Tweaking the fastest AGP Based System
 

While the rest of the mainstream world moves on to PCI-Express and DDR3, we take a step back to the previous generation hardware. Our aim is to build a scalable AGP benchmark platform with sole purpose: breaking overclocking records. Fueled by HWBot competition we squeeze the best AGP performance from a budget-friendly Asrock motherboard. Which memory goes the fastest? DDR1 or DDR2? Let us find out

http://www.madshrimps.be/gotoartik.php?articID=670

Thanks... More Please!
 

Excellent article! I would like to know more about tweaking the advanced memory options. VIA has not made the chipset datasheets available to the public yet, which was key to tweaking my old Apollo Pro boards.

Please in any case keep up the great work and make Part 1 just that: a preamble to more to come!

Thanks.

Hey, welcome to Madshrimps!

Thanks for the kind words, I really appreciate it.

Now, I've talked to Asrock more than once about this board, but the engineers don't like to give away information. IF I had the Via datasheet, I'm sure the Via chipset can be tweaked a lot. To be precise, the Asrock engineers actually said more than once "Chipset limitation".

I intended to write a part2, but not yet sure what's the main focus will be :).

Perhaps you could try some of the memory drive skew settings. Confess I don't understand it much, but in my humble opinion there should be a way to set them so that the DIMM slots are more closely matched (ie compensate for differing trace lengths).

I have requested the data sheets on 2 occasions, but was turned down gently by Fiona at VIA. However, many months have passed and just mebbe she'll be more forthcoming if the request is from someone like yourself from a reputable review site. After all, no new boards are being launched with this chipset and it is now outdated...

With the datasheets in hand I was able to get some serious improvements in my Apollo Pro memory and IDE performance (the latter outpaced the results I am getting on the 4Core in burst, sustained read and seek times.)

Could you PM me the contact information of Fiona? I'll contact her and hope she's willing to send me more information :).

The two 'advanced ...' pages are indeed too interesting to just ignore. For instance, by enabling the Pipeline DRQCTL option I got a huge boost in memory bandwidth.

PM done.

And yeah, I am sure those BIOS options contain as much value as the old Apollo stuff. My experience so far with several VIA mobos is that the BIOS is never tuned to set up the juciest PCI registers in the northbridge, and these advanced memory options smack of just that. On the PT880 boards they are at least exposed... but what use are they if there's no info in the manual, from Asrock, or from VIA so far. :bash:

I've contacted Via, awaiting the answer :).

Thanks for the PM :)

Big thanks for this artickle. I've solved a lot of questions now :beer: