FIC 503+ lockup freezing problems

[rsales]

Well I have had this problem for some time. FIC told me while it was under warranty that the board is ok. I have tried alot of things but I believe it just can't power all the PCI cards, drives and a tnt agp video card. PCI sound and nic card with two hard drives. Doesn't seem to have the problem with a S3 4meg Virge PCI video card in there instead of the tnt agp card. I also noticed in the past if I take out some of the other cards it works ok with the tnt card. It's a third computer and still useful if it doesn't hang/lock. Guess if I want to keep running it with the AMD K6III 400 I need to replace the mother board with another one that's better than the FIC. What do you think? AT case and for a third computer it's still fast enough to be useful but don't want to spend alot on it.

(addition)- Since I thought I may need a new mother board because this one does not seem be handling the power right I went looking for another super 7 board. While reading about a Soyo super 7 I noitced an * next to the specs where it said it was K6III-400 compatible. The note said "The AMD K6-3 CPU needs a very good cooling fan (> 4500 rpm with good thermal contact to the CPU, use heat paste), in addition the power supply must be of good quality and able to supply the current needed (> 250W)". Perhaps my power supply is too small to handle the power of the chip and the TNT card.

As always thanks for your input.

 

[Gunner]

How many watts is your current power supply? With all the gadgetry you have, it's my opinion you probably should have at least a 300 watt supply. I rather doubt it's a board problem. I've found the FIC 503+ to be very stable once properly configured. It's always worked with everthing I've ever put on it. Good luck to you.

 

[rsales]

I have a 250watt power supply in the case. Seems like it isn't big enough. Strange considering my BXMaster board is in a case with alot more stuff in it and it's running with a 235 watt supply.

 

[GeoffS]

I couldn't get a TNT card that I had to work with the 503+. A little research indicated that the vid card would not work with a VIA chipset... couldn't even boot!

 

[rsales]

Well my tnt worked for some reason for awhile after the clean installed. Some point after adding more software it just started locking/hanging. Don't know if the additional software actually has something to do with it or not. It can lock/hang at the desktop just sitting there. Put in the S3 pci video card and it work fine not locking or hanging. I'll try a the larger power supply. Got a 300 watt but haven't had time to install it yet. The curse of having more than one computer and this one is the extra one. Only so much time for the computer work.

 

[rsales]

Lastest on this problem. If I use either TNT board it will crash/lock the computer after a short period of time. Lastest TNT drivers made no difference. Using an S3 4meg pci card it works just fine. Have this problem using K6-III/400(not overclocked) or K6-III+/450 at 550. System has two other cards pci cards, sound and Adaptec nic. Had this problem with a 3Com nic too. No pci cards in the slot next to the AGP slot. Case had a 250 watt supply so I thought there might be too much load on the power supply so I installed a 300 watt supply. Using the k6-III+ and the 300 watt supply seems to have helped some. The system seems, so far, to be alittle better in operating system and basic software but will still lockup in a game after a say 5-10 minutes. Lockup/crash looks different now. Running a game is my hard test for locksup/crashs on this machine. Haven't tested it alot in basic software but it so far it appears alittle more stable. It's a third computer not primary but would like to use it. I'm puzzled as to the problem. In the past when it was under warranty FIC replace it once and check the replacement, saying it check out ok. Any ideas?

 

[jmorrell]

I used to have the 503+ with a Creative Labs TNT. I had similar problems until I read the answer on a couple of forums. To get your TNT working correctly, you have to change some BIOS settings. Here's the settings:

Assign IRQ to VGA - enabled
Video BIOS Shadow - disabled
Video BIOS Cacheable - disabled
AGP Aperature Size - 1/2 your system RAM
Write Cache Pipeline - disabled
Read Around Write - disabled

Once you have these settings in your BIOS, you should have a very stable system. I ran my system this way for over a year until I upgraded.

 

[rsales]

Thanks jmorrel, I'll give it a try right now.

Added: I tried it and it works. Must be some memory conflict that takes place when video bios is shadow or cached?

 

[chucky2]

rsales- Since your running the 3+, I'm going to assume your using the JE4330 BIOS?

Another thing: I'm almost sure that the farthest PCI slot from the AGP slot (the PCI slot that shares with the ISA slot) is NOT a busmastered slot. I've run into problems when trying to run things like SCSI controllers (Adaptec 2940U) and NIC's (Intel Pro/100+ Management) because they needed to be run in a slot that is busmastered.

Now, since there's only 3 PCI slots on that board, and the PCI slot that shares with the ISA is not busmastered, that only leaves 2 PCI slots open. Knowing that nothing should be in the 1st PCI slot (the one right next to the AGP slot) when a video card is in the AGP slot, leaves only 1 free busmastered PCI slot open.

What happens when the SCSI or NIC is in PCI #2 and the sound card is in PCI #3?

Hope this helps!

Chuck

 

[rsales]

Status:

Loaded the VIA drivers that came with the motherboard and set bios settings to default settings as per the manual. Worked pretty good at 550 but locked game after 1 hour of game play. Went back to 450 and found a couple of settings in bios that I hadn't set to defaults. Played the test game for over an hour with no lockups. Now that it is stable at 450 time to go back to 550 and I may find I need to go to 2.1 volts. Thanks for all the input.