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Biostar A870U3

post #1 of 22
Thread Starter 
Hello to everyone here at the OC forum, this is my first post. I am a long time RTS Gamer and finally decided to build my own rig after many years of putting Band-Aids on retail junk. After my successful first build I am gaining the confidence to try some system tweaking. This is new ground to me. I had not touched a BIOS since back in the days when it was required to to do so. My first rig was a Commodore 16. Yes 16k, NOT 64k - LOL.

I was deciding between a few boards that met my build criteria, all of which were between $90-$100. I was leaning towards an MSI 870 board that had an IDE so I could use some old drives. The Biostar A870U3 has no IDE, BUT it does have 6 SATA inputs and all of them are SATA3. Most of the boards in this price range have only a couple SATA3. When the price of the Biostar dropped to $65 I decided I would get a new primary drive (turned out to be SSD) and an adapter for a pretty new IDE DVD burner I had. A $10 Rosewill IDE adapter has worked flawlessly.

Thus far I have been able to unlock all 4 cores on the 555BE I got for $87@Newegg (It appears that 3 are stable) and overclock 5% by changing the clock from 200 to 210. I have tried changing some of the memory settings, but I am at a complete loss as to what any of this means and have only seen mild changes in performance. I managed to get black screen last night after blindly monkeying with a memory setting. During the night I postulated that I had changed the memory reference and this turned out to be the case when I tried this morning. Switching the memory to the other slots got me functioning again. This may have been the perfect close call to convince me to stop blindly changing BIOS settings, and so here I am!


My goals for this build were :

A: Make a rig capable of running any current RTS game flawlessly.
B: Be able to play legacy games flawlessly & without hassle.
C: Spend less than $500
D: Cool & Quiet!
E: Have USB 3.0 & SATA 3.
F: Have the option to upgrade further in a couple of years.

This Biostar A870U3 build has met all 6 of these goals with flying colors! I can play every game in the stack that I have bought in the past few years that my old boat anchor 2.7Ghzx1 Compaq POS would not play, and every Demo for new games I have downloaded in the week since the build. This includes: Men of War, Theatre of War, COH, Anno 1404, Medieval2, AOE3, and a few others. All of these games run superbly fluid on Ultra settings, even when loading largest maps and doing camera rotations, zooming- etc. No hiccups- all fluid. Pretty amazing - I have never experienced this level of performance before. A lot of the credit has to go to the 1Gig HIS card, that thing is a real winner for $49!! I have had zero problems with any older games I have tried including: Blitzkrieg, Desert Rats vs Afrika Korps, No Surrender, Railroad Tycoon 3, Civ2, AOEII, Panzers, and even ArmyMen - the first one from '98.

$500 Gaming rig? The NewEgg bill was $425, with $50 in rebates- all sent. So I am @ 375 there along with a Praetorian case for $25 on CL(Score!) and $35 for a clean non-oem copy of XP (used). The only old thing I used was a DVD. I also have $27 for a card reader and a 16 gig SD card which will be here today. I plan on getting a new 6 Gbs HD, which I see for around $50, so I will land within a 12 pack of $500 for the whole system. The benchmarks I have run thus far place the performance of this RatRod gaming rig in line with $1000 (on up) i7 machines. I am confident that I can up that a little further still for no cost with some help from the geniuses here at the OC forum.

The RatRod runs cool and quiet in the flat black Praetorian all aluminum case, and being "full ATX" (*length only- width is clipped to 8"") I have plenty of options for adding things in the future, including SLI and the option to go for a 4 or 6 core CPU.

So, the $500 RatRod Biostar build meets all of my build requirements and I would recommend a rig like this to anybody who wants to go fast for cheapski and isn't worried about whether the heatsinks are curvy $ anodized blue.

My first questions for the community relating to the Biostar A870U3 Phenom 555BE are: How do I get this thing to run at somewhere near 4Ghz? And, how do I adjust the memory settings to maximize their performance as well? I have thus far only been successful in overclocking 5% by changing the clock from 200 to 210. Any other #s I have tried give me a "too many cold restart" message and won't boot, and the memory tweaks I have tried have only brought grief. Anybody got some advice for an old RatRodder?
Edited by Jagged_Steel - 6/24/11 at 11:37am
    
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AMD FX-4170 @ 4.86 Ghz ASUS M5A97 EVO 2 x PowerColor AX6790 Crossfire 16GB (4 x 4GB) SAMSUNG MV-3V4G3D @1890 Mhz 8-9-9 
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post #2 of 22
Welcome to the forums! With your 555 you can overclock as well by upping your CPU multiplier too. You should really get an aftermarket heatsink such as the Cooler Master hyper 212+ if you want to reach 4GHz. Up your frequency a little at a time and stress the cpu with Prime95 and keep an eye on temps using HWmonitor.
post #3 of 22
Jagged_Steel.... welcome to OCN!

