KT7A - Random crashes - Remember this problem?

[gramboh]

Hi there,

My friend recently received a free machine - an AMD TBird Athlon 1.0GHz (7.5x133) using an Abit KT7A mainboard with 256meg generic PC133, Creative Labs GF2 GTS etc. (good enough to play CS and DOD for the time being). Anyways, she set up the machine and started gaming, and noticed immediately that the machine likes to randomly reboot/get STOP errors (running Windows 2000 SP3). I did a quick search on Google and found literally hundreds of posts about this exact problem. The machine also hard locks in some areas of the BIOS (usually DRAM clock screen, I wanted to lower the memory timings).

I wasn't able to find out if there was a clear solution. I underclocked it to 750MHz (7.5x100) and ran memtest since I suspected crappy memory, lo and behold it generated a ton of errors, and also locked up, but I'm not sure if the lock is from bad memory or the reboot issue. It's definetely not heat, side panel of case is off and temps are resonable for a TBird (~48C under load).

I'm going to bring over my Micron PC133 SDRAM which I know is good and test that, and was thinking about flashing the BIOS but am worried it may hard lock during a flash and that would be a real piss-off.

Thanks for any tips, I'm sure there are some KT7A vets lurking here 🙂.

Cheers.

 

[lenjack]

I don't have the answer, but that board was one of those affected by the defective electolytic capacitor problem. Many of them went bad after a while. I've had 2 go bad. Look carefully on the board. If they are swollen, bulging, or leaking, that's probably the cause.