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I've had it. Time to swap boards.

C

Cougar

Golden Member
Alright, I'm sure everyone is familiar with my athlon troubles by now so I won't go into the whole thing over again. But this a quick summary: No games will play whatsoever. I've got the msi k7pro motherboard and I'm sending it back to get an entirely different motherboard. So which irongate board is the best? Is the Asus K7M or the FIC SD11 any good? If they're not any good then which one should I buy. I've read many reviews and I know that there are a whole lot of boards out there that are highly rated, but I want some input from people that actually use these boards day in and day out.

With all that said I'm sure that some of you will still want to know what exactly I've tried so here goes (all this stuff has been done on a fresh format with only the cpu, ram, video card, hdd, ls-120, and dvd installed):

Flashed the board to the 1.5 bios
flashed again with the 1.6 bios
flashed yet again with the 1.7 B3 bios
flashed the elsa erasor x to the 7.06 bios
enabled superbypass
disabled superbypass
installed the latest elsa drivers
installed the nvidia 5.22 drivers
installed nvidia 5.30 drivers
installed nvidia 5.32 drivers
hacked the registry to enable agp2x
tried my agp tnt1 card that I'm currently using
installed the 1.21 ide drivers
installed the 1.24 ide drivers
installed the 4.45 agp drivers
installed the 4.50 agp drivers
installed the 4.61 agp drivers
set memory timing to cas-3
installed 98se
took out 1 128mb dimm so that only 1 was left in the system
took out both dimms and tried my own 128mb siemens dimm

Everything I tried there still produced the same results, so I installed an old pci starfighter card and everything worked just fine so I'm guessing that something just isn't right with this agp slot.

Edit:

Forgot to add that I've installed direct x 7.0a as well
 
CRV...

I've got the antec pp303x 300w power supply. I guess I did forget to mention that I did swap out the power supply for not one but 2 different 250w power supplies. I'm sure that if this thread continues I'll list even more things that I've done in order to get this system working right. I feel pretty confident that I've tried everything possible and it's the board that's at fault and not something that I did. (at least I hope so)
 
Instead of people asking me what's in this sytem I'll just post it all right now instead of bit by bit.

Antec ks282 with pp303x power supply
MSI 6195 K7PRO
Amd Athlon 800mhz
2 x 128mb Crucial Micron cas2 pc100 memory
Elsa Erasoz X (regular sdram, not ddr)
Adaptec 2906 scsi card (scsi id: 7, terminated)
SBLive! Value with spdif in
Linksys 10/100 nic
Maxtor 30gb hdd (master on primary channel with udma66 cable)
ls-120 drive (slave on secondary channel with udma33 cable
Toshiba 12x dvd drive (master on secondary channel with udma33 cable)
Sony 8x/4x/32x scsi burner (scsi id: 6)
scsi Zip drive (scsi id: 5, terminated)
Smasung 950p
Altec Lansing acs56
Lexmark z31
Logitech keyboard
microsoft ps/2 wheel mouse

Only the bare essentials are installed in the system now so there's no way that all that extra stuff is screwing things up.
 

If you haven't done so already, go to this page and pick your motherboard, and other applicable components, from those recommended by AMD:
http://www1.amd.com/athlon/mbl

I would accept no substitutes or rationalizations for going outside their guidelines if you're having so many problems, no matter what you hear in the forums from well meaning folks - that will only complicate your situation.

Also I would recommend for an old Athlon (I assume that's what you have, not a Tbird) a motherboard based on the VIA Apollo KX133 chipset, rather than the AMD Irongate - but both are compatible.

Maybe this will help:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=202744

Good luck.







 
Put the PCI Starfighter in and the computer runs fine.....

To rule out the AGP video card, does the it work fine on another computer?..then you may be right that there is a problem related to the AGP slot or system.

Cleared the CMOS?
Aperature at 64 or 128MB?
Bumped the I/O?
 
Yeah, what is the I/O voltage set at? GeForce cards require quite a bit of power. I would set it at 3.5 and give it another shot.
 
Ulysses...

When I was first designing this system that's exactly what I did. I went to amd's website and I picked the motherboard and power supply that they recommended for the athlon 800mhz (regular, not a thunderbird). Since I had seen that the k7pro was recommended by amd and by many other sites (and various posters on this and other message boards) I decided that it would be a safe bet to get it. Now I have to admit that the first system I designed with this board went pretty smoothly once I installed win 98se (with the first edition of 98 it was a nightmare), but this second system is just giving me a headache. I wanted to have this system completed and shipped off by now so that I could get on with my life, but apparently I'm going to have to hold onto it for just a little while longer.

I would be willing to get a kx133 chipset, but the person that I'm building this for wants the ability to upgrade to a thunderbird someday and according to amd's website only the boards that use the amd-751 chipset will be able to do that. If he had no interest in the thunderbird then I would have no objection to getting a kx133 board.

thanks for your help.
 
CRV....

I took out the geforce card and I stuck it in my celeron 300 system (not overclocked) and it worked like a charm. I had no strange system crashes or bsod's at all. It was beautiful. Now the minute I put the card back in the athlon system, it would immediately crash once I started a game.

I have tried clearing the cmos
I've had the agp aperature set at 64, 128, and 256
I can't boost the i/o voltage, the only voltage that I have access to is the cpu voltage which is set at 1.70v. I have also tried 1.55v, 1.60v, 1.65v, and 1.75v <----this was a last resort.
 
mpitts...

As I told CRV I can't boost the i/o voltage so I'm pretty much stuck there, but even if I could boost the voltage I don't think that it would help anyways. You see, I tried my tnt1 card that I'm using in my system right now and it still would crash as soon as I started up any games (or opengl screen savers too). I know that it may sound like it might be a driver problem, but I've tried everything I can think of and it still won't go. The computer just freezes the minute I launch the game and I've got to hit the reset button in order to bring life back to the machine.

If anyone else has any other suggestions I'd be glad to hear them, but until then my quest continues for a good irongate board.
 
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