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The Singing Atom

Hi all,
this weekend the Atom based Asrock AD525PV3 arrived: AND IT ROCKS!!
Boy, this board is SINGING AND SWINGING! Great detail, soundstage etc...MUSIC!!

No deletions done yet!! Only:
- small nLite install (as per Junaid / Rick)
- minlogon
- awe
- mem=256 boot.ini-tweak
I am VERY VERY happy!!

My current Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3 will move to desktop and take care of office-work. I purchased the h55m a year ago, for its well-designed cpu power phases. Unfortunately sq was disappointing: too much needles chips (sound, hdmi, dvi, sata2/IDE, USB-3) which made it difficult to get good sound and real music.

Then Ryelands set me on the Atom-trail (thanks Dave!). For me upsampling to 88.2 is enough, so i don't need sse4-capable CPU.
see http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/9/98866.html

Why the Asrock ROCKS:
- simple design, no needles functions
- detailed bios
- fanless (i removed the fan and extended the heatsink, by putting an old heatsink up-side-down on top - for the moment, later more elegant solution - it keeps temp below 50 max is 100)

The Bios
- cpu: i clocked it to 1,5GHz. By changing system/'FSB'-clock. This means underclocking memory as well.
- memory is clocked @333MHz - DDR3-667
- most steep dram latency settings:
tCL 5
tRCD 4
tRP 3
tRAS 11
tRFC 30
tWR 4
tWTR 2
tRRD 2
tRTP 2
- besides latency this bios offers "DRAM Rcomp control". This is a set of 6 variable settings which controls the datatraffic between RAM and CPU. I didn't find anything on it, have to ask Asrock.
Some settings give more detail, others more laid back.
Any ideas how to set Rcomp?
- cpu voltage set to 1,0v (lowest setting)
- dram voltage set to 1,3v (lowest setting)
- disabled spread-spectrum, usb, lan, pci-ide-busmaster, parrallel port, com-port
- fixed graphics memory

Only strange thing is xp (and cpu-Z) only sees two cores, not the hyperthreads / 4 cores.
I installed xp in MPS-multicore (non-acpi). Maybe that's why xp only sees 2 cores. But i did this on the h55m and this worked ok (4 'cores').
Any ideas?

In the mean time, i'll play some music and enjoy all the new details!!

Cheers!
Douwe


Edits: 12/21/11
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