iGGy

The weathers not bad at the moment...bit of rain due towards the weekend. Have fun

Isn't it almost pointless reviewing something which the company that produced it can't support? (www.razorzone.com for details) I don't know if they even produce them anymore or was this just a case of existing stock. I used one of these, in fact it was number 255 according to the serial number. It now resides at the bottom of a land fill dump somewhere. Due to the very flat nature of the design it caused severe pain in the knuckle/tendon joint of my index finger, something I'd never experienced with the MS mice I'd used previously and currently. The only good feature was the 'on-the-fly' sensitivity adjustment, but that would prove to be almost useless in the heat of an online battle. I'd rate it as the worst mouse I'd ever used and therefore give it 2/10...only because the metal tin box it came in can be used for other things!

Thanks, will give it a go.

oh 'eck, this is a real can of worms. Forget the networking issue for the moment, as a rule we've kept the Servers NTFS and Workstations FAT based. Many reasons for it, but recovering data (even though the important stuff is all on the servers) from nuked workstations is a good one. Using permissions and shares with mixed OS's can prove troublesome if it's taken away from the user/server scenario. Many people can't manage to get their 98 PC's talking to NT workstations in a straight peer-to-peer network because of the inherent way NT handles security. To set-up a quick file access method we've used a basic FTP server and assigned user/access rights to drives/files in the past. This removes the Windows based Share and Permission headaches when we've been trying to move data in a quick and dirty manner. There's plenty of information floating around, NTFAQ for one has enough articles and How-to's that'll make you go running for a stiff drink.

The answer to your question depends on a number of things. If you plan to still boot off your IDE drives and just add the SCSI drives configured as extendend partitions, then they'll get tagged on to the end of the drive list. I've seen cases where they followed directly after the IDE hard drives and also where they've gone right to the end after the CD's. There's nothing to stop you assigning whatever letter you want in NT anyway. There's a server here with a SCSI C: drive, D: CDROM and follwing that another two hard drives. This was done because the end drives are swapped or missing sometimes and we didn't want a 'wandering' CDROM letter.

Here's always a good place to start http://www.storagereview.com/

The 1.1 patch does fix the texture problem with det's higher than 6.5, you're right. As for the no-CD, well it's yes and no. I can't get the game to run on this PC (whether it's because it's a dual CPU I don't know) under 2000. But after patching and applying the 1.1 no-CD exe it returns a 'not a valid 32bit application' type error. Boot into 98 and run it...no problems what-so-ever.

The DOS box that you see flash before your eye's contains the following and helpful message 'program too big to fit in memory'. Not started to wade through the crud to find out why this happens. Will post back if I get it going.

I have it running on Win2000. From what I can remember there was an issue with OGL and my GeForce, it would go through right to the point of driving then the video would lock up. The solution was to use the D3D beta drivers and it works fine...in fact there's about five of us with all different types of config's and it works for all of us.

I use a Kingstone 110TX on the same IRQ as my ISDN TA and have never had any problems with this pair in any motherboard I've used.

Would I recommend the VP6...phew, feel the pressure. I'd have to say no. Plus I don't put Abit in my top three of preferred suppliers. If he wants a serious dual system for a workstation, then look at the existing boards based on Intel chipsets.

EddiE, here's a description (the main points)of my experiences with the VP6 and the issues that I felt justified my reasons for going back to my Intel based system. Just to lay the ground, this CUSL2 system runs a P3 700 @ 933 with Crucial CAS2 RAM and is 100% stable. I use SCSI based on an Adaptec 29160 card handling a single Seagate Cheetah X15 hard drive and various CD's etc. First off the VP6 has a problem with the 160-based cards and you have to disable CD booting in the cards BIOS or run with the Win2k CD in so it times out and then uses the hard drive...not the best of starts then! After installing WinMe and 2000, plus the various drivers and fixes, it was time to run a few tests at the default CPU speed of 700MHz. Pretty poor generally. Now I'm not one that goes in for benchmarks in a big way, I prefer the 'feel' of the system to the user. I had already done the memory interleaving and that proved to be quicker than the score with the CUSL2, so that was one thing in its favour. The general speed of the SCSI seemed slower though...I know this is all very subjective. Thought at this point I'd crank up the CPU's to a higher level. I knew that this would be difficult because I couldn't get the stepping versions I wanted in time and didn't really hold out much hope for 933. The board would boot at 933 and even run Windows, but I'd get freezes after a short while. Adjusting the core voltage past the 1.75 I'd already set had no effect on stability. I took out the CPU's and tested them individually in another board and found that one was good for 933, the other wasn't up to it. Another step backwards for the VP6 is the inability to have independent core voltage setting for the CPU's (not really relevant in my case, but could be for other CPU's). So I left it at 700 with the memory running at 133. Now too using the thing. As a general workstation under Win2K I had no real issues. I think that I noticed a few more lockups with IE but that's not exactly a true reflection on stability! The major problem came with games. Under either OS all of the games that had previously run smoothly were now subject to stuttering and frequent crashes. Without going into too much detail, I'm using a GeForce GTS2 and Det 6.47's. With 4X AGP set in the BIOS it was the kiss of death to any game and tweaking the Fast Writes value had no effect. Any game using Force Feedback with a USB controller (Joystick or steering wheel) would also result in crashes and huge video slow downs. After a week of fiddling I decided to go back to the CUSL2. Using the exact same drivers and system speed settings I tested the games. No video slow downs, no crashes and what seems better SCSI interaction. So I'm back at 933, running AGP at 4X and got all my games turned up to full detail at 10 x 7...plus my 3Dmark is back to 7600+ without overclocking the GeForce (will tweak that later on). I've had no freezes with IE and I've also been able to put one of my PCI cards back because of the extra slot on the CUSL2 (VP6 only has 5). Another thing about the CUS board is that I find the BIOS IRQ handling the best I've ever experienced. I always have more things sharing IRQ's on Abit boards than any others I've used for some strange reason. I've not given up on the VP6 and will use it in something else, but I'm less than impressed with its overall stock performance. I'll try it with some CPU's that I know can hit 933 in a month or two and also hope that Abit come out with a better BIOS (like fix the SCSI bug..oh and remove the spelling error from the initial boot screen!) More ideally I'll get my hands on a good Intel based dual board...now that sounds like a proper solution to me.

In the past month I've gone from my Asus CUSL2 to an Abit VP6 dual board and back to my CUSL2 because of the problem with the AGP on VIA boards. (Using a GF2) I use SCSI and have nothing connected to the High Point controller so any issues with that shouldn't affect me. But it still stutters to what is an unacceptable level no matter how many combinations of installation I tried. So I'm back to my old hardware and everything runs smoothly. From now on I'm steering clear of any VIA based boards (don't have anything to do with AMD stuff, so no problem there) and will see what appears in the next few months to try and get my dual system going once again. Also the USB was very poor as well, so that was another nail in the coffin for the VP6. Nice try, but not quite...

Toby, you're not alone there... Let you know if I find out why.

hmmm Upgrader, sure I've seen you post on another great board. Anyway, I enjoyed the message. It's always good to have narrative rather than just (and yes, sometimes boring) benchmark posts. Cheers, iG.