The log of the gamer

Strange thing just happened. I have installed Win XP over Win 7, which caused boot menu to corrupt - I could boot only XP’s, so after a moment of googling I’ve found EasyBCD - great and simple boot manager. Using it I restored Vista bootloader on the primary partition of first HDD, rebooted and the screen went black.

WTF, I thought for a moment BIOS had died again (remember my problems two months ago?) but then the computer boots, the HDD LED blinks vividly, so it’s running with no video. Then I thought ‘VGA dead’ with a smile - I would replace the crappy GF8500GE with something newer (HD4770/4830/4850 or GF9600GT/9800GT/GTS250), even started looking for warranty card. I even digged out some old S3 Virge PCI VGA which proved some of my theories - using it I saw the computer booting (bootloader was installed correctly), but then came the idea ‘what if I switch PCI-Express slots’.

Damn I hate those moments of truth.

Anyway, I put the 8500 in second PCI-Express slots, and it worked! Seems like the first (PCIEx16) slot went down to hell, so I quickly changed the configuration of PCIE slots from 16/2 to 8/8 (damn you DFI for those jumpers), reseated the VGA in the second slot and off we go.

Good thing is that I realized this could be the cause - I would spend money but the problem will be there still.

Bad thing is that I don’t know why and how this could be reverted.

In my previous post, I described an unlucky situation when BIOS in my computer got corrupted. I’ve been waiting to fix it for two days, when I finally hooked up with a friend of mine, who still happens to have computer with working floppy drive. Fine, I thought, I will do it quick and come clean out of this mess.

Not so fast. First it turned out that his computer is stored somewhere in the basement, so we had to go and pull out of the storage room. Then it appeared that the computer was dead, so we grabbed another one from the storage. This one booted fine, but after entering Windows it became clear that default account has only guest privileges and is unable to detect and install my flash drive I brought with. Damn the machine, we said, and went looking for a nice student in nearby dormitory who owns working computer and floppy drive.

Then this dude happened. First year postgraduate in chemistry, so I thought, it’d be real quick now. So I sat in front of monitor, pull the flash drive out of the pocket, but still something seems strange. Yeah, that’s fucking ubuntu at the desktop. Fortunately, he appeared to use Windows virtual machine due to his fondness of Office 2007, so after 10 minutes of installing floppy drive module and mounting disks I got it working. It took me an hour to make three bootable floppies with three versions of DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D BIOS.

Then I’m back home, put the floppy into the drive and damn! It won’t flash! It just hangs after reading BIOS image from the floppy. I thought floppy was corrupt, but no, two others acted the same. What the hell, I thought, and started to work with some strange runtime parameters for awdflash. Finally I’ve found the combination of awdflash /py/sn/cc/cd/qi/f to be working (actually /qi was the one to do miracles), but the nightmare’s not over. It’s time to assemble to machine again, what is the most annoying of all. Got still a leak in water cooling to catch, anyway.

The outcome is easy - never flash with overclocked/untested/unstable settings.

I came to an idead - DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D with 510-1 BIOS now is not the best of ideas, especially while using X2 processor. So I tried to flash to newer one, 3/29/06.

I used WinFlash as usual. While flashing the progress indicator stopped at 27% during programming flash memory and bang! computer rebooted. What’s left was:

Award BootBlock 1.0

Checking drive A:

INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I don’t have a damn floppy with system and BIOS to flash!

Well, all overclockers know motherboard maker AsRock. It’s famous for its’ hybrid designed mobos:

• Socket 754 with an option to insert add-in card to support Socket 939,
• Socket 775 with support of both DDR/DDR2 and AGP/PCI-Express,
• Socket 775 with support of DDR2 and DDR3.

Some of those cases aren’t really unusual (check for instance Asus P5KC/P5QC), however, this led me to wonder whether it would be possible to combine DDR1 and DDR3  or maybe even DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 on one motherboard. Apart from clear issue of limited space it would be interesting if it’s possible to design such chipset or memory controller and what would be the difference in performance between those two. As we all know, there isn’t much difference between DDR and DDR2, as it has been checked in cases of 939- and AM2-based Athlon 64 systems, and with mentioned AsRocks with Intel’s E6×00 CPUs.

The question remains open and I don’t see if it is going to be verified in any way other to comparing DDR to DDR2, then DDR2 to DDR3 and adjusting the results somehow.