I am about one nerve away from never buying ABIT or VIA again, or at least the part that is making me crazy!!!

DavidTigerFan

Senior member
Nov 13, 2000
474
0
0
/rant on

Allright, I will explain it all to just get it off my chest. Since January I have been purchasing my dream system piece by piece. Well 2 weeks ago I finally got all the parts and set about building it. Here are the specs:

ABIT KT7A-RAID
512 MB pc133 crucial cas2 ram
(2) Maxtor Diamondmax 40 gb drives in a RAID-0 array
Soundblaster live value
Plextor 16X burner
Toshiba 16X dvdrom drive
3Com 3c905tx
Tornado Geforce2-Pro 64 mb ddr

and the usuals

Well I got it all put together and after a very frustrating round of battles with the damn FAN1 header not seeing that I plugged the damn CPU fan into FAN2 I got it booting.

Well I went to install win2k server and everytime I would make it to the detecting hardware part, *freeze*. Hard freeze too.

So I did this about 5 times to no avail, and I decided to try win2k professional. Same thing.

Then after about 3 days of researching ABIT problems, I flashed the bios to a beta bios from viahardware.com that allowed me to disable ACPI. I then installed Win2k professional without ACPI support and I thought I was out of the woods. Well Mr. Murphy had other plans for me.

So now instead of it freezing during installs, it just froze whenever it felt the need. It would run Prime95 all night, but if I were to actually use the damn thing, *freeze*.

So I delve deeper into the research and through here I found out about a possible bug in the Via hardware itself for all abit boards with 1AE0 and some other revision. Well I removed the heat sink and low and behold was 1AE0. So...I decide to try to get a replacement board.

On a side note here,

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD ANYONE HERE BUY FROM MICROBARN!!! YOU HAVE BEEN FOREWARNED!

I called them, and left a message cause no one would answer. I emailed them and no one replied. Basically I think they consist of a guy standing on a street corner with his thumb up his nose. I kept calling and calling, and in the meantime my new computer is unusable. I finally gave up on reaching them and am considering talking to the BBB.

So now I decide that I am going to give ABIT another chance, so I order ANOTHER KT7A-RAID from newegg. Another side note:

NEWEGG.COM IS THE BEST WEBSITE ON THE PLANET FOR PURCHASING COMPUTER PARTS, THEY HAVE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE AND I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THEM.

Ok so now I get the new board, and I verified that I didn't have a flawed via chipset. (which I didn't) So instead of just swapping out boards (cause I wanted ACPI to work) I installed the new board and wiped everything to install win2k again.

Everything is running smoothly until I get to the format of the 80 gigs of space. It freezes hard at 74% ARRGGGHHHH!!!

I look at the highpoint drivers version from the old board and the new board and see that the old ones were 1.20 and the new ones were 1.30. So now I try to reinstall, but this time I use the 1.30 drivers.

Everything installed beautifully with ACPI...I got win2k up and running great and I thought I was home free. Alas, Mr. Murphy had not satisfied himself with my nether regions yet...so I tried to install Diablo2 and run it. Guess what...Yep...*freeze*

I am thinking "hey this could be a fluke" so I reboot and actually managed to get it installed. But of course nothing lasts, and now I am back to the random freezes. Albeit alot less frequent now, but still the damn thing shouldn't freeze. So far, since having the computer up since Sunday night it froze on me last night when I wasn't even using it. I just came in and nothing worked. Then again this afternoon after work I come in and it?s frozen again. I reboot, and it freezes after the reboot. As of this writing I have actually been up and running for 2 hours now without a freeze.

I am at my wits end...

My last resort was to call crucial and request some new 256mb modules that will be here Thursday.

If that doesn't fix it, I am selling the RAM and the motherboard and getting an AMD chipset with DDR ram.

/rant off

BTW, anyone want a barely used ABIT KT7A-RAID fairly cheap? Otherwise I am egaying it...surely someone else can't catch my gremlin.

Thanks for all your help this forum truly is a blessing to those of us that feel like abusing our computers.

-David
 

brtspears2

Diamond Member
Nov 16, 2000
8,659
1
81
I had similar problems, I solved it with giving my VIO an extra .1v . Now everything runs smooth.
 

Viperoni

Lifer
Jan 4, 2000
11,084
1
71
I run my VIO at normal, and I've installed win2k numerous times on my kt7-raid rig no problems.
I have all SCSI drives as well, not too much trouble either (got screwy getting it to boot from CD, but I solved it)

I have no complaints at all from the mobo, or anything else from my comp, save for the win2k 60hz ref rate problem in games.
 

Sugadaddy

Banned
May 12, 2000
6,495
0
0
#1. Never buy Abit
#2. there's a known bug when using a SB Live with the Via 686A south bridge
#3. IDE Raid isn't too good, onboard IDE Raid is worse, and Highpoint IDE Raid controllers suck a&&
#4. Never buy Abit
 

Scabilian

Senior member
Jan 16, 2001
677
0
0
check your ram settings in the BIOS

i had trouble with my ram set to TURBO and I had the ram set to CL2 when it was CL3
 

LAUST

Diamond Member
Sep 13, 2000
8,957
1
81
It's VIA man.. :| I never had as much problems as when I had one of those..

