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Compatibility problem between Gigabyte GA-7VX and certain type of AMD Athlon Slot A processor

S

solo56

Junior Member
Hi,
I'm new to this form of forum. May be someone out there can help.
I'm building a system for my son while in university.
The system consists of Gigabyte GA-7VX motherboard, AMD Athlon 650mb Slot A processor, IBM 40GB hrad drive, Hercules Prophet2 GTS graphic card and other normal bits and pieces like floppy and sound card tec.
When I boot up the system, there is nothing on screen, nothing whatsoever, not even a beep from the internal speaker.
I later found out that certain type of AMD processor is not compatible with the Gigabyte motherboard.
Can anyone make some suggestion?

http://www.giga-byte.com/home/amd_n1.htm

Many thanks
😕
 
Well a bit of history. When the Athlon first came out, the only motherboards for it were ones which used the AMD 750 chipset. These were all SlotA motherboards that used PC100 RAM and "Classic" Athlon processors. The Classic Athlons did not have the Cache for the processor on the chip, but rather to the left and right of it on the board.

VIA then made a chipset for the Classic SlotA Athlon that could use PC133 RAM. It was called the KX133. Your gigabyte has this chipset. This chipset ran the Classic Athlons just fine.

AMD then came out with the Thunderbird-Athlon processor. Rather than having the cache off die, they put it on die. AMD wanted this new processor to be a socket rather than a Slot. But to help in the transition, they made a few SlotA Thunderbirds. The catch is, the SlotA Thunderbirds have timming issues at speeds greater than 700Mhz in the KX133 chipset. They work perfectly in the 750 chipset.

Anyway, back to your problem, as long as you don't have a SlotA Thunderbird Athlon your processor and motherboard will be fine. You can check from the link you provided. Also you can look up your SlotA proc and see if the two indentations are touching or almost touching what look like RAM chips. If they are, you have a Classic. If they aren't you have a Tbird (because the cache is on the chip.)
 
I've checked my Athlon processor, the serial no is: AMD-K7650MTR51B
Does this mean my Athlon processor is not compatible with the Gigabyte GA-7VX motherboard? and that's the reason why it didn't boot up? Would Gigabyte GA-71XE work with this processor?
 
Do you think it cause by the fact that my motherboard could be touching the case chassis? or could I be using the wrong dimm? ( I use 256mb sdram 133 dimm )
 
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