To be honest, if you're looking to do much in the way of tweaking or OC'ing.... you should have bought a "T-Series" board. The vanilla version you have usually doesn't have as many settings, and they weren't really meant to be overclocking boards.
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post #4 of 22
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kratthew D. Kraids View Post
Welcome to the forums! With your 555 you can overclock as well by upping your CPU multiplier too. You should really get an aftermarket heatsink such as the Cooler Master hyper 212+ if you want to reach 4GHz. Up your frequency a little at a time and stress the cpu with Prime95 and keep an eye on temps using HWmonitor.
Thanks, I like this forum already. How do I change the CPU multiplier? I don't see anything like that in the BIOS. I have the Coolermaster Aerogate fan controller, with all of the temperature sensors installed. Love that thing. Thus far I am staying really cool, even when stress testing with all 4 cores engaged, so I am hoping I can get up to at least the high 3s running only 2 with my current cooling setup.
    
CPUMotherboardGraphicsRAM
AMD FX-4170 @ 4.86 Ghz ASUS M5A97 EVO 2 x PowerColor AX6790 Crossfire 16GB (4 x 4GB) SAMSUNG MV-3V4G3D @1890 Mhz 8-9-9 
Hard DriveOptical DriveCoolingOS
2x Corsair Force 3 120 GB SSD External USB AMD stock cooler Win7 Ultimate 
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ASUS 23" DVI Fullsize, solid. OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W CM Praetorian 730 Black 
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Has red light on bottom 
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AMD FX-4170 @ 4.86 Ghz ASUS M5A97 EVO 2 x PowerColor AX6790 Crossfire 16GB (4 x 4GB) SAMSUNG MV-3V4G3D @1890 Mhz 8-9-9 
Hard DriveOptical DriveCoolingOS
2x Corsair Force 3 120 GB SSD External USB AMD stock cooler Win7 Ultimate 
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ASUS 23" DVI Fullsize, solid. OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W CM Praetorian 730 Black 
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post #5 of 22
I'm not sure about the A-series boards, but in the bios there should be an option for custom P-states.
post #6 of 22
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kratthew D. Kraids View Post
there should be an option for custom P-states.
Yes, there are P-state settings. What exactly do I want to change there?
    
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AMD FX-4170 @ 4.86 Ghz ASUS M5A97 EVO 2 x PowerColor AX6790 Crossfire 16GB (4 x 4GB) SAMSUNG MV-3V4G3D @1890 Mhz 8-9-9 
Hard DriveOptical DriveCoolingOS
2x Corsair Force 3 120 GB SSD External USB AMD stock cooler Win7 Ultimate 
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ASUS 23" DVI Fullsize, solid. OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W CM Praetorian 730 Black 
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Hard DriveOptical DriveCoolingOS
2x Corsair Force 3 120 GB SSD External USB AMD stock cooler Win7 Ultimate 
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post #7 of 22
If it asks to enable it select yes, then from there you can adjust multiplier, core voltage, and divider. Along with NB speed and voltage, you really don't need the divider so don't worry about it.
post #8 of 22
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kratthew D. Kraids View Post
If it asks to enable it select yes, then from there you can adjust multiplier, core voltage, and divider. Along with NB speed and voltage, you really don't need the divider so don't worry about it.
Great. Thank you for the information. I recall seeing those things. I think I have enough info to try to rev this thing up a bit. Hopefully I wont spin out and smash the ol' RatRod. Going black now, I will report back - which won't take too long thanks to the SSD- 7 second XP boot to cursor- truly amazing!
    
CPUMotherboardGraphicsRAM
AMD FX-4170 @ 4.86 Ghz ASUS M5A97 EVO 2 x PowerColor AX6790 Crossfire 16GB (4 x 4GB) SAMSUNG MV-3V4G3D @1890 Mhz 8-9-9 
Hard DriveOptical DriveCoolingOS
2x Corsair Force 3 120 GB SSD External USB AMD stock cooler Win7 Ultimate 
MonitorKeyboardPowerCase
ASUS 23" DVI Fullsize, solid. OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W CM Praetorian 730 Black 
Mouse
Has red light on bottom 
  hide details  
Reply
    
CPUMotherboardGraphicsRAM
AMD FX-4170 @ 4.86 Ghz ASUS M5A97 EVO 2 x PowerColor AX6790 Crossfire 16GB (4 x 4GB) SAMSUNG MV-3V4G3D @1890 Mhz 8-9-9 
Hard DriveOptical DriveCoolingOS
2x Corsair Force 3 120 GB SSD External USB AMD stock cooler Win7 Ultimate 
MonitorKeyboardPowerCase
ASUS 23" DVI Fullsize, solid. OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W CM Praetorian 730 Black 
Mouse
Has red light on bottom 
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post #9 of 22
Good luck just remember to keep an eye on those temps, keep her below 55c for 24/7 usage.
post #10 of 22
I hate to say this but hold that unlock!

The Biostar A870U3 has a 3+1 phase that will not handle fully that unlock safely and reliably!

Biostar does not design their regular "A" series for unlocked & overclocked performance. This board uses a 3+1 design with especially failure-prone NIKOS MOSFETs.
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