Biostar k8m800 Micro AM2

Obscure Via board. Fits the bill.

feipoa wrote on 2020-02-13, 21:39:

RoberMC wrote on 2020-02-13, 19:13:

IMHO, i prefer a fast Core 2 Duo.

Windows XP games do not benefit from multiple cores, and a fast C2D runs pretty cold and overclock like crazy, a 3,3 Ghz easily to over 4 Ghz with default voltage, while still running cool and silent. It beats even any Core 2 Quad for WinXP gaming because of the lower clocks and more heat of the C2Q. It is also a cheap and stable platform with a lot of mainboard choices in all kind of form factors, chipsets, colors, and memory types (I like Micro-ATX boards the most for all my retro systems).

AM2 is just not as fast in general, not as efficient, noisier, fast processors are harder to find, not so many choices, some say drivers are not as stable, but anyway, still valid and fun to play with.

I currently run a Core2Duo T7800 (2.6 GHz) on my Thinkpad laptop in the kitchen, and an FX-60 desktop in my office. Both run XP with 3.x GB of RAM. Even with the FX-60 running at 2.6 GHz, it feels a bit more responsive than the T7800 with general browsing. Maybe the hybrid drive on the FX-60 system is responsible for that; I don't know.

EDIT: The main issue I have found with the AMD FX-60 and AM2 systems was that some old and new software doesn't work on it, like the version of Snagit I have, or the new printer drivers for my M281 HP laser printer. Probably an issue with the drivers not being tested for this hardware, but it is still something to consider.

Well... That T7800 is a laptop 30w CPU with 4 MB cache. A C2D E8600 is a 120w 6MB cache desktop CPU with 40-60% more performance in single and multi core. Also HDD speed is crucial when speking about system responsiveness and if you are using a mechanical HDD in laptop vs Hybrid in the desktop, it is just too unfair of a comparison. Also laptops motherboards do not support the fastest memory, no tweaking in bios, no OC, etc, etc.

What?

T7800 is 35W and C2D E8600 is 65W. I know as had T7xxx and T9xxx, and worked on many C2D notebooks, and still have a C2D E8600 in couple computers, and modded a P5K, my only board that I kept all the years and was retired from 7 years of use but in storage to use Xeon quad 3.0GHz. Can get another Xeon 3.33GHz quad later and stick the jumper sticker on.

PS: your notebook supports socket P which means you might able to use T9800 (2.93GHz 6MB, 35W).

Cheers,

I have a Asrock am2nf3-vsta. Nf3 with AGP. But all of you know that.

I am running a Phenom II 955 overclocked at 4,0ghz at 1,45v.
4gb RAM ddr2 800mhz overclocked at 1066mhz with very high voltage setting.

The video card is obviously a Radeon HD3850 512mb gddr3.

I really want to make another installation of Windows XP this time in an ssd. But I think I have to put the SATA driver on diskettes I read, to enable the AHCI module for the ssd.
It's correct?

Where can I find the SATA driver to put in the diskette for this AM2NF3-VSTA motherboard?

Thanks mate.
Now I really want

VIA-based 754/939/AM2 boards can be very interesting for those who want to include DOS as a target, since ESS PCI sound cards' legacy functions (TDMA) work mostly fine with these chipsets.

On the other hand, for the 775 side, does anyone know of a relevant VIA chipset that can run C2Q? The ones I know mostly support C2D only, despite Wolfdale ones can be used on some.

Additionally, these chipsets have an upper limit of what kind of video cards can be used, and it seems to coincide with the period when vendors started crippling VESA/VGA BIOSes in favor of UEFI GOP. When I was working with the M2V, the highest video cards I could use were those of nVidia Fermi (400 series) and ATI Evergreen (5000 series). nVidia Kepler (600 series), AMD Southern Islands (7000 series) and onwards don't appear to work with it.

biessea wrote on 2023-01-16, 22:04:

I have a Asrock am2nf3-vsta. Nf3 with AGP. But all of you know that. […]
Show full quote

I have a Asrock am2nf3-vsta. Nf3 with AGP. But all of you know that.

