Motherboard swap

[Cage]

I'm about to swap out my motherboard, replacing the GA-880GM-USB3 with a new GA-970A-D3P (rev. 1.0), the main reason being to make use of the higher data transfer rates of the Samsung SSD I've just installed, the new board offering 6 x SATA3 ports.

My set-up is as follows:

W7 Pro SP1 64bit O/S
AMD Phenom II X4 955 (BE) with Noctua twin fan HS
4 x 4GB G.Skill F3-12800CL9D (Running @ 1333Mhz Unganged)
Samsung 128GB SSD 840 Pro
3 x WD HDD (1 x 2Tb and 2 x 500Gb)
Sapphire Radeon HD5750 with 1GB DDR5
Cooler Master 550W PSU

Other than major screen freezes when I first set it up with only 4GB RAM, it all runs cool, quiet and stable.

You may wonder why the 970 chip instead of the 990 chip. Well I'm not into gaming so SLI support was not required.

I'm hoping that other than updating the chipset drivers, this should be a clean swap 'n' go exercise, swap the boards, hook up the SSD, have a fiddle in BIOS, and away we go.

I've only recently re-installed the O/S when I added the SSD so I'd like to avoid that exercise again, if possible.

OK, am I missing anything here?

[Dazz1]

I'm about to swap out my motherboard, replacing the GA-880GM-USB3 with a new GA-970A-D3P (rev. 1.0), the main reason being to make use of the higher data transfer rates of the Samsung SSD I've just installed, the new board offering 6 x SATA3 ports.

My set-up is as follows:

W7 Pro SP1 64bit O/S

OK, am I missing anything here?

A decent operating system

Are the hard drives new? Looks like a couple of old 500GB drives - I used to do the same. Now I don't bother, because drive space is so cheap, and I am sick of old drives just letting me down at inconvenient times. Might be alright to use them as linux swap space :P

[Cage]

A decent operating system

Are the hard drives new? Looks like a couple of old 500GB drives - I used to do the same. Now I don't bother, because drive space is so cheap, and I am sick of old drives just letting me down at inconvenient times. Might be alright to use them as linux swap space :P

Brand new SSD and the 2TB drive is fairly recent. Just use the old 500GB drives for storage.

From the 'dark side' huh? A Linux user. Nothing wrong with W7, or at the very least it's a breath of fresh air after Vista.

[Dazz1]

Brand new SSD and the 2TB drive is fairly recent. Just use the old 500GB drives for storage.

From the 'dark side' huh? A Linux user. Nothing wrong with W7, or at the very least it's a breath of fresh air after Vista.

Of course you are right. W7 is quite good, and I suspect will be one that sticks around like XP did.

[Cage]

A painless installation.

The chipset drivers were the same so it went without a hitch.

And changing the thermal paste on the CPU has dropped my temps about 4C.

All good. And it kept me out of mischief for a few hours.

Cheers
Kevin

[arthurking83]

......

All good. And it kept me out of mischief for a few hours.

Cheers
Kevin

Damned! .. and here I was hoping that you'd get up to, at least a little, no good!

I'm curious as to know if you've done any before and after HDD speed testing, both HDD and SSD speeds.

I'm currently on an 890 series board, and when I temporarily had my SSD(840 pro too), I saw speeds in the 400-250Mb/s range, both in real usage and using PCWizard's hdd speed testing.
Can't exactly remember but the 890 series boards were supposedly of the 3Gb/s SATA generation.

My 3T Seagate drive achieves a steady 100-125Mb/s sustained speed(internally) and just slightly slower via USB3(90-100Mb/s) but I'm happy 'nuff with those speeds .. I was happy with my old Samsung drives and their 50Mb/s way back when!

I can now transfer a terabyte in about an hour or two, as opposed to the dreaded 4-6hours ....

I'm weighing up if it's time for a PC refresh for me too. I don't have any issues with stability, nor speed .. but as always more is better.
D800 files have slowed things down a bit compared to how CNX2 renders D300 files .. but even that slight speed hit isn't annoying to the point that I feel my PC is 'too slow' now.

I was thinking that I'd keep the cost to an absolute minimum, getting just an FX series CPU; a top end 990 series board from ASUS; and 32G RAM. That's about $500-600ish that I'd rather not spend on useless stuff, better off with a few more lenses I reckon .. but if there's a benefit of some kind, I'd probably do it sooner rather than later.

[Cage]

Hi Arthur

Haven't done any formal testing yet but I've already noticed a slight increase in start-up and shutdown and programs loading.

