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Hi Fates B) Abit = headache , just ask quite a few people. But that's a discussion for when Beer gets back in town Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion & having had 2 ASUS boards previously I am a now an ABIT convert :) My NF7-S is the best board that I have ever owned & it's rock solid even heavily overclocked. I don't think that there is any doubt that the NF7-S V2.0 up until now is the overclockers nForce2 board although the A7N8X series are fine boards. Most of the problems that people have are common to the chipset rather than ABIT's particular implementation. ABIT's may have a few quirks but the IS7 is hard to beat performance wise at that price point.(Alternative for FATES :P, ASUS P4P800 $111) to quote Hardocp' s latest test of an ABIT AI7 (which would be an excellent contender but it's $125): "Once again we have taken an ABIT board out of the box and run it at stock and overclocked speeds with aggressive memory settings virtually error free. Actually, outside of pushing the board beyond the MHz mentioned above, there were no failures. Over 100 repetitions of Winstone testing revealed no weaknesses." There may be no difference price wise between PC2700 and 3200 but check your motherboards acceptance of such RAM. I found that my older A7v8x would take up to 3200 but only in 1 slot. Thus it was better for me to run 2700 so I could utilize more slots. Shouldn't be a problem on a new board & if he wants to get all the benefit from an 800FSB P4 or overclock an Athlon he should get PC3200.

Hi, Are we to assume that you have a case, decent PSU, floppy & an OS? I think that you are going to find it hard for your budget to get what you ideally want (a 2.8C P4 is $285 on its own). From what you are saying sounds like you want to go Intel whereas AMD is the "bang for the buck" builders choice. You should care what rpm hard drive you get & go 7200rpm. An 80Gb HD will cost you like an extra $10 over a 40GB so you ought to go bigger. 2 Sticks of RAM will give you Dual Channel= extra performance. There is virtually no difference pricewise between PC2700 & 3200 so get 3200. Prices from newegg.com Intel system: ABIT IS7 with 865 chipset $101 Intel 2.4C 800FSB Retail $184 Corsair VS PC3200 RAM 2x256MB $90 Sapphire Atlantis 9600Pro $149 WD 80Gb 2Mb cache 7200rpm $69 Total $593 AMD System: ABIT NF7 $82 ($106 for NF7-S, $115 for AN7) AMD XP2500+ retail $90 Corsair VS PC3200 RAM 2x256MB $90 Sapphire Atlantis 9600Pro $149 WD 80Gb 2Mb cache 7200rpm $69 Total $480 Both boards/CPU's should overclock happily to 3000/3200 level. If you go AMD I would recommend spending some of the savings on getting the better board - AN7 if you can. Again if you go AMD you might want to get a 9600XT & free HL2 for an extra $30. An 8MB cache WD 80Gb 7200rpm would cost an extra $13

Sabre download link not working. Guess Zur changed the filenames.

Sabre

It's definitely XP compatible - I've got it on 2 XP machines. Sorry, can't offer any help as mine were plain sailing.

Hey Mr. Mudd, If i recall you've got an NF7-S V2.0? You ought to easily be able get your XP2400 upto at least 2.2GHZ on that if not 2.3GHz. I can run the LOMAC demo on higher than medium settings on my 9700.

Crank up "Ride of the Valkyrie" & don't forget your surfboard! :D

#1 leave for someone else;) #2 Depends. Which card? There is a thread on SimHQ with some settings for use with Radlinker (a 3rd party ATI tweak utility). This seems to work for a lot of 95/9700 cards but not 100%. TK says that it is related to ATI 's TCL & that patch 2 stops the game engine from trying to access it so definitely fixed in patch 2 when released.

http://bellsouthpwp.net/l/o/lordoliver/download.htm

I believe that the Ultimate is the one with the passive cooling solution so what you are paying $60 extra for is less noise rather than extra performance. A 9500 Pro should beat a 9600 Pro - but it'll be close. Considering the 9500 pro is an extra $43 that's why i say the 9600 Pro is the better buy. The 9600XT should take them both to the cleaners - according to ATI it should outperform a 9700 most of the time.

I know that I answered this before... At those prices the 9600 Pro. However, if you think that you may want to overclock it then you need to check the spec. of the memory chips used (this is more likely to be the limiting factor rather than the core). The newly announced 9600XT looks like being quite a card at a reasonable price ($199) if everything they are saying turns out to be true :). Best ATI forums I know www.rage3d.com

Unless they have recently changed it, I don't think that the manual shipped with the X45 is current. Iirc, it covers the SST that was actually SGE renamed rather than "true" SST. Latest drivers & SST Manual I tend to use modes setup as AA, AG & Nav. For Aux. I tend to use as a sub-mode.

At those prices probably the 9600 Pro. There are however, differences between manufacturers in e.g. the memory that they use so a bit more info would be needed.

Sorry, but what exactly is your question?

Hi, Sundowner on SimHq has found a solution for the corrupted/non-functioning RWR on ATI 9700 cards (I'm assuming 9500 too seeing as the GPU is the same just fewer pipes ). see this thread Can anyone report if this works for 9800 (probably) but also 9600 etc.?

SF doesn't get on well with ATI cards (fixed in the 2nd patched we are told). Make sure that you have mirrors & shadows turned off.

Sorry to hear that Beer, my ABIT has been great. Just picked up a 9700 for half price today :D - currently its in the A7V266-E but will probably end up in the ABIT.

How's it coming MrMudd? Did the XP3200+ arrive & is it up & running (you might need to get PC3200 memory if your OCZ won't run 400FSB). Btw, that XP2400 is unlocked (all T'bred B's are) - I have an XP2400+ running in an ASUS A7V266-E & an XP1700+ in, yes, an NF7-S V2.0 :) both @2.3Ghz .

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Well, you get your speed by a combination of FSB & multiplier. Sometimes you can get a better result with a lower FSB & higher multiplier (although there are benefits to a higher FSB) so you might want to see if it will do 166 x14. Alternatively, assuming that you are running RAM & FSB in sync you might want to try relaxing the timings on your memory @ 200FSBx11.5 to see if it improves stability. Btw, how are your temps?

It is 333Mhz (2x166FSB) RAM but you are running it at 400Mhz (2x200FSB ) assuming that you are running the RAM in sync with FSB (which you want to do as on nForce 2 that gives the best performance).

Just noticed in another post that you are running PC2700 RAM. 200 FSB is obviously out of spec for that so it may be that your RAM can't handle the FSB & tight timings. You might want to relax the timings a bit or try a lower FSB but higher multiplier.

Up the vcore & that should stabilise it. 2.3Ghz is probably about right without serious cooling/mods/ experimentation Memory voltage might need upped too. Don't expect to get the same - for that 2.7-2.9 they wiil be running at least watercooled , they may have done some volt-mods etc. too. Some people put a lot of effort & equipment into overclocking. I recommend that you brows the ABIT USA & nForcersHQ boards.

If it is an XP2400 it is a Thoroughbred "B" & is unlocked. On an NF7-S (what you've got?) you shouldn't have any problems changing the multipliers to get it to run higher. 1 thing to watch out for is that NF7-S's tend to undervolt the vcore very slightly but it is enough to make a difference for a lot of folk. Both my XP2400/A7V266-E & XP1700/NF7-S V2.0 run just under 2.3Ghz quite happily with mediocre cooling.