I am running a Phenom II 955 overclocked at 4,0ghz at 1,45v.
4gb RAM ddr2 800mhz overclocked at 1066mhz with very high voltage setting.

The video card is obviously a Radeon HD3850 512mb gddr3.

I really want to make another installation of Windows XP this time in an ssd. But I think I have to put the SATA driver on diskettes I read, to enable the AHCI module for the ssd.
It's correct?

Where can I find the SATA driver to put in the diskette for this AM2NF3-VSTA motherboard?

Thanks mate.
Now I really want

AsRock should have the XP SATA driver on their support site for your board still, if not should still be able to use a standard nf3 or whatever SATA controller your board utilizes. As you said, load it onto a Floppy, enable ACHI in your bios if applicable, and load the driver off the floppy during XP install when it asks if you want to load SCSI storage drivers? I cant remember the exact terminology.

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2020-02-12, 10:21:

XP PCs around here seem to always be Socket 775 based C2D or C2Q systems, when they're not modern over powered systems!

No one seems to build AM2 / Athlon X2 or AM2+ / Athlon Phenom II X2 X3 x4 builds much. Why is that? I know they were generally not as good as Intel's competition at this late 2000s time but I can't remember reading any builds really....

Maybe I will make a stupid and oddball XP build with an Athlon II X3, 5GB of RAM and an xfire ATI 4830s or something...

I've once build an AM2 single-core build with some spare parts I had laying around. Iirc the specs were something like a GeForce 8600-something, 2*1GB DDR2 and some spare HDD I had laying around.
AM3 I really like. AM2 is a bit harder for me as it is mostly a step-up from s939 but without AGP support (I know there are a few oddball exceptions out there) and the removal of more and more legacy connections. Also iirc the multicores for AM2 weren't particularly faster in single core performance and AM3 CPUs did a much better job.

Having said that, I'd still want to build a more proper AM2 rig one day because I kinda skipped over the AM2 platform back in the day (I went from s754 and s939 to several AM3 builds as that way I wouldn't need to find DDR2 modules).
I even got some extra DDR2 modules recently specifically for that.

I always priorize AMD over Intel, so I always chose AM2 over 775. I always had the felling that AMD was more honest on the cost, performance ratio. But is very likelly that I'm mistaken. I don't think I'm a fanboy or someting like that, I also have 775 based computers.

Am2/+ can easily be skipped. Early am2 basically 939 refresh on ddr2 and then later better binned but still behind intel. I went from 939 to am3. Phenom ii was way better. Am3 was my platform until intel haswell. Never looked back.

IMO there were disappointments in the AM2 era, like Windsor to Brisbane core, cache was reduced and IPC seemed to drop a fraction, one of those fruitless feeling shrinks, though I guess power use improved. Intel being conservative with C2D conroe clock speeds early still made you feel like AMD was winning if you had a X2 6400+ brute, though it was soon found the Conroes overclocked like mad. Basically it felt like AMD losing ground all through there, and things didn't brighten up much until the Phenom II, then Intel advanced more rapidly than anyone thought probable. But that left AMD to fall back on their age old, better value per $ strategy and I guess that's where they always win me. So yeah, had to buy an AMD 3.0 to be good as an Intel 2.4, but you got it at the price of intel's 2.0 so it's all good. What's lovable long term too is that AMD give you a couple or three generations per socket at least, you can keep a platform going 5 years. Some say yeah, but you don't get the latest tech then, but every generation of DDR it seemed like the late top end modules of the previous gen always kicks the ass of the first years modules of the next gen when they're immature, so it's hardly much benefit for a while anyway.

greasemonkey90s wrote on 2023-01-20, 02:23:

Am2/+ can easily be skipped. Early am2 basically 939 refresh on ddr2 and then later better binned but still behind intel. I went from 939 to am3. Phenom ii was way better. Am3 was my platform until intel haswell. Never looked back.