Well guess I had a SIS that blew too.

<--- Has a Old but reliable BX now.
 

DavidTigerFan

Senior member
Nov 13, 2000
474
0
0
To answer the questions...

I am dumb, I forgot to tell ya I am running a 1.33 ghz athlon, and its not over clocked. Its running at the default voltage that the bios supplies. I'll try and bump it up a notch and see what happens.

I am running NTFS, I wouldn't go any other way...=o)

Also what EXACTLY is the bug with via and sblive?

Thanks guys (and gals)

-D
 

Brutuskend

Lifer
Apr 2, 2001
26,558
4
0
Get a T.B. Santa Cruz. I was having trouble with my SB Live and my VP-6. Gone now with the SC. Though my problems where much differant than what your getting, SB live and windows 2000 and VIA chips, don't play well togather!
 

Pastore

Diamond Member
Feb 9, 2000
9,728
0
76
Three letters...


M... S... I...

I have never had a problem with my VIA chipset...

 

RGN

Diamond Member
Feb 24, 2000
6,623
6
81
7 more letters.

V I A S U C K S

I'm going back to intel. After a TB 1.1 and a MSI Pro2A. I'm outta here. Mostly stable. Just wierd sh!t.
 

SuperSix

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
9,873
2
0
No.. VIA has issues? Nah...

:Q

/me lovingly strokes his BX chipset.

BX Sweetness


You seem to want caviar performance and stability on a tuna fish budget..
 

Sacotool

Platinum Member
Feb 26, 2000
2,877
0
0
Make sure your motherboard is grounded properly to the case, and you probably already checked this, but it's worth repeating, make sure your P/S is on the Athlon approved list.
 

bigbootydaddy

Banned
Sep 14, 2000
5,820
0
0
hmm using via here....abit vp6...both the onboard raid and a scsi card...no problems that are related to that.

knock on wood...but then i realize i dont think its luck...it is how its supposed to be.
 

DavidTigerFan

Senior member
Nov 13, 2000
474
0
0
I used the standard connector that came with the case, and I have all the screws in the board. It is an Enlight case with an Enlight 300W psu..

-D
 

Sacotool

Platinum Member
Feb 26, 2000
2,877
0
0
I was having all kinds of problems with my new Tbird system when I first put it together. It would freeze after a few minutes of running, all due to the under-rated Enlight P/S I was using.
 

SuperSix

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
9,873
2
0


<< Tuna fish budget? If you look all the parts are high end parts...

-D
>>



Abit motherboards and HighPoint IDE RAID (Any IDE RAID for that matter, but especially Highpoint controllers) are budget parts. I agree, the rest of the parts seem well thought out. *I* think AMD processors are budget too, but let's save that for another thread.

If you want to take advantage of AMD's superior price/performance ratio, you MUST use and AMD 760 DDR board. If you want stability, that is. If you HAVE to have RAID and it's not just to toy around with, get an addon Promise card, or try to find an AMD 760 board with a built-in Promise RAID controller, but I don't *think* there's any made with that combination.

THIS would make me switch to AMD:

MSI DDR board with the AMD761 Northbridge and AMD762 Southbridge, 6 PCI, 3+ DDR DIMM, 3 fan headers, etc...

The problem with even the best AMD 760 boards is that they use the VIA 686b (b = buggy) southbridge. I have yet to find a production board that uses BOTH pieces of the AMD DDR 760 chipset.


I don't want to be a guinea pig while VIA figures out how to manufacture a rock-solid chipset.

 

zzzz

Diamond Member
Sep 1, 2000
5,498
1
76


<< Abit motherboards and HighPoint IDE RAID (Any IDE RAID for that matter, but especially Highpoint controllers) are budget parts >>


huh? Abit budget?
FYI, I have used both onboard promise and onboard highoint controllers and promise one sucks more. Promise doesn't release new bioses or drivers for the onboard controller while highpoint does. I had emailed high point about a problem I had, and within a week they released a new bios( embeded in Abit bios) to fix that particular problem.
While I agree that AMD 760 is better than via KT266, highpoint is not neccesarily worse than promise. (evian.sys, anyone?)
..
I am waiting for n-force based Abit board....
 

BlueScreenVW

Senior member
Sep 10, 2000
509
0
0


<< #1. Never buy Abit
#2. there's a known bug when using a SB Live with the Via 686A south bridge
#3. IDE Raid isn't too good, onboard IDE Raid is worse, and Highpoint IDE Raid controllers suck a&amp;&amp;
#4. Never buy Abit
>>



I strongly disagree with #3. First, IDE Raid is pretty good. Second, onboard IDE Raid definitely has the potential to shine a lot more than some PCI add-on Raid card. Third, the Highpoint 370 chip on Abit KT7 boards rocks. But the Highpoint 366 chip wasn't too good, though...
 

Wedesdo

Platinum Member
Jun 5, 2000
2,108
1
0
via here... o'ced duron to 1 ghz... stable like a rock for almost a year now