GA-790XTA-UD4 Fun

I ordered the MB, two sticks of DDR3 RAM, and an AMD Phenom II X4 965. I
put it together using the case, HDDs, and DVD drives that I currently have.

When I fired it up, I did not reinstall XP because I wanted to see what it
would do. Surprisingly, XP came up and changed a lot of drivers.

However, it took a long time for XP to come up. The logo would appear faded
then eventually appear normally. The boot time was several minutes before
the desktop appeared. When I had this issue before, it turned out that the
CPU was not 100% compatible with the MB. Everything I bought for this build
was on GigaByte's compatibility list. After some searching, I found others
had the same issue of extended OS load times. I did two things to try and
fix it, one is clear the CMOS, and secondly, I noticed the BIOS had a
'keyboard plugged into USB port' item. That was disabled, so, I enabled it
since my mouse/keyboard are USB.

The XP logo appeared normally after the BIOS message and the boot time from
the first BIOS message to the XP desktop was about one minute. That load
time did not change after reinstalling XP. My guess is before, with the
longer load times, XP was doing port scanning. Still, 1 minute is a long
time to load the OS. I did a build in the late 90s and used either win-nt
or 2000 and after changing some options in the BIOS, the load time from BIOS
to desktop was less than 15 seconds.

So, the build is:

ATI Radeon 5770
AMD Phenom II X4 965
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1600
GA-790XTA-UD4
500GB SATA HD (2x)
DVD SATA (2x)
Win XP 32-bits

.. . . but, I'm not impressed with it. I'll see what it does when I get back
to some video editing with Adobe Premiere Elements. I have a feeling I
won't be saying 'WOW!' though.

Also, I expected the temperatures to be in the low 30s but today, a hot day,
the MB and CPU are about 38c. I bought parts for a build one time at Comp
USA, which a sales guy put together. I found out later that there was a
thermal design point (TDP) mismatch. The MB had a TDP of 125w and the CPU
was 140w. It was not a serious issue and the temperatures for the MB and
CPU also were at about 38c.

The above CPU is 125w and the MB TDP is 140w but it hasn't helped in keeping
temperatures low.

--g

However, it took a long time for XP to come up. The logo would appear
faded
then eventually appear normally. The boot time was several minutes before
the desktop appeared. When I had this issue before, it turned out that
the
CPU was not 100% compatible with the MB. Everything I bought for this
build
was on GigaByte's compatibility list. After some searching, I found
others
had the same issue of extended OS load times. I did two things to try and
fix it, one is clear the CMOS, and secondly, I noticed the BIOS had a
'keyboard plugged into USB port' item. That was disabled, so, I enabled
it
since my mouse/keyboard are USB.

I disabled the 'keyboard plugged into USB port' item and the XP logo
appeared normally, so, it seems clearing the CMOS fixed the above issue. I
never had to do that before.


I did a build in the late 90s and used either win-nt
or 2000 and after changing some options in the BIOS, the load time from
BIOS
to desktop was less than 15 seconds.

I doubt I'll be able to get the load time down to 15 secs. With that old
build, it was an ASUS MB and I remembering enabling some item that had to do
with the bus. I was surprised at how fast the OS loaded afterwards.

--g

geoff wrote:
However, it took a long time for XP to come up. The logo would appear
faded
then eventually appear normally. The boot time was several minutes before
the desktop appeared. When I had this issue before, it turned out that
the
CPU was not 100% compatible with the MB. Everything I bought for this
build
was on GigaByte's compatibility list. After some searching, I found
others
had the same issue of extended OS load times. I did two things to try and
fix it, one is clear the CMOS, and secondly, I noticed the BIOS had a
'keyboard plugged into USB port' item. That was disabled, so, I enabled
it
since my mouse/keyboard are USB.

I disabled the 'keyboard plugged into USB port' item and the XP logo
appeared normally, so, it seems clearing the CMOS fixed the above issue. I
never had to do that before.


I did a build in the late 90s and used either win-nt
or 2000 and after changing some options in the BIOS, the load time from
BIOS
to desktop was less than 15 seconds.

I doubt I'll be able to get the load time down to 15 secs. With that old
build, it was an ASUS MB and I remembering enabling some item that had to do
with the bus. I was surprised at how fast the OS loaded afterwards.

--g

It won't affect anything, but how "clean" is Device Manager, after your
build was finished ? Are all the drivers present ?

If the OS is WinXP, you can look in C:\WINDOWS\setupapi.log , to see
hardware being discovered and drivers added to handle them. I have an
"event" in there right now, where it looks like the OS just about
"copy reinstalled" everything, on July 29. And I don't know what triggered
that.

