Anyone have/ever had Asrock 775Dual-VSTA/Upgrade Max out

Hello. I am new to this forum. I currently have a 775Dual-VSTA Motherboard made by Asrock, which curiously is not on the list of vendors in this forum.

My question is for those of you who have or have had this board regarding what components you have installed on it.

The details of it are here:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview. [...] al-VSTA&s=

I purchased it almost 2 years ago and am trying to max it out to last a little longer before having to rebuild a whole new computer; I am on a budget. The goal is to be able to last a little longer in the gaming market(I would love to be able to play Far Cry 2 and GTA4) and also make the computer faster on start up (currently about 2 minutes from push button to completely loaded on Windows XP). The computer set up has worked flawlessly for the last two years.

Here is the CPU support list

http://www.asrock.com/mb/cpu.asp?M [...] VSTA&s=775

I currently have a Prescott Pentium 4 3.4 CPU. I have been watching the e6600 and e6700 prices and they are reasonable new or used.

Here is the VGA card support list

http://www.asrock.com/mb/vga.asp?M [...] =775&c=VGA

I currently have a 7900GS card. According to the list, I can go as high as a 8600GT or 8800GTX. Unfortunately, the PCIe is only set-up for x4 but will fit a x16 card so I have to be careful. Upgrading the card may buy me some more time and is fairly cheap now.

I currently have two 512 sticks of DDRII667 memory (PC5300) and according to the website, the max is 2GB. However, I ordered a pair of 1GB sticks from Newegg and when I installed them, the computer booted but nothing was viewable on screen. When I put the 512 sticks back in, the computer was normal again. Hopefully the replacements work, otherwise I am clueless.

My question is: What CPU, GPU, and Memory did you have max in your identical board?

Hope someone has had this board before and can help me.

Thanks,

Josh

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If your new memory still doesn't work with the asrock board, I would look at the newegg socket 775 ddr2 boards. They usually have one new or open box for less than $50 shipped. You can also check the for sale forums for a used e6600 or socket 775 board; the e6600 often goes for around $80 shipped; lots of guys including myself have leftover fry's electronics combo special ecs boards cheap. I use the anandtech for sale forum.

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Reply to o1die

o1die wrote :

If your new memory still doesn't work with the asrock board, I would look at the newegg socket 775 ddr2 boards. They usually have one new or open box for less than $50 shipped. You can also check the for sale forums for a used e6600 or socket 775 board; the e6600 often goes for around $80 shipped; lots of guys including myself have leftover fry's electronics combo special ecs boards cheap. I use the anandtech for sale forum.

What do you mean by "I would look at the newegg socket 775 ddr2 boards"? any link to that? the e6600 go for about that much on ebay, but where on here can I pick one up with paypal?

Reply to jaq78

I am using an E5300 with 4GB of Mushkin and an HD3870 on this mobo, BIOS 3.13g.

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Reply to theAnimal

theAnimal wrote :

I am using an E5300 with 4GB of Mushkin and an HD3870 on this mobo, BIOS 3.13g.

You are the only person I have found that is still runing this board.

-How were you able to run 4GB on this board when it says 2MB max?
-What CPU are you running? I have a 3.4 Prescott Pentium 4 that i have been able to stabilize(runs very cool) at 3.75. What have you been able to overclock at? I am looking at buying a used e6600 or e6700 C2D.
-Is the HD3870 the highest ATI card that will work on the x4 PCIe slot on this board?
-Will the SATA 3.0 work with this board's Sata 1.5?

I would greatly appreciate any more info you can provide to help me last a year or so more..

Thanks,

Josh

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Reply to jaq78

jaq78 wrote :

You are the only person I have found that is still runing this board.

-How were you able to run 4GB on this board when it says 2MB max?
-What CPU are you running? I have a 3.4 Prescott Pentium 4 that i have been able to stabilize(runs very cool) at 3.75. What have you been able to overclock at? I am looking at buying a used e6600 or e6700 C2D.
-Is the HD3870 the highest ATI card that will work on the x4 PCIe slot on this board?
-Will the SATA 3.0 work with this board's Sata 1.5?

I would greatly appreciate any more info you can provide to help me last a year or so more..

Thanks,

Josh

-I'm using an unofficial BIOS (3.13g, actually noticed there's a newer one, time to flash again) from pctreiber.net. http://www.pctreiber.net/filebase.php?cat=22 It has support for >2GB (actually sees about 3.3, 3.25 available in Windows).
-The CPU is a Pentium Dual-core E5300, which right now I have up to 3.4GHz (from 2.6). The E7X00 series is also supported. The E5200/5300 sell for < $100 and have a default 200MHz FSB, and would definitely recommend them over the E6600/6700 due to the limited FSB of this mobo.
-The HD4XX0 cards are supported as well.
-I put a jumper on my HDD so I'm not sure, besides AFAIK there are no current HDDs which are able to use more bandwidth than SATA 1.5 offers anyway.

