8K7A+ issues

[martinm]

So, I jsut got all my parts at long last, and put together the best machine I could afford. No Major complaint, but I do have a few questions. But first, here's the setup:

EPoX 8K7A+ (BIOS 07/11/2001) w/ T-Bird AYHJA core 1.4G
2x 256MB Crucial PC2100 DDR
Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 64MB w/ 19" monitor
Cirrus Logic 5446-based w/ 15" monitor
SBLive! MP3+ w/ FPS1000 Speakers
D-Link DFE-530TX+ 10/100 Ethernet
Creative 2x DVD
Creative 4x2x24 Burner
4x WD400BB 40GB HD's, in RAID 0+1 on the HPT370A chip
1x WD205BA 20GB HD, on IDE 0
450W AMD Approved PSU

So after some initial troubles installing Win2K (EPoX's Highpoint driver disk had am old, bad version of the driver that killed W2K Setup) Everything's up an running fairly smoothly. However:
1.) SBLive crackles. Will moving slot's potentially fix this?
2.) How adjustable is the FSB for overclocking? I've got the onboard jumper set to 133, but I was wondering if there was anyway to increase beyond this. I have and AYHJA core w/ pre shorted L1 Bridges for an unlocked multiplier, but I'd like to ba able to overclock my FSB too.
3.) I disabled the onboard audio in the BIOS, but it still shows up in device manager. I didn't install the drivers for it though.

That's all the questions that I can remember here at work, so I'll probably update this when I get home. But any suggestions about any of these questions will be very appreciated.

 

[oobuk]

I moved the SBLive around in the slots a few times myself. Eventually I forced its PCI slot to IRQ 5. I still get a pop when the machine starts up and some deep hissing in Fallout Tactics that may have more to do with the games sound drivers than the machine, other things seem fine particulary DVD surround out.

You might want to check your bios again to make sure you have the AC97 totally off. I had missed something the first time around.

 

[martinm]

Alright, good to hear that the sound's probably fixable. Oh yeah, I noticed when I used the VIA IDE Bus Master Driver off the CD, the problem was worse than it was once I installed the latest version from www.viahardware.com. However, when the update installed, it had to get rid of the old version, and now somethings jacked in the registry, and I get a little error message every time Win starts up. Any ideas on that one?

 

[Courtland]

try disabling legacy audio in the bios for your audio prob. I do not know if this will work but I think I think I remember reading about a problem similar to yours and that fixed it.

 

[oobuk]

I'm running Win98 right now. This could be a Win2K issue. I did this using a Ghosted clone from an Asus based system. I loaded the drivers supplied on the CD and then updated all. I did this several times, just from past experience.

As soon as I have Win98 stable, I'm planning on dual booting Win2K or WinNT4. It could be confusing to try and go head to head on the drivers with you considering the OS difference.

You may want to drop over www.amdmb.com and check out some of the threads there as well.

 

[Courtland]

I just built my 8k7a system with a live, not one problem.