My Athlon T-bird Upgrade Experience - So Far

[Siddhartha]

I have just upgraded my system, from an Athlon 700 mHz\Abit KA7 to a Tbird 1.33 gHz\Abit KT7A. I brought the cpu($179), mb($115), two NEC 256 meg RAM sticks($45 each!), and a Global win heatsink ($25) at a computer show. I got my goodies home, did the quick 35 minute assembly, plugged it in and nothing happened!

The vendor replaced the motherboard without a fight. Then I did the quick 40 minute reassembly, plugged it in and turned the bad boy on and it booted up with no problems. I spent another couple of minutes with the BIOS and my system is running with no problems (so far). I am using it now.

On general principle, I might format the hard drive and reinstall Windows.....

Any suggestions on tweaking the BIOS or anything else is welcome.

 

[BFG10K]

So was your first motherboard defective or were you the one that damaged it?

(If you're not sure, what do you think was the case).

 

[Siddhartha]

I think the first board was defective. I do not think I did anything to it to break or damage it.

 

[bacillus]

<< Dr Smooth >>


hope you live up to your name! 🙂

 

[LXi]

Try to get your RAM to run 133MHz with 2-2-2 timings, be sure to enable 4 way interleaving. That should give you a boost in memory performance.

 

[brennan]

Yep, tweaking the memory timings is the first thing I do. Go here and here for more BIOS tweaking suggestions.

-brennan

 

[Siddhartha]

The system is running great with no issues.
A couple of notes:

1. Installing the hs required more force than I have needed with other systems. I am not sure if this is charteristic of the global win or all Tbird hs in general.

2. Cpu temperature: no overclocking
Highest so far: 42 C
Idle: 25 to 32 C

3. Vcore: 1.81

4. I am using a Soundblaster Live soundcard with no issues. Wasn't there suppose to be a problem with VIA and the Soundblaster card?

 

[TunaBoo]

Soimetimes ya get SB issues, sometimes you don't. The latest 4-in-1's fixed the problems (or so they say).

Anyways, my problem didnt develop until like 3 months after I built the system, but then it lasted 1 day and a reboot cured it. Don't worry about the SBLive problem.