I got my SATA Drives working on my P4PE - more questions now..

Thanks to Lars, Dave & Pauls's advice & help I can now see my sata
drives on my P4PE board. I put two Seagate 250 MB drives in as striped
rather than mirrored. I noticed though that the jumpers on these drives
are set to limit the speed to 1.8 GB's so I left them there, can I
remove them ok with this board?

I am also wondering is what is the fastest processor I can put on this
board, I currently have a 2.4 Ghz Intel chip on it. I am wondering
because on my other PC that has a P4PE-X there is a 3.2 processor that
allows multi-threading and was thinking about upgrading the processor on
this board if it allows it.

I ran the CPU-Z utility on this board and it says it is just a P4PE rev
1.xx.

Also, in looking at the ASUS downloads for this board I see that there
is a bios upgrade available, but I'm wondering if it is neccesary to
upgrade the BIOS since everything seems to be working fine and the
upgrade says it is for newer CPU's.

thanks again in advance

GS wrote:
> Thanks to Lars, Dave & Pauls's advice & help I can now see my sata
> drives on my P4PE board. I put two Seagate 250 MB drives in as striped
> rather than mirrored. I noticed though that the jumpers on these
> drives are set to limit the speed to 1.8 GB's so I left them there,
> can I remove them ok with this board?
>
> I am also wondering is what is the fastest processor I can put on this
> board, I currently have a 2.4 Ghz Intel chip on it. I am wondering
> because on my other PC that has a P4PE-X there is a 3.2 processor that
> allows multi-threading and was thinking about upgrading the processor
> on this board if it allows it.
>
> I ran the CPU-Z utility on this board and it says it is just a P4PE
> rev 1.xx.
>
> Also, in looking at the ASUS downloads for this board I see that there
> is a bios upgrade available, but I'm wondering if it is neccesary to
> upgrade the BIOS since everything seems to be working fine and the
> upgrade says it is for newer CPU's.

The fastest cpu supported would be a 3.2GHz 800FSB (works with limitation as
you have to use later BIOS and overclock the memory bus)
From Asus site :
*800MHz FSB CPU is not the default specification of this motherboard. If
you decide to overclock with Intel Pentium 4 processor on 800MHzm FSB,
DDR400 DRAM module is a must.

1) Apply only one DIMM
2) Download the latest BIOS and the P4PE series will automatically upgrade
to 800MHz FSB.
3) Only supported Northwood/WM CPU

Second fastest would be a 3.06 GHZ 533FSB (that is the processor I have
installed on my P4PE office machine)
According to the chart I just looked at it needs pcb motherboard revision
1001 and atleast BIOS 1001.

Having said that IMHO this board is somewhat slow in performance probably
because of the single channel RAM.

> are set to limit the speed to 1.8 GB's so I left them there, can I

I don't think I have such jumpers, but the speed of the Promise S-ATA
is a bit slow (I have my old S-ATA in an external USB2 box, and that
is MUCH faster that the Promise S-ATA). No problem in real life though

> I am also wondering is what is the fastest processor I can put on this
> board, I currently have a 2.4 Ghz Intel chip on it. I am wondering

I have a 2.54. When I bought mine 3 was max (but very expensive)

> Also, in looking at the ASUS downloads for this board I see that there
> is a bios upgrade available, but I'm wondering if it is neccesary to
> upgrade the BIOS since everything seems to be working fine and the

At least it is safe. I have the newest one.
--
Lars-Erik - http://www.osterud.name - ICQ 7297605
WinXP, Asus P4PE, 2.53GHz, 1GB, MSI 7600GS, SB-Live

> Having said that IMHO this board is somewhat slow in performance probably
> because of the single channel RAM.

Notice this on newer games. I have at Nvidia 7600GS AGP and my P4
2.53Ghz. None of them bottlenecks. But the RAM transfer holds back.
Helped a bit with 1GB RAM. But still CPU and GPU are not at 100%
--
Lars-Erik - http://www.osterud.name - ICQ 7297605
WinXP, Asus P4PE, 2.53GHz, 1GB, MSI 7600GS, SB-Live