ssmokee

The motherboard and video card must have atleast one AGP mode in common for them to work together properly. In your case both the motherboard and video card you are looking at have two modes in common (both support 4x, and 8x), so you are fine.

If you do want to do some gaming then I would seriously recommend NOT getting that 9550SE. If you want a cheap gaming card you will actually be happy with, I would recommend a minimum of a 9600 Pro. This card will run circles around the 9550SE. Also that Asus heatsink could go. You linked to the retail 2800+ which comes with its own heatsink/fan, so buying another one is kinda pointless unless its a REALLY good one. I recommend sticking with the included heatsink/fan and put the other money (that you were going to use for the Asus heatsink/fan) towards the video card. Edit: Getting a socket 939 system would probably be better in the long run, but will cost you more money. Either way, a socket 754 system would not be bad by any means.

Yes they would be ATA.

Not sure what you are trying to ask. You can easily tell a SATA drive from a plain ATA (or PATA) drive just by looking at them. The different connector on the drives for the data cable is a dead giveaway. PATA is somewhat of a newer term. Until the introduction of SATA, all PATA drives were (and STILL are) basically just known as ATA drives.

IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) could mean either PATA or SATA. PATA = Parallel ATA; uses a wide ribon data cable ~6 cm wide. SATA = Serial ATA; uses a much smaller data cable ~1 cm wide. The narrower SATA cable is prefered because it doesnt impede airflow nearly as much, and also makes for an easier time when working inside of a computer case.

No, it will work fine with PATA CD/DVD drives also. Someone told you it wouldnt?

Why the older version of memtest? Youre not the first person Ive seen recommend it, so I figure there might be something to it that Im not aware of.

Scroll down to about the middle of that page and you will see a section called Storage Decives. In that section you will find that the board supports up to four ATA133 devices, plus an additional four SATA devices.

I dont see the point of putting the OS on a RAID 0 array. RAID 0 sacrafices integrity for speed, and for simple file serving duties the OS drive is rarely going to be accessed (other than at bootup). A hardware RAID card would be a nice idea also, but again I would have to say there isnt much point. Since its just a file server the CPU is going to be idling most of the time anyway, why not use it for calculating parity data? A RAID card that actually offloads the parity calcs from the host CPU cost $200-$300 at the low end. Motherboards with onboard SATA/PATA RIAD (or cheap ~$50 PCI RAID cards) do not offload, they still rely on the host CPU for parity calcs. Personally I think that money could be better spent somewhere else.

Yup, thats exactly it.

Well since they are all on a UDMA33 controller that read speed for the RAID arrary does look about right. Keep in mind that the 33MB/s is only a theoretical maximum. You could opt for a PCI UDMA 100/133 card, but Im not so sure there would even be a point to that because even now you are going to be limited by the 100Mb network interface when serving files over the network. Over a 100Mbit connection you are only going to be able to get somewhere between 8-12 MBytes of throughput, and your array is already well over that anyway.

What benchmark were you running when you got 23MB/sec? DMA enabled for all drives? If you read or write a big file to the array what is the CPU usage like? I would think the overhead for a software RAID 5 array would be significant...maybe a limiter?

If you are installing drivers via F6 during setup, there are two drivers that must be loaded for nf3/4 SATA; Nvidia Raid Class Driver, and Nvidia Nforce Storage Controller Driver. Im guessing you might have just installed one of them. Its probably easiest if you just dont install the SATA drivers during setup though, as they are not neccessary for nvidias SATA controllers. A quick look here should provide you some helpful info.

I have another question for you. I have been testing win98se on this board a lot, using both APM and ACPI installations. When doing simple operations like double clicking a music file, navigating through windows explorer, the system immediately halts for a second or two. During this brief time I cant move the mouse cursor, or switch applications. I also witnessed the same type of behavior in windows 2000 sp4. Another weird thing is that this board refuses to run my RAM at anything other than 100 MHz. Ive tried manually setting the fsb/ram ratio, but that bios setting changes nothing. I am verifying the mem speeds with sisoft sandra. I was talking to another person who has this board having similar problems getting memory to run above 100 MHz. Have encountered either of these problems with your board?

In the Device Manager, Im seeing a yellow exclamation mark beside "Motherboard resources", which is under "System Devices". I also see a second mark beside "PCI Universal Serial Bus". Id gladly post a screen shot, but for some reason I dont have the option to attach a file when I add a reply to this thread. I did try installing 98se in APM mode though, and I didnt get any conflicts.

Who and/or what gave you the idea the it wouldnt support SATA?

I just got the same motherboard (asus a7s8x-mx rev 1.01) a couple days ago. Ill be installing 98se on it the next couple days. I will let you know how it goes. Could you post a screenshot of your device manager showing the conflict(s)?

You dont need sata drivers in order to install 98se. You can install them afterwards if you want, but becareful because there are separate raid and non-raid drivers. Make sure you pick the right one. I have installed 98se to a sil3112 sata controller w/ sata hard drive a few times, and it worked like a top. The one thing that looks off is your hard drive. Are you trying to format that thing a one huge partition? I would be rather surprised if a new 98se install would support partition sizes >128GB. Try partitioning the disk with a single small partition at first, and just leave the rest as empty space. Id also recommend trying to install using a pata drive to make sure the problem isnt being caused by something else. Check out this other thread here, and closely check post #22 by Petr.

That is a general rule that should be followed, but I think we should allow exceptions to that rule in rare situations where we can get a big majority to agree upon something. Making the freeware/opensource extras optional during install is the way to go, but I think all of them already are optional arent they? I personally prefer the patched notepad with the extra shortcut keys from rc3, mainly because it will stop everyone from arguing about what text editor to include.

The sysprep util you linked to earlier specifies its for NT4. Is this really what you used for 98se? Ive done a single 98se image using ghost and moved it to computers with very different hardware configs with success, but using a different method. To avoid that I install the master image using APM instead of ACPI. When installing use "setup /p i", and note there is a space between the "p" and "i".

The modified versions are only used when installing the optional win2k theme, arent they?

That is easily solved. Dont use the unofficial service pack, and just stick to windowsupdate. There is no need to come posting temper tantrums on the forums...it accomplishes nothing except making an a** of yourself.

Quake 3 was SMP? I didnt think were any games were threaded to take advantage of multiple procs.

Actually I dont think that has anything to do with it.

Not that Im qualified to answer, but if you feel Tihiy's solution is better then I would go with it. The only thing I would be concerned about is future compatibility with MS patches. If you did go with Tihiy's fix, would it (somehow?) break future patch applications from MS?