I did the same thing and went from s939 to a AM3 Phenom II.
I stuck with that system for 10 years till it got replaced by an i5 which lasted me way too short because apparently at that time Gigabyte had made it a habit to make motherboards that will spontaneously die for no apparent reason (stuck in infinite boot loop, google turned out this was happening a lot with gigabyte boards of that era so I avoid these like the plague now). This included a legit Windows OEM licence *poof!*. Gigabyte used to make great boards but these recent ones? No good at all, so fuck you Gigabyte.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-01-20, 04:08:

IMO there were disappointments in the AM2 era, like Windsor to Brisbane core, cache was reduced and IPC seemed to drop a fraction, one of those fruitless feeling shrinks, though I guess power use improved. Intel being conservative with C2D conroe clock speeds early still made you feel like AMD was winning if you had a X2 6400+ brute, though it was soon found the Conroes overclocked like mad. Basically it felt like AMD losing ground all through there, and things didn't brighten up much until the Phenom II, then Intel advanced more rapidly than anyone thought probable. But that left AMD to fall back on their age old, better value per $ strategy and I guess that's where they always win me. So yeah, had to buy an AMD 3.0 to be good as an Intel 2.4, but you got it at the price of intel's 2.0 so it's all good. What's lovable long term too is that AMD give you a couple or three generations per socket at least, you can keep a platform going 5 years. Some say yeah, but you don't get the latest tech then, but every generation of DDR it seemed like the late top end modules of the previous gen always kicks the ass of the first years modules of the next gen when they're immature, so it's hardly much benefit for a while anyway.

This is I think very close to the truth 🙂

With Conroe, Intel caught AMD with their pants down and I considered the faster AM2 dual cores to be more or less inefficient furnaces. AM3 however was a much better platform when considering value, especially since Intel then began their socket hopping strategy to make people pay big budget for upgrades that were barely any faster, milking their customers to the max (and Bulldozer didn't help AMD much, I skipped that one as well as Bulldozer concept seemed like a bad idea to me).

some AM2 boards released during the k8 days got bios upgrades to support Phenom and Phenom II, while running Phenom II with DDR2 had a performance drop I don't think it was that massive, well, the original Phenom II 920 and 940 were DDR2 only CPUs.

the cheaper AM2 A64s like 4000+, 5000+ used to be good budget alternatives to the e2000 pentium line (Conroe with 1MB l2) with interesting options for motherboards,

SPBHM wrote on 2023-01-21, 18:34:

while running Phenom II with DDR2 had a performance drop I don't think it was that massive,

While you could get higher clock on the DDR3 when it was maturing, initial releases were a little slower, the increased latency was a penalty. Illustrated here, where the clock speed of the DDR2 was only 75% of the DDR3 but the benchmarking difference maxed at around 10% while some tests were much less... https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1782/amd_p … ance/index.html

At the time for your performance dollar, trying to hold it down to a reasonable budget, you could get now cheaper DDR2 board and insanely fast for DDR2 RAM to fill it, whereas the $20+ for the next gen DDR3 would probably have you economising to Kingston Value RAM or equivalent and not initially having any real performance advantage.

There were some disappointments for upgrades though, like first gen MSI K9 Neo SLI which has absolutely zero official support for anything beyond Brisbane cores and doesn't seem to like those all that much. Where as a more enthusiast oriented board you'd expect greater effort.

My main gripe with AM2 (despite it having (often sketchy) compatibility with certain AM3 CPUs) was that AM2 boards tended to support 8GB max. This was just barely worth it for me as I already had 2*1GB DDR-400 in my s939 rig and wanted to put 4GB memory in my new system at the least and still have an upgrade path.
DDR2 was nearing the end of its lifecycle.
The AM2 CPUs didn't really appeal to me and I saw little reason to go DDR2 when DDR3 boards seemed to simply be a better choice at the time.

