KT133A(A7V133) problem. . .

[ErikaeanLogic]

Hi

I need some technical advice from you, my brethren, on the following scenario:

I installed and ran an ASUS A7V133 with a T-Bird1000@1301(1.85V) on my system and it ran totally stable. I benched it for 12 hours of continuous Sandra "Burn-in Wizard" followed by 24 hours of continuous UT "Timedemo 1" with no crashes or hangs. The UT bench was run at 1600x1200 resolution with 32-bit color depth, smooooooth as glass(63fps). This is the rig I ran it on:

A7V133
T-Bird1000@1301
Maxtor 20GB 7200rpm ATA/66
Radeon 64MB ViVo
Aureal Sq2500
3Com 905b
Pioneer 115 DVD drive
NEC floppy
Antec PP303X 300W power-supply

I just transplanted the A7V133 and the T-Bird to a friend's system and it hangs, crashes, or both, even when running at 700MHz. What gives? Here's his setup:

A7V133
T-Bird1000@1301
IBM Deskstar 20GB 7200rpm ATA/66(master boot drive)
Western Digital 15GB 7200rpm ATA/66(slave)
Quanum Fireball 8.4(?)GB ATA/33(slave)
Radeon 64MB ViVo
Aureal SQ2500
3Com 905b
Pioneer115 DVD drive
Plextor 12x10x32 Plex-Writer
Mitsumi floppy
Antec PP253X(250W) power supply

There are a few differences in our respective setups which I suspect of causing the instability:

1) He has 3 harddrives and is using both the VIA and the onboard Promise controllers to run them.

2) His harddrives are running at mismatched ATA ratings(no RAID, though).

3) His power supply is a 250W and mine is the beefier 300W.

The power supply issue is my leading suspect, and I will be swapping them out later. Any other theories? I'd really like to hear them.

Thanks for your time!

 

[ErikaeanLogic]

c'mon, folks, I need your help!

 

[twisted]

Power supply is a good guess but probably his CPU or board is just not as stable as he wannabe. Downclock a little, unplug some drives, take the side off the case and see what happens. I don't think "mismatched ATA" matters since each bus should operate at the highest common speed.

 

[Bagger]

twisted, he mentioned in the first thread that he "transplanted" the motherboard/cpu from his case to his friends' case so that removes those components from the suspect list. I just checked AMD's approved power supply list and the 250watt Antec power supply isn't on the list at ALL, much less at 1.3ghz. I'd say the culprit is the power supply. The 300w Antec power supply is only recommended up to speeds of 1ghz, any higher than that and they recommend the 400w version.

 

[ErikaeanLogic]

Thanks, guys

Replacing the PS in an hour, we'll see how that goes. Also forgot to mention that the OS is Win98SE; I think that he had the virtual memory set to 1.5GB(he had 640MB installed prior to this upgrade) but only has 128MB currently installed, so I think that could be a culprit, too. What do you think? LMK, and thanks!

 

[BigAl427]

You definetly don't need your virtual mem that high. Also, the a7v shares a few pci slots. Try moving your sound card to another slot. (I think slot 3 is good.) when I put my sound card in my k7tpro2-a, the puppy wouldn't even post. You can try putting in your sound card first, then another pci card, etc. Good luck.

 

[jimmygates]

It's either the PSU or maybe a screw holder that's shorting out the board ont he bottom. My friend has a Abit KT7A which was giving him random reboots. At first he suspected his PSU for these evil deeds so he shelled out $120 for an Enermax 430W. It was still rebooting with the new PSU. I later found out that one of the gold screw holders (those things that you install into your case so you can screw your motherboard onto them) was touching the bottom of the board and shorting it out.





-Jimbo

 

[ErikaeanLogic]

Sure enough, the virtual memory setting was set too high; let Windows manage the memory and everthing is peachy at 1301MHz!

Thanks for the input, folks!