EPoX EP-8KRAIPRO VIA KT880 Problems

[hooflung]

Here is my delima. Recently I replaced my Nforce 2 motherboard based system with another AMD64 computer after the mobo crapped out on me. However, I tested the CPU in an old SiS 746 mobo and it is fine and dandy. Few weeks later my buddy decided to buy a mobo for the Barton 2800+, the CPU retained from the upgrade, when I said I'd give it to him for free.

So he purchased the EPoX KT880 mobo off of newegg and tonight we spent about 8 hours installing hardware and software. Here is the run down of parts :

Kingston Value Ram DDR266
Crucial DDR266
MSI Geforce 3
Via 3 port Firewire
Soundblaster Live!
WD 80gig 8mb cache HD
Maxtor 40gig 2mb cache HD
Lite-ON DVD+-R
Generic BT878 TV Tuner


Ok, we loaded everything down first. It booted after setting the RAM to 266 Async in the Bios, Disabled onboard sound, Parallel port and serial ports as well as Serial ATA. Everything booted ok and started hanging during the install of XP Pro SP 2 at various places during the copy of system files.

We took out the oldest Ram stick, the Kingston, and reran everything and viola we got windows installed. On the reboot of the system it froze loading into the system. Bah! Ok so we rebooted and it loaded into windows and kept getting random crashes. We managed to get all the latest chipset drivers on the system as well. So we start taking out the PCI cards, admittingly we should have clean installed without them in the first place. Well... random crashes happened just the same.

So I decided to grab one of my PCs and grab a Corsair TwinX DDR400 that would step down to DDR333 so it wouldn't be async. The system was definately more stable but would still random freeze. ah heck all! Ok... we had a bright idea to use his second HD, which so happened to contain a bootable win2000 install, as the boot disk.

My My My... after the initial Windows 2000 driver found song and dance for aout 5 mintues we had a stable, fully functional system on my DDR333. No crashes, intermitant freezes or sluggish performance. My buddy is running Memtest86+ on the Crucial DDR266 module tonight to see if it is bad. However, we were getting crashes off the good current memory is XP Pro SP2 and not Windows 2000 Pro SP4.

Has anyone had similar problems on VIA boards ( all my mobo nightmares come off athlon XP via technology I am afraid )? We have decided to forgo the Soundblaster Live! altogether but before he RMAs this board back or decideds to stick with Windows 2000 for the next 5 years is there anything anyone would try? Could the AGP 4x Geforce 3 just not like Via KT880 chipsets in XP? Does it sound like a bad mobo to anyone because its unstable in XP? Shared IRQ problems giving XP SP2 a ride for its life ( yes there are a lot of shared IRQs that we can't change b/c of factory settings ). Any ideas would be appreciated its already past my rule of RMA material but this guy is a poor college student about to be married man who can't just play cloak and dagger with this stuff.

Thanks in advanced

 

[grooge]

what about giving a small bost with memory voltage? something like 2.7v. It can be done in BIOS.

 

[hooflung]

The memory is already running at 2.68v which is fine for my DDR400. His DDR266 might not survive that setting as it is specced at 2.5v on both I believe. I believe the mobo is auto adjusting voltage atm for the lowest common denomanator. I will try bumping his up a bit tomorrow tho.

 

[hooflung]

Nothing worked... 2000 was always stable and XP wasn't despite HOURS and HOURS of testing with different hardware. RMA'ed it I would advise to stay clear as this seems to be a common issue with this board.

 

[skikaz]

Try this to fix the IRQ's if you want. Used it with a different mb.
Does your mb have the BIOS where you can reset configuration data. Set this to enable and reboot. After one boot cycle reenter the BIOS to verify that this entry has defaulted back to disable. If it hasn't, then reset to disable manually. This should result in a more conventional allocation.
Sometimes the IRQ's still dont allot the way you need, so you might have to remove one piece of hardware, then reboot, then reinsert the card and reboot again to see if the IRQ's are they way you want them. It took several times when I had a new vid card and sound card to find the right sequence.