So far this motherboard has been a great disappointment. Sure its nice for overclocking purposes, but other than that I think it sucks.
When I got it, I formatted my hard drive, reinstalled win98se, then video drivers, etc.
After a day or two I started noticing the hangups. I thought they were created by directx7.0a at first. so i managed to find a really old version of it that installed over the new version. (Why cant you uninstall directx??). Anyways, they started during games so I blamed it on directx. But after another day I noticed it at very random times. Rebooting would make it go away, but only for a couple of minutes.
After installing new drivers for everything, flashing the bios, etc... I decided to reformat.
Reformatted, installed drivers except for sb live!. Everything was fine. Installled sb live! drivers, hell broke loose again.
So I called creative labs and talked to a nice tech support dude (imagine that!) and he seemed to be very informed of the problem. Apparently they have had many complaints of the same form before. He blamed it on the VIA chipset. But I dont think via is the only guilty party, because it just could be a bad motherboard by abit.
Taking off my DVD decoder (by creative labs) helped a lot. Actually, it was the only thing that actually seemed to help.
Then I got a new Ati Radeon 32mb DDR. Windows will not even load if Enable 4x AGP on the bios. It shuts off the monitor. Must be a frequency thing, although it doesnt even mention it. Either way, got new drivers for the radeon, same old, same old. Took of sb live! and every other card except for the radeon. Worked much better, but still froze.
happens during browsing or any game that uses opengl (Soldier of Fortune, Quake3).
So now i have too many places to blame. Could be Creative, Ati or Abit's fault. Could be Abits and Creatives fault screwing with the Radeon. I will research some more on this, trying different setups (my roommates Asus k7v) and etc... Hopefully its just the mobo.
I really hate computers now.
When I got it, I formatted my hard drive, reinstalled win98se, then video drivers, etc.
After a day or two I started noticing the hangups. I thought they were created by directx7.0a at first. so i managed to find a really old version of it that installed over the new version. (Why cant you uninstall directx??). Anyways, they started during games so I blamed it on directx. But after another day I noticed it at very random times. Rebooting would make it go away, but only for a couple of minutes.
After installing new drivers for everything, flashing the bios, etc... I decided to reformat.
Reformatted, installed drivers except for sb live!. Everything was fine. Installled sb live! drivers, hell broke loose again.
So I called creative labs and talked to a nice tech support dude (imagine that!) and he seemed to be very informed of the problem. Apparently they have had many complaints of the same form before. He blamed it on the VIA chipset. But I dont think via is the only guilty party, because it just could be a bad motherboard by abit.
Taking off my DVD decoder (by creative labs) helped a lot. Actually, it was the only thing that actually seemed to help.
Then I got a new Ati Radeon 32mb DDR. Windows will not even load if Enable 4x AGP on the bios. It shuts off the monitor. Must be a frequency thing, although it doesnt even mention it. Either way, got new drivers for the radeon, same old, same old. Took of sb live! and every other card except for the radeon. Worked much better, but still froze.
happens during browsing or any game that uses opengl (Soldier of Fortune, Quake3).
So now i have too many places to blame. Could be Creative, Ati or Abit's fault. Could be Abits and Creatives fault screwing with the Radeon. I will research some more on this, trying different setups (my roommates Asus k7v) and etc... Hopefully its just the mobo.
I really hate computers now.
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