When I did build my s939 system, AM2 already existed btw, so the wait for AM3 wasn't actually that long (3 years later I got a Phenom II).

Still, AM2 does appeal to me 🙂

8 Gb RAM was a reasonable amount for Core 2 Quad 6xxx/Phehom 9xxx system. And quite pricy at that time, if you wanted good overclocked memory (1000-1066Mhz).

I have a Msi 785GT-E63 with a Phenom II 960T and 8gb DDR2 800 and a Radeon HD5870. From my experience with RAM, it is better to have a lot of not so fast ram than not having enought RAM and have to use a big swapfile. Maybe is an old abit of the 90's.
Is true, that this is a late motherboard for AM2, I think it came to the market when the AM3 platform was already there.
One cool factor of this motherboard is that it supports all the AM2/+ CPUs and all the Athlon II and Phenom II CPUS for AM3 until the FX line. And has the intresting core unlock feature.
One big point for AM2 is the cooler retention mechanism, I didn't try an AM4 cooler but you can use the same cooler for 754-939-AM2/+ and AM3/+, the only thing to take care is the mounting presure.
I'm using a colermaster AIO on the 960T.
Intel has the abit of changing the socket very often and I think that it's not easy to find an AIO for 775 nowadays, althought I still have the 775 retention mechanism for the Asetek AIOs.
But it's true my Core 2 Duo 6700 doesn't need a powerfull cooler.

I recently thought about a socket AM2/3 retro rig.
I ran into some issues while researching for a good combination vs a 775.
Badly phrased:

1) to make sense vs 775 I need it low power: I can get a C2D with x2 for lower power and better performance
2) ddr2 vs ddr1 (939 vs am2) makes little everyday difference; old reviews showed not so much increase in performance (x2 vs x2) - K10 didn't help much; C2D wins again

In order to challenge a 775 C2D you need better than AM2.
AM2 is, from my experience, some kind of in-between for better to come in AMD's future.

I never found it appealing, it was just the stuff to buy to keep prices down. After C2d it was just dead.
When Phenom came out with its bug it was just deader 😀

Personally I can't find any use apart for some ultra low voltage cpu, but Intel alternatives can give much more.

I've got a nice AM2 platform with an X2 6000, 4gb ECC RAM and a Quadro 2000 but am having a hard time justifying it's existence. I've got other machines (C2Q, LGA1155) to do what it can but better.

Nexxen wrote on 2023-01-22, 13:57:

I recently thought about a socket AM2/3 retro rig.
1) to make sense vs 775 I need it low power: I can get a C2D with x2 for lower power and better performance

There are those 4850e and 5050e brisbane core X2s that are lower wattage. On a nforce 400 mATX board they will pootle along at under 50W at the wall (more of course under high load), but those boards fall in the bumpgate problem area, so may not be ideal for long term use.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-01-22, 04:08:

8 Gb RAM was a reasonable amount for Core 2 Quad 6xxx/Phehom 9xxx system. And quite pricy at that time, if you wanted good overclocked memory (1000-1066Mhz).

The thing is that I always have tons of windows and folders open. Browsers, programs, folders because I need access to a lot of files quick, mostly because of my other hobby, which is making mods for games.
I already had 2GB and that felt kinda cramped, and my aim was to go for 4GB with a new system. But a max of 8GB would mean a marginal upgrade path and I'd be stuck till I did yet another full system upgrade.
With AM3 this max amount was doubled to 16GB which, for me, provided sufficient upgrade potential. This system eventually did get upgraded to a max of 16GB and it lasted me for 10 years 😀 (yes the last few years it was already cramped again)
For me 8GB max was simply not compelling enough.

Of course for a secondary system I can make due with way less memory. My other AM3 rigs had 4GB and it was plenty.