ASROCK K7S8X SiS 746FX Setup Guide
Rob Hilton (last update : 09/23/2008 15:32:31 +0800)

The K7S8X motherboard is the most recent addition to the Asrock quality budget range of motherboards. Asrock was established in 2002 as a subsidiary company to ASUStek one of the oldest and well-known IT component builders in Taiwan. The aim of the company was to use older and cheaper chipsets to produce quality, budget performance motherboards. So it was a little surprising when Asrock released a motherboard based on a new SIS chipset, when previously they had produced motherboards based on the Via KT266A and Intel 845D chipsets, technology that was more than 2 years old and in IT progress times these were nearly dinosaur chipsets.

The K7S8X features the latest revision of the SIS 746fx chipset rev.A2 and the sis963L rev.C1 south bridge. This 'Lite' version of the south bridge supports ata133 IDE drive performance, 6 USB2 ports, SIS900iLan and SIS7012 sound production. The board uses the C-media 9739A chip as a sound decoder and a Realtek PHY LAN chip to facilitate Ethernet access. Unfortunately the 'Lite' version of the SIS963L does not feature IEEE FIRE wire technology or Serial ATA support.

The North bridge does officially support 100,133,166mhz support for all AMD Athlon processors and this board does feature a jumper setting for 200mhz CPU fsb. SIS does officially support 200mhz for this chipset (200mhz support is available with the forthcoming SIS748 chipset). The board features support 100,133,166 and 200mhz dram speeds and supports Asynchronous settings for all speeds, so you can have 133/100, 133/166, 133/200 or 166/200. Though at present asynchronous operation and mean poorer memory performance than Synchronous 133/133 or 166/166 operation. This situation is being remedied with improved bios releases from Asrock, keep checking the OCWorkbench K7S8X bios page for future bios updates.

ASrock supplied drivers disk.

The board comes with the Asrock AMD-SIS version 1.0 drivers disk. This is a very basic cd rom containing drivers for Windows 98,98se, NT, ME , 2000 and XP. A copy of PCcillin 2002, Adobe Acrobat 5, Direct X8.1. The disk also contains the motherboard manual in PDF format and a visual guide to setting up the motherboard featuring a rather nice looking Taiwanese girl in silver spandex. To see the visual guide to setting up the board you need to watch the guide in Windows Media player, what happens if you do not have access to another pc to watch the guide?

Supplied drivers:

AGP driver 1.13r3
IDE driver 2.03
LAN driver 1.16
Sound driver C-media v25

The disk claims to have a USB2 driver as well, but in fact it doesn't. To get USB2 you have to download Windows XP service pack1 for the extra Enhanced USB driver.

Of the above drivers most function fine, apart from the C-media v25 sound driver. I have found that v25 sound driver to cause Windows XP to lock up and crash the desktop resulting in having to press the reset button. I checked at the C-media web site and they have V25 as the latest driver for the CMI 9739A sound processor, fortunately Hawkofleafs, another great contributor to the Asrock site had spotted spotted an updated V27 sound driver at the Microstar web site, they used the same sound processor in their newly released SIS655 chipset motherboard. So to enable sound functionality with Windows XP please follow this link to download the updated sound driver.

Updated V27 sound driver from MSI.com.tw web site

Also available is an updated AGP driver v 1.14 from the SIS web site. I have used both 1.13r3 and rev 1.14 and found that they are both stable and work well with my detonator Nvidia drivers. I am at present using 1.14 and have found no tearing or artifact issues with this AGP driver. You can download AGP 1.14 from this link.

AGP1.14 driver

Both these drivers can be downloaded after installation of Windows XP.

My system:

Asrock K7S8X, AMD Athlon XP2100+ T Bred B AIUHB 0301 with Coolermaster HCC002 Heat sink 7K rpm fan
2 x Geil 256mb PC3500 Ultra Platinum CAS2 ddr, Inno3D Geforce4 ti 4600 128mb ddr
Western Digital 40gig 8mb cache hard drive, Yamaha F1Cdrw 44x, Lite On 52x CD rom
Alcatel Speedtouch USB ADSL modem, Skyhawk case with 5 case fans and Enermax 365VE psu.

I recommend a clean install of Windows XP onto a newly formatted hard drive. I prefer using NTFS file system over FAT32 as you get better data security but you loose out on hard drive compactness

Installation Procedure and Order.

Boot from Windows XP disk and start normal setup, setup partitions and format the partitions as you wish.

Windows XP should install with no complications! It has been noted that AGP 8x video cards such as Radeon 9500/9700 can cause Windows XP to fail. This could be due to the VGA default setup driver in Windows XP not supporting 8x agp, if you have problems go into bios and set the video card agp speed to 4x instead of the auto settings, this is under chipset settings in the bios.

When you get to your desktop, the system will have no Video card driver installed, but will have a default SIS agp driver, a default SIS ide driver, and lan driver installed. So if you connect to the Internet via Lan connection you will have full Internet functionality from the start.

Recommended order of installation of drivers:

1. Enable your internet connection, either via modem, Adsl modem or router.
2. Connect to Internet to download Windows XP service pack1 from the Microsoft Windows Update site, or you could use an Windows Service pack cd, or download a copy of the pack from the net (this is a 132mb download). Run service pack and this will install the latest updates for your system.
3. Go to Control panel, click on performance and maintenance and make your way to the device manager screen. You will see that the usb root has a yellow exclamation mark against it, click on this and select update driver, select search for the best driver and Windows XP will find the updated USB2 driver from the Service pack and you will see that you will have a new SIS PCI-USB enhanced hub with working drivers.
4. Install AGP driver 1.13r3 or 1.14.
5. After the system reboots install your Video card driver, for Nvidia Geforce and TNT2 video chipset's I recommend either detonator 43.00, 42.86 and 42.68. These are Beta drivers that I have tested and find to function well in my system. If you go to the Nvidia web site the latest Officially released drivers are version 41.09 and these are WHQL candidates but they haven't been passes yet. I don't have any experience of ATI Radeon drivers, so if anyone wants to pass on information and experiences that can enhance this guide, then please contact me.
6. Install IDE driver 2.03, I recommend this driver over the default IDE driver because I noted that when running the default driver I got data corruption on installing applications via my Yamaha F1cdrw. Also installing the newer IDE driver it gives you a a nice IDE utility called SIside that can interrogate your drives and check which UDMA and PIO mode they are set to.
7. Install sound driver V27. After installation you will notice that your sound will be set to default 2 channel sound, if you go into the XEAR 3d sound utility on the right of the task bar, you can select 2ch, 4ch and 5.1ch support and you have a large range of options to optimize the sound for your system.
8. Update the Lan driver by using the 1.16 Lan driver.
9. Run Windows Update again to pick up all the latest security packs. You will see that there is 1 device driver update and this is a new Athlon CPU recognition driver which supports the new Barton CPUs.
10. Install and connect any other devices such as scanners, printers.

11. Run Disk clean-up and Disk defragmenter.
    
    Providing all has gone well, you should have a fully functioning Windows XP operating system installed on your hard drive. Now install applications and games and enjoy your new system. Check out the bios guide and the forthcoming tweaking guide for those who want to overclock this motherboard. If anyone has any experiences or tips they wish to share then please post them to the Asrock Forum at OCWorkbench.com.

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