Ok, here's the thing... I was living in Brazil, very near the beach and my pc kinda got salted up from all of the salty air, and now I moved to Argentina, but flight travel with equipment that has been affected by salted air accelerates the process... anyway, since the actual screw up happened during the moving, my dad's company is replacing my computer... I had a PC-CHIPS M810D which i know was a real peace of junk but with a Athlon XP2000+ and 256 DDR/133/266.... So now they replaced it and all, and now I got an Asrock K7S41GX with an AMD Sempron 2400+.... Here's the deal.. i know the motherboard is an improvement and all but i had 3 basic questions... 1) Is the Sempron 2400+ better then the Athlon XP2000+ or am i being ripped off by being replaced with this one? 2) I'm really not that much of a hardware genius and since these days its easier (and cheaper) to find DDR RAM that runs at 400Mhz then 266Mhz, will this board accept 400Mhz if i choose to buy another paint, and if so.. can I run them both together the 266 and the 400 or will i have to change the 266 so its 400 as well? 3) I've been checking online and it says that my shared video is only supposed to go up to 64, however i have the option of bumping it up to 128mb of shared memory on my BIOS... i tried it and windows sure did show up with the 128mb on the system... meaning or i did really get 128mb for the video shared or it dissapeared when i put that option.. anyway, running windows xp with only 128 is kinda hard.. so i put it back until i buy the other paint... is it really possible to have 128mb or graphics on this motherboard.. or I am just going nuts? Oh yea, and off the bat... im kinda stupid when it comes to hardware... normally i just use anything that runs... I can put a ...say... GForce 4 on my AGP slot and it will run? I mean, i always thought onboards couldnt get any add-ons.... Thanks again, if anyone answers... and ohh, dont have to answer all the questions if you dont know.. whatever help you can provide will be appreciated... thanks... Aphis
Let me try these one at a time.. Thats a very good question, but it would be kind of hard to find a XP2000+ processor now a days. The XP processor is the better processor however you have uped your speed to 2400 so it probably about equals out For this board you will need two of the same memory modules. Just get another DDR266 MHz stick and you will be good to go It is possible that they had a Bios update for that? Are you sure it's not the AGP Aperture Size that is reading 128? Yes and it is recommended that you put a good Video card in your system. Just make sure you disable the onboard video in your BIOS.
- might be able to use ddr400 ram but will run at your old ram speed Max. 2GB DDR, 2 x DDR DIMM, DDR333/266 - VGA Integrated Real 256E 3D Graphics Shared Memory Max. 64MB - AGP 8X/4X 1.5V - check in bios to disable onboard video not sound after posting with new video card
[bold]I got an Asrock K7S41GX [/bold] I've got the same mobo in my main pc. ddp/bbmayo:ddp,you may remember me when I told you my mobo got partially fried after an ice storm in january? Fried the LAN/1 gig of ram/ then a month later one of my ram slots went bad. Hard telling what else got fried in it. I just replaced it with a new one yesterday.Exact same model,but has the P2.00 bios version as to my old P1.70 in the old mobo.I also added round 80 wire/40 pin ide cables. I have a minor issue I was just curious if you can catch something that I may have missed. I swapped mobos/cleaned the top of athlon 300+ processor/applied an even thin layer of thermal paste,cleaned the heatsink,set all the mobo jumpers to the same setting as the old one/hooked in the new ide cables and left in just 1 gig of pc2700 ram. I then powered up,checked my bios and set it back to my previous settings and rebooted the drivers after the windows opened up. It's working faster and better than before,but seems like something I may have missed with my onboard graphics. I really noticed it on all these "moving gifs",but it started doing this about a week or so ago on old mobo. These gifs aren't moving. I didn't notice it until I posted to JimDandy and my frog was dancing his ass off!lol He just sits in the middle of the screen on my monitor.I thought is was my gif site,but I checked on my backup pc and surely enough,he was dancing-but a little slower. I check at asrock's website and they did have another update on the bios. Just thought maybe you guys may have seen something I missed,maybe the update? Thanks and Happy Easter to all at AD!
saugmon, are you using onboard video & if so are you using ram from old board as possible might be ram problem. see what happens if use different ram &/or a videocard to see if it does still. happy easter to you too
Thanks for the quick reply ddp, That was my original 1 gig stick. I still have the other half gig that should still be good. The guy I had that worked on it said it checked out ok after that ram slot went bad.I don't have any other graphics cards, not sure of which one to pick up-a little over my head. I have an empty slot near the center of mobo for AGP 8x. It has a sticker on it,and the manual states: (do not use a 3.3v AGP card in the AGP slot on mobo-may cause damage to mobo).Is this where i should be checking on with another graphics card? Sorry,when it comes to pcs,I'm still a noob-I haven't messed with video/graphics cards. Later
try the 512meg in place of the 1 gig to see if problem still there or not. that 1 gig, is it 1 stick ot ram or 2 sticks. the slot with that sticker is for a videocard so you are looking at least a 4x agp card with 1.5v or less
Graphics look the same,Speed still ok-no slowing down when going from 1 gb to 1/2 gb. maybe try both sticks?
what do you have the apeture set as in the bios, 64meg or what. also amount of ram assigned to videocard??
I inserted both sticks of ram, black screen. I unhooked all my drives but main hd,cleared cmos and left 1 stick of ram in the #1 slot on all is back to norm so far with just both my hd's hooked up. Apeture set in bios: 64 mbs Amount of ram asigned to video card: Can't locate that phrase exactly. I found Onboard vga shared memory and it is set on auto.Also primary graphics adapter set on PCI, option available to set for AGP but that may for a separate graphics card-Maybe? Edit, got all my drives hooked up,1 gig of ram,and back to square one. I will get another card tomorrow,being easter,probably nothing open.
chane apeture to 128, shared to manual & to 64meg or higher, change from pci to agp & disable assign irq to pci video.
same result ddp-, I just hooked up my dsl onto my spare pc,and the graphics are the same-no motion on those moving gifs. Maybe ISP problem-Sprint dsl via earthlink. At least i'm not getting anymore black screens of death on this new mobo,lol. Later buddy
