GA-7VRXP => "Hated It"

[dmhinz]

Just RMA'd this board....major dissapointment

1st impressions were very good, packaging was nice and the board looked solid. Began install and my video crashed out, monitor wouldn't even get a signal. No CMOS jumper to clear the BIOS, had to pull the battery Checked Giga-byte website (using another pc) and found original BIOS had issues w/ ATI Radeon 8500 -> thought everything would be fixed w/ BIOS update....

2nd shot at install....get through 1st abstraction of WinXP but, after reboot everything goes downhill. System tries to automatically load off of XP CD (no option "press any key to boot from CD") and when I pulled the CD I got an error message saying "Hal.dll is missing or corrupt". Tried to install several times same result. Tried to load W2K, same result. Could this be some sort of SCSI issue since I'm not using IDE?

3rd shot at install...swap out SCSI for IDE to test my theory of SCSI/GA-7VRXP incompatibility => everything goes off fine and WinXP loads like a champ.

4th shot at install...replace IDE for SCSI, try SCSI card in every PCI slot w/ no other cards except AGP => same result as 2nd attempt.

Final thoughts? This board & Gigabyte are pretty lame. Clearly a case of rushing a product out the door to try and be the 1st KT333 board. Support has been non-existant, 4+ days and several emails w/ no response. No tech support phone number listed in manual or website. Do they even test this stuff before they put it to market? Lucky for me Newegg RMA'd the board w/ a restocking fee, time to try my luck w/ the MSI KT3....

-D

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

Bummer man.. Hope you have better luck with the next board. Yes, it does seem that manufacturers rush boards out sooner than they should have and early adopters end up with many a problem that usually can be solved with a new BIOS release, but that usually isn't 'till a couple months down the road.

 

[Ausm]

You must have gotten a lemon because my board is running saaaweeet.


Ausm

 

[jpetermann]

My board has been perfect as well. I am assuming when you loaded Win 2000 that you pushed f6 to load the 3rd party drivers for your scsi device? As far as tech support goes, there number is listed on their homepage, but not under supoort. I had to call about the driver on teh cd for the raid, it was no good. Got ahold of tech support and he emailed me the new driver right away. This board is stable and fast! A good oclocker also! To bad you had such a bad experience. Hope the MSI is a better match!

 

[dmhinz]

I don't think the board was a lemon, as I said, it worked fine w/ IDE just not SCSI or the ATI 8500.

 

[jpetermann]

I am running an 8500 with no issues. Scsi could be a problem, but I have no experience using scsi drives. I am using a raid 0 setup.

 

[rockhard]

Just curious - what make/model SCSI card were you using?

 

[dmhinz]

Adaptec 29160N w/ Quantum Atlas 10K's 18GB (C and 73GB (D

 

[dmhinz]

Did you have to flash the BIOS?
The original BIOS has specific issues w/ the ATI 8500 (see Giga-byte BIOS histrory).

 

[jpetermann]

No, it was running fine right out of the box. I did flash the bios anyways, and I did not see any diff in the video card.