Help! Having freezing problems with new Athlon 700.

[Peppy]

Help! Yesterday I set up my new Athlon 700. Here's my setup:
Athlon 700 mhz Retail Box
ABIT KA7 Motherboard
128 MB stick of Crucial PC133 CAS 2 SDRAM
InWin S500 w/300 ps and 2 extra cooling fans
Western Digital 17.2 5400 RPM ATA66 HD
Generic 50x CD-ROM
Voodoo3 2000 PCI
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
USR 56k Fax Voice INT
USB Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer
PS/2 Microsoft Natural Keyboard
Parallel Port 100 MB Zip Drive

For some reason, it freezes up a lot. It often freezes up when Win98 is playing the opening wav file. It also freezes up whenever I try to play a game, even SNES ROMs. I've been trying to get Q3 and Q2 to work. It seems that whenever it freezes up, there's audio playing, so I think it's a sound card incompatibility, or it could be a hard drive problem, because the sounds play off the HDD.

I know it's not cooling, my athlon is running at a low 26c, and 21c case temp. I've tried the latest Voodoo3 drivers, and VIA KX133 drivers. I downloaded some new sound card drivers, but I can't figure out how to install them. But it keeps freezing! Please give me some suggestions!

 

[chase13]

try going into cmos and enabling "memory hole 15-16". this is a known issue on kx-133 via chipset boards. it worked for me.

 

[Peppy]

I uninstalled the MX300 and it worked fine, I could load Q3 even! I'm thinking that it's freezing up because of the extra IRQ needed for the SB Pro Dos Emulation, so I'm trying to disable it. I tried removing it, windows redetected it, now I tried disabling it, and the whole sound card isn't enabled! Any suggestions?

I'll try that memory hole thing right now!

 

[Tonec]

A usb mouse will allow you to free up irq 12 in bios, use the Aureal reference drivers, not diamond.

 

[Mecheater]

Don't know if this really helps. I had the same problem with my computer. I had similar computer parts, the main problems came out of the Diamond Monster MX300 & power supply. I noticed when I removed the MX300 it froze up very little, and replaced it with my sound blaster, but still freezes every now and then. Then I bought an AMD recommended ANTEC 300 watt power supply since the AMD's take all the power. I haven't had a problem since. I never got the MX300 to work, however I put in my Sound Blaster Live X-Gamer in and it works perfect.

so in my case the MX300 and power supply caused the problems

My old setup :
AMD K7-750
ABIT KA7
64MB RAM
27.2 Gig Maxtor
40X SCSI Plextor
Voodoo 3 3000
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Adaptec SCSI card
Inwin S500 case w/ 235w power supply @1st
etc.

-Good Luck

 

[KGB]

Do not get a different sound card!!
Are you using the DiamondMM drivers??
If so, they are the problem (constant lock-ups).

Go to http://www.a3d.com and get the Vortex2 reference drivers.

The MX300 is a nice sound card but the factory drivers SUCK!

 

[Peppy]

Thanks for all your help guys! I finally got it working correctly, and I like it a lot better than my old p166

The thing that was messing it up was the Sound Blaster Pro Dos Emulation driver. I'm guessing my system didn't like it taking up an extra IRQ. So I got the new updated drivers, and put a "rem" statement in front of the line for the driver in autoexec.bat. And everything works fine!

 

[Angrymarshmello]

Wow your leet Peppy. Go away. Slippy owns you