KT7-RAID Voltage Readings and BIOS Instabilities

Netopia

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
4,793
4
81
Hey All,

The other day I bought 4 KT7-Raids, 2 Tbird 750's and 2 Tbird 800's. The first thing I did with the Tbirds was close all of the L1 bridges with a defogger repair kit and a tiny straight pin. Wish I hadn't, because now I don't have a "virgin" Tbird to compare with.... anyway, here is the situation.

So far I've tested two motherboards and used two power supplies and also used different SDRAM modules. No matter what I do and no matter which of the CPU's I'm using I get the same results... the BIOS is unstable and will almost always hang if I stay in it for more than 20-30 seconds. Sometimes only after a couple of seconds. The other thing is that the voltage settings in SoftMenuIII don't seem to correspond to what the motherboard is reporting... i.e. I can set the voltage to 1.7, but if I look under the "Health Monitor" or boot the machine and use MotherBoard Monitor, I get a reading of between 1.84 and 1.89! This is on two different motherboards! Same EXACT thing! Has anyone else ever seen this?

If I boot into W2K, everything seems fine. I can get one of the 750's up to about 935 so far at 1.775 and it seems completly stable, though it reports 1.89 as the core voltage. If I reboot and go into BIOS, it will hang just like before. I've never had a machine that was stable in Windows but not in the BIOS.... it's weird.

One last thing (forgive me...I've never had these sorts of stangenesses with motherboards before)... in motherboard monitor, one of the sensor readings is at about 185F! The other is at about 86F (I'm using an Alpha 6035 and have two HedgeHogs waiting for me to finish playing around). I assume that the 86F is the CPU, since this is what the BIOS shows, but does anyone know what the other temp is from?

Thanks in advance,

Joe
 

YanTheGeeza

Junior Member
Sep 18, 2000
1
0
0
Joe,

My KT7-RAID's VCORE is always ~0.07V above the softmenu setting. However I hav'nt encountered the instabilities you mention. My Duron 650 is rock solid at 800 (VCORE=1.525V in BIOS to give ~1.6V). I did e-mail Abit about this but I recieved an incomprehensible answer (the jist of it seemed to be that this was normal...I think...:eek:)).

As for the temp reading. Motherboard Monitor v4.18 always gives 22C on VIA686A-1 on my system (VIA686A-3 is CPU and VIA686A-2 is System Temp).

Oh, I almost forgot. I did flash the BIOS to 'UL' but that made no difference.

Yan.
 

Netopia

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
4,793
4
81
I believe that the two I've already tried were shipped with the UL bios, but I will double check. YanTheGeeza, I appreciate your letting me know about you having the same problem. Mine seems to be always about .14v off, which is more than a little alarming, but I'm doing the same as you and reducing the the voltage to below normal in SoftMenu and it seems to end up ok. My only concern is that two of these machines are going to other people and if they ever have to reset the bios for any reason, I'm afraid what will happen if they leave the voltage at default but 1.89 is actually being delivered! We shall see.

Thanks again for the responses.

Joe