the woes of my a7v

[sixsixtysix]

so, i came across some money recently(state renter's rebate) and decided to upgrade =]. i bought an a7v and a t-bird 800mhz. it came on monday, and, boy, was i excited. i read through the manual(not familiar with new amd goodies) of both the mobo and cpu to see if i need to get anything else. i see, need a new power supply. i go buy a 300w one. i vgather my tools and parts and get to work(i had stripped my celeron 300 the night before). i follow every instruction ( i set it to jumperless). put the cpu and memory(it does support pc100, right("pc100/pc133?&quot?[if not, this might be my problem]). i stick in my 3d prophet. then connect the rest nic/sound/drives/etc. i turn it on, and it starts its whirl and other noises, and then nothing. no beeps, nothing on the monitor, NOTHING! after crying for 1/2 an hour(might as well add drama to my tale of misery, eh?), and 1/2 an hour of punching walls, kittens, and cussing like it was going out of style(no, timmy, it's not really going poutof style), i start to wonder wtf went wrong. i tried everything i can possible combination i could think of(no ram, pci video card, 1 dimm of ram, etc. etc.). my assumptions are as follows:

1. cpu or mobo or, lord forbid, both are bad.(although the cpu was a retail, cellophaned box, so i doubt that.)
2. i NEED strictly pc133 memory.

any suggestions accepted.
*sixsixtysix*

 

[FastEddie]

Try changing the I/O Voltage Setting (VIO) from the default 3.56v to 3.35v by moving the jumper to the 1-2 position. For JumperFree mode, make sure you have the DSW switches all to the Off position.

 

[sixsixtysix]

nope. nothing. zip. zero. zilch.

 

[DeezNtz]

Sounds like you've got a DOA. Go return the motherboard and go get another one. I've heard a lot of stories of people needing a second mobo before everything works.

 

[FastEddie]

One other thing to try before you RMA the present board. Set your vcore manually, by jumper, to 1.7v or 1.75v, and see if it'll fire up. You could also try straight jumper mode, setting your multiplier and fsb manually as well.

 

[loweyson]

I've had a similar problem where sometimes it refuses to turn on via the soft off/on, but it still has power, it tended to do this if i tried to turn it back on after extended use, so I just unplugged it for 20 minutes came back to it and it switches back on, not sure if it's heat related though, the onboard thermister reports that my tbird 900 is at a bout 55c during normal use, which seems a little high to me. Not really sure how accurate this is ?

or.. something worth looking at is your psu, or maybe get someone who's a bit handy with a multimeter to test the the different leads make sure it can supply the right voltages/ power output. Might be worth checking that the little green led is lighting up on your mobo, so that you know it's getting some sort of power.

Any suggestions my problem of intermitancy would be appreciated though

 

[DaddyG]

Did you check that the underside of the mobo is not shorting a trace to ground, happens fairly frequently. Could be a memory issue, Athlon systems in general are more picky than Intel. Have you got the speaker connected correctly to listen for the 'beep' codes.

 

[paulip88]

The A7V does sometimes have issues assigning IRQs, so you may want to try booting with only the bare minimum installed. This means nothing but the AGP card and your drives. No sound or LAN card (those did me in). Also, make sure that your graphics card, memory, CPU are all firmly seated. if they are not, it won't boot.

 

[bonkers325]

see why i dont buy asus anymore
first cusl2 hype now a7v

go abit

 

[loweyson]

The not switching on thing has slowed to about once every so often, and i checked all the connections, nothing was grounded that shouldn't be. At the moment though I'm a little more worried about the Asus Probe proggy constantly reporting these sharp drops in voltages across all the different rail, and there is definately nothing wrong with the psu. Plus BIOS doesn't show drops like that, but then you can't set how often the bios polls. Also I'm not really sure how hot my cpu is supposed to be but it's reporting about 55ºc which seems a little high to me it's a tbird 900. Although this was after I put a one of those orb heatsinks on it, and used a silicon based heatsink glue to make good contact, before that it was closer to 65. I'm wondering if this heat problem is causing the readings in the asus probe software to report wrongly (especially seing as in bios the temp of the cpu is a lot lower as the load on it is much lower than when in windows), and also what is causing the system to hang every couple of hours.

 

[CraigRT]

Don't go Abit, they're garbage..
new Asus boards are just not well developed and seem to have a few glitches and a few little dumb things.. but like DaddyG said, could be a short to the case...
if not, send it back and get a new A7V, my friend has one and he loves it.. Zero problems yet he says, he has a T-Bird 800 as well.
I bet if it is the board, and you get a new one that works fine you'll love it!

 

[loweyson]

Don't think this would be too wise, I live in the UK, and we get about 240v RMS, I'm not too sure how the PSU regulates it's supply but under normal circumstances I think it may go pop.

I seem to be running stable now, I've got the cpu temp (tbird 900) down to about 52ºc and I think there is a bug with the asus probe software, because no other monitoring software reports such spikes and drop, i'm using Motherboard Monitor and it polls every second, i've set the tolerance on the +'ve rails to 2%, and I still haven't heard anything about voltages, and it's been running for the past 4 hours.

I have 1 and half problems left to sort, it's been fun so far, so I'm buggered if I'm gonna let it get the best of me now.
1) I can't get my C/LABS GTS 2 to give me 4x, (I've got latest NVidia ref. and that 4x reg thing and that Win2k / AMD reg Fix), still can't get Powerstrip to enable that enchecked 4x agp box though, it's like it thinks the GTS supports it but the mobo does, and all the agp/4in1 are up to date as well.
½) Think the cpu could do with being a little cooler, although not sure that it's not to do with having bios 1004 and the cpu not idling, maybe the next BIOS release will fix this.

Still working ...

 

[FastEddie]

You may have to do the 4X AGP registry hack manualy, as the program from one or two particular sites didn't work. I've got the manual hack for W2K, but not the one for W9X.

 

[Citadel]

Sixsixtysix, I HAD YOUR SAME PROBLEM!!!!!!!! I am willing to bet my computer that it is your brand of RAM.... I now have Micron PC 133 CAS 3.

 

[loweyson]

Eddie, by manually do you mean add the setting it into the registery by hand, I already tried that, and funny enough the same result.

I'm getting really frustrated now, I know it matters little compared with the other probs i've had but I have a mobo capale of 4x, and I wanna bloody use it.

 

[Kreff]

I had an Asus P3C2000 (which is now recalled) and I had the same voltage flucuations
that you describe. Across all voltages. I even called the Case manufacturer and
had them send me a new power supply.... But I never used it.

Due to unforseen circumstances I had to reformat my drive and reinstall my drivers
and guess what? The voltage flucuations went away! So I sent the PS back. Don't
know why the voltage monitor didn't work, but after I reinstalled... everything was
fine. Haven't had a problem since... been about a month now.... Power steady as can
be.

Good luck