divx/xvid. I don't care to overclock. I just want it to run Win2k stable without any cpu issues.

I'm running the RU bios with HPT366 disabled. I have 2x500 cpus, Geforce 4 MX440 in AGP, sound blaster in slot 3, & a Nic card in slot 5.

I have softmenu set at:
CPU Operating Speed: User Define
Turbo Freq: Disabled
Ext. Clock (PCI): 66mhz (1/2)
Multiplier Factor: x7.5
AGPCLK/CPUCLK: 1/1

CPU Power Supply: CPU Default
CPU1 volt: 2.00v
CPU2 volt: 2.00v

I would be grateful for any advise or recommendations.
Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

so, the problem is, ....
you don't want / care to overclock it ?

66 x 7.5 is the right setting. then.
if you want to overclock while keeping the agp/cpu ratio at 1:1 then (looking , just a sec)

no, you want to keep the agp @ 66 while the cpu goes up..... hmmm...
the only options are 1:1 or 2:3

so, does the video card work ok or badly with agp/cpu set to 2:3.
to get it back up to 66, you'll need the cpu at 99
i've never had a 466/500/533 over 72/75/78 , uhm 80
in winter they were fine at 78mhz but the voltage needs to be up high so the cooling has to be good, hence winter only.

if you run at 66, you can drop the voltages back to 1.90v. even 1.85 if they still post.
jakfr02
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Post by jakfr02 »

Thanks Dave. :D

If I set the AGPClk to 1/1 then Divx/Xvid movie files play better than if it set to 2/3 where the movies skip a lot.

So, giving my limitation on AGPClk is there any hope to overclock a little?

What do I gain my reducing the voltage?...A lower power bill?
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Post by purrkur »

I've got a pair of 533's and I run them at 72MHz fsb which gives me two CPU's running at 576MHz. I do this without touching the 1/1 setting for the AGP port. I do this on a standard, unmodified BP6 so I am certain that you can as well, which should give you 540MHz. There is also a "turbo" setting for the CPU which basically overclocks the cpu in the same manner.

Lowering the voltage gives you lower heat dissipation from the CPU's so they run cooler. If you want to overclock then do that first before experimenting with lowering the voltage, although I am pretty sure that a modest overclock like the above would allow you to drop the voltage a notch or two if you got a decent PSU. Oh, and powerbill should be affected but not by much though. you may go out and buy yourself a decent meal at McDonalds for the difference :)
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Post by hugoc »

First, NVidia cards are, as a rule, tolerant of an overclocked AGP bus. You shouldn't have any difficulty at 1:1.

Secondly, the AGP bus is used for things like loading very large textures that won't fit into the main memory of the graphics card, allowing the GPU to use system memory for overflow. However, although the AGP bus is fast compared to PCI it's very slow compared to the internal bus of the graphics card, so generally it gets used in desperation. Your MX440 probably has 64MB of memory, definitely no less than 32MB, which is more than adequate for playing video.

I would not have thought that playing back video would utilise the AGP bandwidth at all. I get very smooth video playback from a Matrox G400 with 16MB of RAM and an AGP ratio of 2:3, AGP aperture 64MB. What are these videos - are they MPEG4 DVD, or HDTV streams, or new HD-DVD files (the latter two would never work on a C500 system, so forget it - but you get the point); or are they just AVI files you've downloaded which tend to be highly compressed and relatively low quality (hence low bandwidth)?

Thirdly, what other settings have you played around with? What happens if you reduce the AGP aperture to 0 or as close as you can get (effectively shutting off the AGP bus)? What happens when sidebanding is disabled (or enabled, if disabled is your default)?
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Post by Dave Rave »

if you are playing with the agp/cpu setting and are not overclocking, you will be underclocking the agp card back to 44mhz.
the agp/cpu is so the poor vga card doesn't fry at higher fsb speeds when you do overclock the cpu.
so the suggestions are ...
you can safely do a cpu at 72/75/78 using 2.05 or maybe 2.10v
you'll need good flow through fans on the case to keep the heat out.
if the vga card doesn't like the higher fsb, then you lower the ratio from 1:1 to 2:3, bringing the fsb of the agp back from 78 to 52. i doiubt it will be a prob until you get past 80 though
jakfr02
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Post by jakfr02 »

Great stuff. Thanks for the advise.

Purrkur,
So if I understand and want to try nominal overclocking, I should try to enable Turbo Freq first. If I want more power or have any instablility, I should try setting Ext Clock to 72Mhz. Once I'm stable I should try lowering the voltage to 1.9 then 1.85. What about the Multiplier Factor, do I need to adjust it from 7.5?

