Chaintech VNF3-250 Problems

[QuaiBoy]

Hi all, and thanks in advance for reading/commenting.

Bought the Chaintech VNF3-250 and Athlon 64 3200+ from Newegg. I've built literally hundreds of PCs and have never had the problems I'm experiencing. I am unable to load Windows XP Pro. No matter what combination of hardware I use, I'm stopped at the STOP Error 7e or 7d (which seems to be a hardware error) during the "Detecting Devices" phase. Here's a list of the things I've tried:
- Swap Kingmax DDR500 modules purchased for this machine with a known-good Corsair DDR333
- Relax memory timings/increase DIMM & CPU voltage.
- Disable all onboard devices (can't disable NIC)
- Disabled IDE controller and tried to load XP off of a Highpoint Rocket100 controller
- Low-level format hard drive
-
I've tried the fix floating around the 'Net involving the disabling of the secondard IDE controller and changing the CDROM to Slave, still no-go. Seems like most people are using at least one SATA drive on this board. I'm using a PATA Seagate 160GB drive and a Toshiba 16x48 DVDROM drive. I've tried loading the nVidia IDE controller drivers for XP (copied them off of the driver pack to a floppy and loaded them as a SCSI device, F6 in XP setup) still nothing. Tried a beta version BIOS floating around, but it wouldn't even boot the hard drive so I switched back to the official.

I'm at a total loss, machine components listed below. Swapping the PS next, but any other thoughts?

Thanks,
-Evan-

Case: Antec Sonata
Board: Chaintech VNF3-250
Processor: AMD Athlon64 3200+ w/Zalman CNPS7000A-Cu Cooler
Power Supply: Antec TruePower 380w (known good)
Memory: 2x512mb Kingmax DDR500
Video: Matrox G450 16mb
DVDROM: Toshiba 16/48x
Onboard Sound/NIC

 

[Vette73]

When you say "Relax memory timings/increase DIMM & CPU voltage" have you also lowered the speed to 133 or 166Mhz? with only 1 slab in the board?

 

[QuaiBoy]

Hi, thanks for the reply.
I tried lowering the speed of the DDR500 and the DDR333 modules to 166, no change. Just tried a different PS (Antec 350w) with just the board, floppy, hard drive, and DVDROM connected. Same result.

Chaintech's support and web site are pretty bad. I bought this board on the Anand and Tom's reviews, and all the good things said about it in the forums. Plus my Socket A machine has a Chaintech board in it that I bought due to the price - works very well. Think I'm going to exchange it for an MSI K8N Neo Platinum MS-7030. Any thoughts on that board?

Thanks again everyone,
-Evan-

 

[FiberoN]

Not sure yet, some of us bought it from this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=29&threadid=1322933&STARTPAGE=1&enterthread=y
None of us have received it yet but we will this week. Keep up in there and see what people say about it once they get it. (I ordered one too)

 

[QuaiBoy]

Well, I ended up RMA'ing my board, proc, and RAM back to Newegg and buying the MSI from ZipZoom right before I came back and saw your reply. ;-)
Tried everything I know to do with the Chaintech and it just wasn't working out. After playing with it for two days, I was just disgusted with the flaky BIOS and disappointed in the whole order. Hopefully, take two will be more successful.

Thanks,
-Evan-

 

[SeaFoam]

I had that board too, it worked fine, minus the keyboard and mouse not working unless it was usb and the network cutting out, i've noticed a lot of people have problems with that board. I'm sure the MSI will work much better.

 

[Agamar]

Both of my builds using this board worked out. Had trouble installing Win2k Server on a mirrored set of drives, but once I figured out that you need to only have one drive during the installion, things went along fine. Fast too.