The thing about the processor TDP, is whether the motherboard has a high
enough Vcore maximum power output, to handle it. If you have a 140W
motherboard, that means it can handle any AMD device that fits in the
socket. A 125W processor would be within the power limit. The Vcore only
provides as much current, as the processor will draw. For example, it
might draw 100 amps at 1.25 volts. But the Vcore may be able to provide
up to 140W/1.25volts = 112 amps, so there is some "headroom" of 12 amps
there.

There have been motherboard designs, with "weak" Vcore, only able to use
65W or 89W processors. And the CPU_Support list on the web site
would tell you that. A motherboard with a "weak" Vcore, wouldn't
run your Phenom II X4 965.

I wouldn't be so quick to discount your purchase just yet. Your
processor probably has a pretty good set of floating point units,
and you may see some good render speed. Give the machine a
chance.

Paul

I wouldn't be so quick to discount your purchase just yet.

It is good in one way . . . I remember back in December of '95, my brother
bought a Gateway and at the time, it was the fastest thing on the planet.
By the summer of '96, it was a slow piece of ****. Intel would crank up the
processor speed every so often (thanks marketing).

Intel stuck with that strategy until PCs started to have a heat problem.
Their skunkworks in Israel had the idea of adding cores. For the majority
of folks, 4 or 6 cores is not going to do much since, as you pointed out
before, most software is written for a single core. The only multi-core
benefit one gets is general load balancing by the OS.

So, machines won't be obsolete in six months, but, on the other hand, Intel
and AMD have nothing new to offer. Maybe the aliens decided to leave Earth
and they told Intel to come up with their own ideas.

AMD will have an APU next year but I doubt it will blow anyone's socks off.
What's next are cheap SSDs and more of the same for the other stuff
(DDR4/5/6/etc. memory, ATI 6870/7870/8870/etc., 6/8/16 core CPUs or APUs)
but no real change in technology.

I think it will be a long time before we get to the M-5 computer that was on
Star Trek TOS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rzGT7zgE8w


--g

This kind of thing makes me think Intel has nothing new:

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/business...742/?s_cid=938
Intel and FTC make antitrust compromise

This sentence has me wondering if Adobe optimized Premiere Elements for
Intel processors:

'. . . Intel claimed better software performance on Intel CPUs than on
competitors' CPUs, but failed to inform customers that Intel had designed
its compilers to give Intel chips a performance benefit.'

--g

geoff wrote:
This kind of thing makes me think Intel has nothing new:

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/business...742/?s_cid=938
Intel and FTC make antitrust compromise

This sentence has me wondering if Adobe optimized Premiere Elements for
Intel processors:

'. . . Intel claimed better software performance on Intel CPUs than on
competitors' CPUs, but failed to inform customers that Intel had designed
its compilers to give Intel chips a performance benefit.'

--g

That has been known about for some time. Any company aware of it,
will just use another compiler, even though the Intel compiler
is a nice one.

This is an old result now, but here some AMD chips are completing a render
in less time than an Intel competitor. The new Intel processors are
head and shoulders above the ones in this example, so the tables
have turned a bit. But I still think you should be able to get
a good result.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu..._18.html#sect0

This chart might be a bit more relevant to today. Your processor is
twice as fast as mine, if that makes you feel better :-)

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2...-CS4,1404.html

You'll notice these two results are pretty close to one another. Clock
for clock, AMD is slower than Intel, so in fact the math capability of
AMD is helping the result here. You might find the ratio on some
of the other benchmarks to be worse for AMD.

AMD Phenom II X4 965 (Deneb 4c) 3.4 GHz, DDR3-1333, 2 MB L2, 6 MB L3 136 seconds

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (Yorkfield 4c) 3.2 GHz, DDR3-1600, 12 MB L2 140 seconds

Here, the ratio is 94 seconds to 133 seconds, so Intel pulls ahead.
It's a seesaw battle, and depends on what you're doing.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2...0.52,1405.html

Paul

This sentence has me wondering if Adobe optimized Premiere Elements for
Intel processors:

'. . . Intel claimed better software performance on Intel CPUs than on
competitors' CPUs, but failed to inform customers that Intel had designed
its compilers to give Intel chips a performance benefit.'

That has been known about for some time.

I actually do not mind if they optimized it for Intel but they should have
two versions, one for Intel, the other for non-Intel, and the installer
figures out which one to install.

As pointed out before, this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uGA6-ASKK4

.. . . uses:

CPU T4300, 2.10GHz Processor
4.0 Gb Ram
Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit.

.. . . and experiences no hesitation in the video even though the performance
is below an AMD 965:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?...00+%40+2.10GHz

.. . . but given that Adobe appears to have moved development India, I doubt
the US managers know fully the technical details, like how it is compiled.

--g

geoff wrote:


. . . but given that Adobe appears to have moved development India, I doubt
the US managers know fully the technical details, like how it is compiled.

--g

I'm sure they'll have code reviews. Adobe has a reputation to maintain.

Paul