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Reply to theAnimal

theAnimal wrote :

-I'm using an unofficial BIOS (3.13g, actually noticed there's a newer one, time to flash again) from pctreiber.net. http://www.pctreiber.net/filebase.php?cat=22 It has support for >2GB (actually sees about 3.3, 3.25 available in Windows).
-The CPU is a Pentium Dual-core E5300, which right now I have up to 3.4GHz (from 2.6). The E7X00 series is also supported. The E5200/5300 sell for < $100 and have a default 200MHz FSB, and would definitely recommend them over the E6600/6700 due to the limited FSB of this mobo.
-The HD4XX0 cards are supported as well.
-I put a jumper on my HDD so I'm not sure, besides AFAIK there are no current HDDs which are able to use more bandwidth than SATA 1.5 offers anyway.

on your e5300, what number did you set in the bios to jump it from 2.6 to 3.4?, why would that be better than the e6600/e6700? I am not following on what you mean about limited FSB of the motherboard...

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Reply to jaq78

jaq78 wrote :

on your e5300, what number did you set in the bios to jump it from 2.6 to 3.4?, why would that be better than the e6600/e6700? I am not following on what you mean about limited FSB of the motherboard...

I upped my FSB from 200 to 262. The FSB on this mobo will not go much over 300, so for a chip with 266 default FSB and a low multiplier you don't have much headroom.

Right, I have found that 297 is the best FSB for the e6700 on this board which puts it at 2.97ghz. With that said, is the e5300 at 3.4 actually better than the e6700 at 2.97 when L2 Cache 2MB vs L2 Cache of 4MB on the e6700 and Front Side Bus 800MHz vs FSB of 1066?

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Reply to jaq78

I also don't see that model on the CPU supported list for the board on the ASROCK website...

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Reply to jaq78

What about the X6800? How high can it go on this board?

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Reply to jaq78

jaq78 wrote :

Right, I have found that 297 is the best FSB for the e6700 on this board which puts it at 2.97ghz. With that said, is the e5300 at 3.4 actually better than the e6700 at 2.97 when L2 Cache 2MB vs L2 Cache of 4MB on the e6700 and Front Side Bus 800MHz vs FSB of 1066?

Yes. The cache does not make much difference, nor does the FSB (which is actually 1048 vs 1188).

jaq78 wrote :

I also don't see that model on the CPU supported list for the board on the ASROCK website...

I'm using a beta BIOS, which adds support for E5X00 and E7X00.

jaq78 wrote :

What about the X6800? How high can it go on this board?

As high as the default Vcore will allow.

theAnimal wrote :

-I'm using an unofficial BIOS (3.13g, actually noticed there's a newer one, time to flash again) from pctreiber.net. [url].

Hi,

I appreciate that the original thread is quite old ... but I hope someone could help me ?

I obviously have the 775dual-vsta board and have just seen on this forum and others that you can "install" beta bios's to get extra features etc ... the most important one to me is allowing it to use more than 2gb memory.

So I have been to http://www.pctreiber.net to get the latest bios, but am a little unsure how to update the motherboard with it ...as all the instructions are in German. Google translate does a good job ... but still suffers and as this task is something that you HAVE to be confident with, I was hoping that someone on here could either direct me to some english instructions or at least let me know via this thread on how I go about flashing the bios ?

I flashed the bios to 3.10 yesterday ( the latest official bios ) via windows and that was easy and worked a treat. But I am not than confident in uping to 3.19a as there is just a file with a "19a" extention and nothing else ?!

Any help would be greatly appreciated !!

Thanks,

Chris.

Reply to bigmox68

bigmox68,

you have two choices:

1) If you have a floppy drive and a working boot floppy, download the 3.10 DOS bios update from the ASROCK site, copy the ASRflash.exe file and the new BIOS image file (e.g. "75DVSTA3.19a" ) to the floppy, reboot and run the ASRflash from the DOS command line once you've booted from the floppy. Follow the instructions given on the ASROCK site, just substitute the 3.19 BIOS file for the 3.10 file.

2)If you don't have a floppy anymore (I don't), download the 3.17a boot image from the PCTREIBER site, burn it to a CD, and boot from the CD. Run the flask utility as mentioned above.

The 3.19 rev adds support for the latest CPUs, and a graphics card. If all you care about is the memory patch, you should be fine with the 3.17 rev.

Hope this helps.

Reply to aboczsr

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