Son of a Bizwack im running KT7A-RAID Stable!!!

[imonarock]

After almost 2 months here is my final product...

Flashed Bios to WZ which also upgraded my Highpoint bios
Setup my Bios for Performence Defaults
Installed W2k with only the ATI all in wonder AGP Radeon
Used the new 4.29 Via drivers (including bus mastering)
Reboot
Installed Realtek Ethernet in PCI #1
Reboot
Installed MX400 Sound in PCI #2
Reboot
Installed Maxtor Firewire in PCI #3
Reboot
PCI 4,5 and 6 are empty.
ACPI is running

Ive recorded 2 hours of TV, ran the Sandra Burnin tests looped about 10 times.

Still runs great.... However I still find myself praying it wont lockup..It will take a while before my confidence is restored.

 

[compuwiz1]

That's amazing! How far did you have to underclock that Abit board to do that?

 

[sad]

For me, I had to underclock mine to 6.5X150.

 

[gtd2000]

Yeah I've had to keep my Duron 700 at 950Mhz too on my KT7A to keep it stable

 

[gtd2000]

Maybe I'm cheating - I went non-RAID....

 

[tracerbullet]

Heh. Go ahead and hook up a fourth PCI device, I dare you!

When I HAD mine, it wouldn't even get to the highpoint bios screen with 4 PCI's installed, and anything plugged into IDE 4 at the same time. One or the other, but not both.

Got any USB's plugged in? That's the other thing I had. Any variety of 98SE or 2000, with all or no VIA updates, anytime I plugged in a USB it froze.

That, and we verified that the floppy controller quit working after the board was turned on for more than about 5 minutes. If you wanted to use the a:/ drive, you had to do it quick.

Glad it works for you, didn't for me...

 

[imonarock]

I do have 2 USB devices plugged in...
My Altec 495 Speakers and a Kodak 325 Webcam...

Floppy is running ok. I have noticed that on occasion my speakers dont get initialized. So there may be some USB conflicts arising. Nothing very bad though. I would never add a fourth pci device. Luckily I dont have any others waiting to go in.

Still praying it will keep working....

 

[Insane3D]

Hmmm..sorry to hear you guys are having trouble. I threw a 1.2ghz Thunderbird in my KT7A-R, turned the FSB up to 150mhz (300DDR), the multiplier down to 9, and I even lowered the CPU voltage down to 1.7v for a nice 1.35ghz, and it has not been shut down, locked up, or rebooted in more than 2 months. I even have a TDK burner, Kenwood 72X, Pioneer 16X DVD, two IBM 75GXP's in RAID "0" mode, 1 75GXP in ATA100 mode, LS-120 drive, Radeon, DVD decoder card, Philips soundcard, 10/100 Nic, and I have all three memory slots filled. It runs Win2K and Win98SE flawlessly....best system I ever built.


Oh yeah, I even have a Promise Ultra100 card sharing the same IRQ with the Highpoint controller...no issues.

 

[WarCon]

What about the following do the bashers of Abit don't understand?

This is not a design fault of the KT7! PCI devices are only allocated four programmable interrupt pins by the VT82C686A Southbridge chip used in the KT133 chipset. The same is also true of almost all other motherboard chipsets. The PCI bus must therefore nearly always share IRQs on some or all of its PCI slots. What makes the KT7 slightly unusual is that you get six PCI slots, an AGP slot and an ISA slot, which mean that all the slots may need to share! As I said above, this is not usually a problem and you should be grateful for all those slots! - courtesy of Paul's unofficial ABIT KT7 site

Hey everyone, every board out there uses this southbridge if they are using the KT133 or KT133a.

So if you aren't trying to use old PCI standard cards, or a OS without ACPI you will probably be rocking first try, except the known problem with NIC cards and Sound cards(they don't share IRQ's well), if you follow the instructions and make sure you put your NIC card on 4 or 6 so it shares with the USB controller, then life is good.

Sometimes I think its just too much of a mobo for most people to set up right.

 

[WarCon]

bumped

 

[sad]

Abit's back on AMD's list of supported motheboards. MAYBE that's why all of a sudden all our systems are running stable.

 

[gtd2000]

Hehe