Skavenger said:
Hello;
I am just about to do a bit of upgrading and spring cleaning on my ASUS
A7N8X Deluxe
Upgrade consists of installing:
2 x 512MB Kingston DDR Ram CL3.0
Maxtor 200GB 7200RPM IDE HD
LG Double Layer DVD RW
I currently have:
1 x 80GB Maxtor 6Y080L0 ( 2 x Partitions C: & D
1 x 40GB Segate 340015A
AOPEN CD RW
BTC DVD RW
2 x 256MB DDR Ram CL3.0
GeForce TI4200 8xAGP
Windows XP Pro
Couple of Questions:
1. Due to a couple of problems I need to carry out a repair install of
the OS to save the hassle of reinstalling everything I might leave the Boot
Drive as the Maxtor 80GB get rid of the Seagate and install the 200GB Maxtor
as additional storage, I will not see much speed benifit in using the 200GB
as a boot drive?
2. Both Hard Drives are connected using an 80 Conductor ATA 133 cable
should I also get one for the CD & DVD? as the existing ones are using a 40
conductor?
3. I need to update the BIOS any problems with the latest verion?
4. Where can I find information on the optimum BIOS settings?
1. To use the 200GB drive, you should be using WinXP SP1 minimum.
You can construct a Windows install CD with SP1 slipstreamed on
it. (There is a program you can download off the net, Autostreamer
or the like, that can do that for you. I tried making a
slipstreamed disk, and it worked OK. Depending on when you
bought your WinXP product, SP1 may already be included).
Otherwise there is a registry hack. In any case, you have to
be careful where you plug that 200GB drive - plugging it into
a machine that just has original WinXP on it, could corrupt it.
I mention that in case you plan on moving the 200GB disk from
machine to machine.
http://www.48bitlba.com/faq.htm (don't buy their BIOS!)
I don't know how well this would work, but you could copy the
80GB to the 200GB drive, and then run the Repair Install. I
have an old copy of Partition Magic I use for such adventures,
but I don't know how messed up that product has become since
Symantec bought PowerQuest. Perhaps the disk manufacturer
has a utility to do a simple copy for you. Before installing
the 200GB disk, make sure you have installed at least SP1
first on the 80GB boot disk. Then, when you copy the 80GB
to the 200GB, your OS will be prepared to run the 200GB
without corrupting it.
Disk drives have faster sustained transfer rate at the beginning
of the drive, versus near the end. Using the 200GB drive, means
more of the files will be near the "60MB/sec" end of the disk,
instead of at the "40MB/sec" end of the disk. But eventually the
200GB disk will fill up too...
Make sure you have a backup strategy. The bigger the disk,
the bigger the crash.
The biggest visible difference with disk drives, would come with
a change in RPMs. A 10K RPM disk has a lower seek time than a
7200 RPM disk, and if you were searching for a file, the 10K
disk would be faster. The only time STR becomes an issue, is if
you are copying really big files from disk to disk. I don't
do that very much, so STR is not that big a factor for me.
If you do disk-to-disk backups, a good STR would reduce the
backup time, for a sector by sector copy.
2. You can use an 80 conductor cable for your CD and DVD. With
recent hardware, in fact, two devices on the same cable can
run at their own transfer rate, without impacting one another.
The 80 conductor cable will make more performance available,
if you had a hard drive and a optical device on the same cable.
The OS is actually able to detect the presence of the 80
conductor cable, and knows when the faster IDE transfer rates
can be used.
3. No idea. There were a couple releases of A7N8X family BIOS
that were bad, but they were pulled from the download page.
I use a "Trats BIOS", so cannot help you there.
4.
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/search.php is where I would
go for information on Nforce2 systems. forums.pcper.com is
another place. But in my experience, spending 30 minutes
playing with the settings yourself, is going to give you
a pretty optimal setup anyway. On my A7N8X-E, I run the
memory "sync" (set to 100%), tweak the memory timing to
its specced value (in case the SPD on the DIMMs holds more
conservative values than the chips are rated for). Try
setting things to "standard" or "manual", to make more
settings appear. It isn't hard to get a good setup.
The only trouble I ever had with my machine, was RAM. Use
both memtest86+ to verify the whole memory is still good.
Use Prime95 while in Windows, to verify there is real system
stability.
HTH,
Paul