Hugoc,
How do you set the AGP aperture to 0?
Where to I change sidebanding?
I have not change any other settting in cmos exepted under the Power Management, I enabled ACPI function. I have 128MB on the MX440. It works flawlessly on my Tyan S2460 w/ 2x MP1800s. The videos are decrypted and compressed dvd children's movies. Mostly Pixar movies, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and many Disney films. I use Auto Gordians Knot with xvid codec compressed down to fit on a single CD. Pretty low quality. I then play them over my analog TV via MS Media Player full screen. They look terrible on the computer monitor but pretty darn good on the TV. I just discovered last night when I play these movies to both the computer monitor and to the TV the CPUs are taxed to about 98% and the movies skips a little bit. It might be that I'm running a high screen resolution of 1280x1024. I'm going to try lowering that tonight.

Dave,
Interesting point regarding the agp card back to 44mhz. I'll try your settings and maybe get my agpclk/cpuclk back to 2/3 and increase the agp card.

I'll be having fun tonight. Thanks again everyone. I'll keep ya'll posted. :D
jakfr02
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Post by jakfr02 »

Oops. I double posted the above.
Last edited by jakfr02 on Wed Jan 12, 2005 12:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by purrkur »

The turbo frequency will definitely work. I would probably go with raising the fsb to 72MHz or even 75MHz first.

You don't need to worry about the multiplier in BIOS. The multiplier is locked on the Celeron so it doesn't matter what you put into BIOS. It will be overwritten by the locked setting on the CPU. Once you got a stable setting then try lowering your voltage to see if you can do it without any problems. I would start with 1.9 volts and then run the system with that for awhile. If it works good then you might try 1.85 if you really want to push it, or you can put it to 1.95 volts if you think 1.9 volts is giving you issues.

Might I add that the best media player ever for systems with not a very fast cpu would be Mplayer under Linux. It uses both CPU's on a dual cpu platform and it uses lower cpu than any other media program out there that I have tested under any OS.

Good luck...
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hugoc
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Post by hugoc »

How do you set the AGP aperture to 0?
It's in the BIOS. I think that it's an option in Advanced Chipset Features but I'm not 100% sure - have a look around. It's called "AGP aperture size" and you want it set to 0 or, if you can't, to a number very close to 0, which will do practically the same thing.
Where to I change sidebanding?
That you would do through your graphics card driver, but it's disabled by default. Download and install "NVTweak", and you will see a slew of extra options in your display control panel (you need to be running NVidia drivers, not ones supplied by your card manufacturer). One of these will be for AGP sidebanding. Turn it off and try it.
I have 128MB on the MX440.
128MB is lots more memory than you need for this task.The only things where you'd need more than 128MB GFX RAM is for the higher detail levels on Doom3 and so on, and that's not an option if you're running less than an Athlon64 FX anyway.
I use Auto Gordians Knot with xvid codec compressed down to fit on a single CD. Pretty low quality.
Yes, that will be low bandwidth. No issues there. To fit a DVD into 700MB you're going to be cutting the resolution and eliminating a ton of data so it won't stress anything in your system to do that.
It might be that I'm running a high screen resolution of 1280x1024. I'm going to try lowering that tonight.
That should only pose a problem if you are scaling the video up to 1280x1024 using a post-processing program such as FFDShow. Your graphics card by default will use the resolution of the video without scaling, which is probably 640x352 or something close depending on what you ripped it as.
Might I add that the best media player ever for systems with not a very fast cpu would be Mplayer under Linux.
Agreed. Windows Media Player is a total resource hog. MPlayer is quite light on features, however, if you want something fuller-featured I would try Xine - not quite as lightweight as MPlayer but definitely better than WMP.

If you're sticking with Windows, I have found BSPlayer and The Core Media Player to both be full-featured, stable and considerably less demanding of the system than WMP. They are both freeware, so give them a try.[/code]
BP6, RU BIOS, 2*Celeron 366@550 1.9v
2*GlobalWin FEP32, 512MB PC100 CAS2
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jakfr02
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Post by jakfr02 »

Well, I have movies playing w/o skipping at full screen on the TV w/o overclocking.

I haven't overclocked yet because I really don't have 2x500 celerons on my BP6. I have one 500 and one 400, but the other 500 should be here any day and I'll try overclocking then.

I did the easiest things first. Like changing the "AGP apertures size" in the bios to the lowest setting which was 4. I changed screen resolution to 800x600 at 16bit. Then I removed Xvid codec and loaded FFDShow and BSPlayer (I didn't think MPlayers would cut it for my wife and daughter). Then in FFDShow I disabled post processing (Some people playing movies on PII's recommended this).

This almost did it. The CPU utilization was only about 80-90% but there was still a little skipping. But much less frequent. The CPUs never maxed out like they were doing when it skipped before. This lead me to thing the bottle neck was somewhere else.

I found some old threads from people with PII's posted in other forums, they had to tweak the directshow filters, but I didn't clearly understand which settings and how. Then I found a utilitiy call Reclock off videohelp.com that tweak directshow automatically for dummies like me. Now, here come the weird thing. After installing Reclock the movie I've been using to test ran perfectly. But the next movie I played, was skipping in fast forward mode. I rebooted, tried again with no resolve (still fast forwarding every movie) and went to bed. This morning I uninstalled the Reclock utility and movies ran perfectly with CPU utilization down to 40-60%. Go figure.

I'm going to spend some more time on it this weekend before I recap all the changes I made in case anyone else wants to turn their BP6 into a HTPC (home theater personal computer).
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Post by Dave Rave »

i thought you'd want the agp aperture to be big, not zero.
isn't that the pipeline size that the agp uses ?
if it's zero you aren't using the reason that agp was created for ..

http://www.tweak3d.net/articles/aperture-size/4.shtml
jakfr02
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Post by jakfr02 »

Dave, interesting article. My thoughts are these. The machines they are testing are much faster that the BP6. Maybe my video card does a better job processing from the 128mb memory on the card than processing data coming from memory on the motherboard.

It does seem conclusive in the article the best lowest number would be 16 and not 4. Maybe I'll try 16 and 128. Hopefully, I'll get my other 500 cpu in today or tomorrow and I can try overclocking and get the AGPclck/CPUclck back to 2/3. I think you said my video card is being underclocked with Agpclk/cpuclk set at 1/1. Maybe agpclk at 2/3 and moving the ASS up to 128 is the ticket.
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Post by davd_bob »

jakfr02 wrote:...on my BP6. I have one 500 and one 400,...
What shows up on the post screen with a pair of miss matched CPUs?

BTW, many of us think a pair of 400s would be better for OC'ing then a pair of 500s.
There are *almost* no bad BP6s. There are mostly bad caps.

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Post by Dave Rave »

jakfr02 wrote:Maybe my video card does a better job processing from the 128mb memory on the card than processing data coming from memory on the motherboard.
the point of AGP is ....
where does the 128mb on the video card get it's data from.
getting it from system memory via the std call, interrupt, wait, refresh, or use the direct to memory access through the AGP bus.
jakfr02
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Post by jakfr02 »

Davd_bob,
There is no indication that there is a 400 processor on the boot screen. It boots first saying something about 500mhz, then something about 2 processors. I'm not infront of my computer or I would tell you exactly. I read a thread here somewhere that said it wouldn't be problem mismatching these two processors.

What is done is done. I already bought the other 500 off ebay. Still waiting for it to come in. How about two 366s. I just bought two of those for their heatsinks/fans. Would they do better overclocking than the 500s? I read a lot of people have the 366 overclocked at 550. Would this help me to overclock my video card?

Dave Rave,
Obviously, I am way out of my league here. I'm just grateful there are folks like you all I can get help from. I did bump the AAS to 16 but it had no noticeable affect. I'll try the 128 after the other processor comes in.
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Post by davd_bob »

jakfr02,
There are those who believe 366@550 is the most effective use of a BP6.(short of mod'ing for Piiis)
Setting 100FSB allows several pros and only one con.

1) The PCI/AGP/ISA divider is at 1/3multiplier which puts all the cards at standard rated speeds. Most cards and HDDs work nicely on 33MHz PCI bus.

2) RAM to CPU transmitts at 100MHZ which is 50% faster then at FSB66MHz. This is prob. the most important increase in system speed. It is necessary to use ram that is PC100 but PC133 will allow you to set latency to CL2 which is faster then CL3.

3) The only negative is rarely if ever noticed. There are some instances where a process will require many calculations between ram read/writes. I think someone mentioned SETI@home as being calculation intensive...in this case the 8 multiplier on the 500s would be better then the 5.5 on the 366s.

It is likely you will be more satisfied with dual 366s. Why not try the 500s for a couple months and get the feel for the board then swap to the 366s. Im sure you won't change back to the 500s.
There are *almost* no bad BP6s. There are mostly bad caps.

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Post by purrkur »

Davd_bob: I have been doing some benchmarking on 366, 533, 550 and 576 MHz speeds on the BP6. I will be ready to set up my results pretty soon. For me there was only one result that came as a surprise while others just confirmed what I have thought all along. Needless to say, I think the results will cause discussions over here because some will get their suspicions confirmed while others might want to debate the results. We'll see what happens once I post the stuff.

As for when I will do it, I am not sure. I have been travelling for a few days (I am working in Switzerland this weekend). I want to do a proper presentation of the computers used (I also tested a dual 550MHz Xeon machine as comparison), the tests I did and the results.
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Post by davd_bob »

I feel I can speak for everyone...
:pop: we tingle with anticipation !!
There are *almost* no bad BP6s. There are mostly bad caps.

No BP6s remaining
Athlon 2800
Sempron 2000
ViaCPU laptop with Vista.(Works great after bumping ram to 2Gig)
P-III 850@100
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