Defective Epox 8KTA+ Motherboard?

[Jingle]

I just purchased an Epox 8KTA+ motherboard, retail boxed Athlon 900 CPU and
a mid-tower Hydraulic case with a 300 watt Fortron Source power supply for a
major upgrade of my wife's computer. Unfortunately, after a 3 day marathon
of trial and error struggles with it, the results are not acceptable. At
this point I suspect a defective motherboard, although the culprit could be
any of the mentioned items as well as RAM.

The symptoms include inability to do a clean install of Windows 98SE without
crashing, failure to install drivers on a old install of Windows 98SE
without crashing and frequent unexplained crashes when used with a working
installation of Windows 2000. (The pre-installed packages were created on
another computer.) The error messages are variable and typically not helpful
in diagnosing the problem. I tried different speeds and grades of RAM with
no effect.

At this point, my current suspicion is the motherboard as stated above, but
I sure don't have much confidence that it is the problem. Anyone have any
relevant experience?

Jingles

 

[Fardringle]

The 8KTA+ has some pretty significant problems with some brands and speeds of RAM. There is a new BIOS update which will correct most of these problems. I'd suggest trying that before going through the effort of RMA'ing the board. If it still doesn't work after the BIOS flash, then I'd take it back and get a new one.

 

[Jingle]

Thanks for the response. I had already tried the latest BIOS, as well as the BIOS 2 generations back with no positive effects. At the Epox Newsgroup it was suggested to raise the IO voltage and I tried that as well with no improvement up to +0.2v increase over specs. I had been running with all of the most conservative settings (CAS 3, 100MHz memory bus) and using mid-grade PC133 RAM. So, I think that should have been adequate to make the thing work if it was going to.

In any event, I have called the vendor, Axion Technologies (nice guys!), got a RMA number and it's on it way back. I had originally tried to buy a Chaintech 7AJA motherboard and switched to order to the Epox board when the Chaintech was out of stock. When I called for the RMA number, I asked if they would cross-ship a replacement ... and the 7AJA was in stock. So, that's it for Epox now. I just hope the Chaintech is as well behaved as the reviews I've seen suggest!

Jingles