anyone had experience with a PC Chips M805LR Socket A motherboard?

[spanky]

i got one off ebay fairly cheap, but it has been nothing but a pain in the ASS!!!! BSODs left and right, windows protection errors, system hangs. and this is all during win98 setup. i am fairly certain my ram and cpu and video is good. just looking for a general opinion on this motherboard. i am about ready to drag it over a carpet and them fling it into the east river.

 

[spanky]

anyone?

 

[Peter]

PC-Chips M805LR is Elitegroup ECS K7VZM.

Three major revisions were done. The earliest ones run 100 MHz CPUs and 100 MHz RAM, followed right by a revised one that runs 100/133. The final v3.x changed the KT133 for KT133A for 133 MHz CPU.

It's a bit hard to tell the former two apart, because the difference is just in a revised clock synthesizer chip - the 133 MHz capable is marked "230-03H" while the 100 MHz-only ones are just "230".

Make sure you got the latest BIOS for your board (from www.ecs.com.tw), and if you got the "230" clock synthesizer, don't set the RAM speed to 133.

Once that is sorted, give it a RAM test. www.memtest86.com

regards, Peter

 

[JWade]

I have the same board, but bought it at a local comp store (instant use as opposed to cheap price). Bought it becuase they were running a special with it and an xp1800+, figured eh? why not?

havent had any problems with it really, was having boot problems, half the time my HD's werent being noticed, but that is because one was on cable select, and one was on slave. but the one that was on cable select to master and no more boot problems.

 

[Buz2b]

Bottom line is that this is and has been shown to be a good board. Can you more precisely explain your problems? Is it that you cannot get Windows to install? There could be some BIOS settings that are causing this. Try taking a look at the settings for your CPU. You might also want to try setting your BIOS at "default" for a boot or two to see if it stabilizes for you. Other than that you said, "fairly certain my ram and cpu and video is good". OK, are you certain? Or do you have a couple of "questionable" items? That would be important to explore.
The only other item that raises a red flag would be that, "got one off ebay fairly cheap". Hey, been there; done that. However, you gets what you pay for, if you know what I mean.