With regards to your potential upgrade, if you are running a 890 series board it may have the SB850 chip that supports SATA 6Gb/s. I know the Gigabyte boards do. I switched to Gigabyte from Asus a few builds back after years of incompatibility problems with video cards.

The FX series CPU is on my wish list, as much for the fact that they have a memory controller that allows for faster than 1333
Mhz RAM speeds as for their faster speeds, although I am looking at tickling my X4 955 up to maybe 3.6Ghz which by all reports is quite a stable O/C.

However my next purchase is Photoshop CS6 as my ten year old CS3 seems to have been put out to pasture by Adobe, the bloody gouging thieves, and there's no way I'm going 'Cloud'. I'm trying Gimp at present but am missing Bridge, particularly for RAW processing.

And I'd like an IPS monitor, and, and ..........................

I guess at the end of the day, my current system, by no means 'high end', is still good enough so that I'm not going to see any quantum performance leaps with most upgrades.

Cheers
Kevin

[Cage]

Just an update.

The board has been running fine for a couple of days now so I thought I'd tweak the CPU a bit.

The Phenom II X4 955 BE has an OOTB speed of 3.2MHz and I hoped to get it to maybe 3.5/3.6MHz. Having an unlocked multiplier meant I really only had to increase the ratio and surprise, surprise, it went to 3.4, then 3.6 without a hiccup so I thought I'd stretch the friendship and try for 3.8 and it has been happily running all day at 3.8MHz. I've stress tested it with the IntelBurn Test and it passed with no problems.

So, should I push the envelope a bit further?

I upped the multiplier to 20X to give me 4.0GHz but it didn't register, no problems, just that the change didn't take effect. Maybe the system has a built-in fail-safe limit but jeez, I'm delighted with the 18.75% increase.

Cheers
Kevin

[Dazz1]

I have a AMD Phenom II X4 945 Processor in mine, but I've never tried tweaking it. Not so easy to overclock as the 955 though, and I worry about overheating in Summer. Nice little processors!

[Cage]

Cheers wettie.

Well I had another go at getting it to 4.0GHz and this time it worked.

However, and isn't there always a however, it failed the IntelBurn Test, but then I don't think I'll ever stress my machine like that test does.



It seems to be doing all the things it usually does, so I guess it's just a matter of continuing on as usual and see how it handles my normal day-to-day computing.

Hell, I hope it works out, that's a 25% increase in processor speed for Jack SH!T! To say I'm delighted would be an understatement.

Now all I have to do is to resist the temptation to get a FX processor to unlock the rest of my RAM capability.

Gawd, where does it stop?

Cheers

[Cage]

An update.

Been on an overclockers forum and the general consensus is that I appear to have a 'very good' 955 chip. They apparently vary with their capabilities.

It has been suggested that I may very well get my RAM to a stable 1600MHz without the risk of doing anymore damage than getting a blue screen in which case I just go back to 1333MHz. To be honest I really don't think I'd notice any real difference in day-to-day operating with the increased speed but the potential is there for free so I'll give it a whirl.

I've had one little hiccup with CPU-Z reporting different bandwidths with my two sets of RAM but GSkill advised me that it was almost certainly a reporting error by CPU-Z, as they would. I'm about to swap the memory sticks around and see whether there is any difference in the reporting.

Here is a snip of CPU-Z showing the same part # but different XMP versions, different Max Bandwidths and different JEDEC timings.

Keep you posted.

Cheers

[deef]

Looking at the CPU-Z readouts, it appears that the memory modules are in sockets 3 and 4. If this is how it really is, try moving one of the modules to another socket, eg. move the one in socket 3 to socket 2. This will enable the dual channel feature and maybe correct the CPU-Z reporting.

Page 16 of the motherboard manual will give you more info. Hope that helps.

[Cage]

Cheers John.

I actually have 4 x 4GB sticks of RAM so all slots are populated. I bought 2 lots of F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL about 18 months apart.
The CPU-Z readings for slots #1 and #3 are the same, as shown in the snip above for slot #3, as are the readings for slots #2 and #4.

I should be able to tell from the serial Nos. which sticks came together so I'll have a play with the sticks in different slots later today to see if I get different readings.

I've been running all four sticks @1333MHz unganged for the last two months without any apparent problems.

Cheers

[deef]

I've been running all four sticks @1333MHz unganged for the last two months without any apparent problems.

Cheers

Fair enough, that puts a different slant on it. I guess the old proverb comes into play then "If it aint broke don't fix it", not that it ever stopped me fiddling.

Ram can be touchy things but swapping them around might work. Years ago when DDR2 was the go I had a pair of sticks that would only work in slots 2 & 4. Put them in 1 & 3 and they were dead as a dodo.