Big stability problems...

[eggs]

To begin with, I have the following components:
MSI K7 Pro Motherboard (supposed to be stable)
Athlon 700Mhz slot A processor (not overclocked)
128Mb generic PC100 RAM (could be the problem...)
Annihilator GeForce2 GTS vid card w/ 32 Megs RAM (brand new)
Diamond MX300 sound card (seems to be working fine)

The problem is that with essentially every graphics intensive game my system locks up (both with OpenGL and DirectX games based I believe). I've tried running Win98 and Win2k as my operating systems and both of these have similar issues although Win2k seems abit more stable. Right now I'm dualbooting Win2k and Win98.

I even tried WinME. While this got me the highest graphics benchmarks it also proved useless because it would only boot every other time. It would boot up fine, then when I shut down and reboot it would hang. Then I would have to boot in safe mode and after I shut down and rebooted again the system would boot properly. Of course, after shutting down I would have to go through the whole process again.

So, I have ordered 256 megs of Kingston RAM hoping to solve my instability problems. The RAM gets here in two days but I'm wondering if anyone else has any ideas.

By the way, when I try to install the Win2k service pack it basically wrecks my operating system beyond repair and I have to reformat. Any ideas anyone?

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Whats your power supply rated for? Also, I've heard stories of the MX-300 mucking up some of the later chipsets. Don't know how off hand.

 

[eggs]

My power supply is rated at 250 Watts. I haven't tallied up the total power consumption of my equipment but I may need to do this. I've been considering spending the money and getting a nice 431 Watt Enermax dual fan power supply (probably would have been cheaper than the new RAM I suppose)

Also, the sound card does seem to have some stability issues (i.e. my sound dies from time to time when playing MP3's). Do you think it may be causing my system to freeze up when playng games though? Do you have any links where I can find some cases of this happening?

At any rate, I'll yank the sound card and try some games that have been giving me problems and let you know on that one.

 

[tippmann]

Check out your bios settings
AGP 4x - turn off
AGP Appeture - 128MB
AGP Fastwrites - turn off (when having problems)



About the win2000 service pack.... SP2 is know to have those problems sometimes... use SP1

 

[eggs]

Tippmann, thanks for the tips. I set my agp aperture size to 128MB. It was 64 before. The MSI K7 Pro mobo only supports up to 2x AGP though so I can't turn that down and there is no fast-write option in the bios.

Also, I've tried both SP1 and SP2 and both make my operating system unusable (gives me that nifty little blue screen telling me that my OS is essentially shot). Sounds wierd to me too but that's the case.

I built this machine from the ground up with fairly regular parts so I can't figure out why I'm having all these problems. By the way, I have a Maxtor 7200 RPM 30GB DiamondMax hardrive since I didn't mention it earlier. But those are supposed to be pretty stable too.

 

[ukDave]

i have a slot A athlon @700Mhz on the Abit KA7(KX133 chipset) and i originally had the MX300 sound card.

WOAH! Did i have problems. I had some very similar problems to you and it turns out that according to Diamond Support, the KX133 is not compatible with the MX300 - something to do with timing problems. This cannot be fixed, hence i now have the SB Live! 5.1 Platinum which works great.

All i can suggest is removing the sound card, and maybe doing a clean install of Win98.

Good luck.

Post back with results!

dave

 

[KGB]

The timing issue regarding the Vortex2 cards is related to only KT133 / KT133A chipsets.
I have been running an Athlon 700 on a K7V (Asus) KX133 chipset board with the MX300 card without incident.
Perfectly stable and dependable.

My advice to eggs:

1. Check your drivers and DON'T use the ones from Diamond (POS). Get the ref drivers here.
2. Make sure you have your IRQs squared away. The Aureal cards do not like to share with anything else.
3. Disable SB emulation (DOS support) device in Device Mangler.

Let us know how you make out.

 

[controler]

try this patch by AMD. It worked for me, after buying pretty much ALL NEW components. Now I use a Iwill kk266 with 1ghz athlon and geforce2mx.. stable as anything with win2k.. and I am happy