Athlon instability

[Brute]

I just purchased an A7V and TBird 750, and boy is this thing fussy. Lockups are te most common problem. Are there any upgrades or drivers I need to know about?

Also, since I am not using the ATA100 bus, is there any way to disable it so it doesn't search for a device on boot up? As it is, my stupid 3Com 3C905CX-TXM keeps trying to boot on the network even though I told it not to.

Fun fun fun. The TBird is faster than the P3-750 but it's a feisty chip.

 

[BW]

up

 

[Brute]

My experience so far has been TERRIBLE. Let's run down the list:

The drivers don't install properly.
Eventually, I get Windows Protection errors on bootup, requiring a whole new OS install.
Once that's done, boot time gets slower. Eventually it just hangs. I find the problem is the SB Live, which I remove. Now I have no sound but at least the stupid thing starts.
The BIOS update won't work. The system locks when I run AWDFLASH.

Man, this thing sucks. Give me a good reason why I shouldn't take it back and get a P3 system.

 

[DeViSoR]

I find your problems very strange, for less then a month ago I set up a duron 600 oc to 882mhz. I newer had a problem with that setup.

His system specs is:

A7V
Duron 600@882
sblive
75GXP 30gb
ATI 128 16mb
250w psu
Mustec scanner (dont remember what type thinkg it was a 600 serie)

When flashing the bios we used the flash tool that come with the cd. It wanted to connect to the internet but as we have downloaded the bios from my comp (he dont have internet) we have to work around it. I dont remember what I did but it was fairly simple. When installing win me we only had the vid card installed. I find it safer to instal a OS without any extra hardware.

Actually after installed the scanner we had kernell error everytime we wanted to go into the control panel. This was fixed by installing Tweak UI, I just removed the icon for the scanner Twain. After that everything worked just fine. This problem seems to regard win me only, becouse when I tryed win me and I installed my epson twein I got the same problem with control panel. Removing the twain with tweak UI fixed it.

 

[DeViSoR]

btw. we had to instal a newer version of the promise driver, this fixed the boot delay. Also Yes it is possible to disable the promise. Just check your bios, I dont have acces to the computer here but it is under advance menu.

 

[moolman]

Hi,
It could be the Asus A7V, I recently had to return a friends A7V because it would boot up but we couldn't get any games to play, anything with graphics it crashes, tried 2 different video cards too, narrowed it down to the A7v. We changed it to the abit Kt7, no problems, I checked the asus newsgroup, apparently others are having the same problems. Also another thing is that my other friend has the asus a7V but he had absolutly no problems, and both were rev 1.02 boards. Maybe just the luck of the draw, return that motherboard and get a replacement or change to the abit.

Alex

 

[BW]

sorry to hear about all the problems. Mayby try and get another board like they said. You shouldnt have any instability with that setup. I have a first generation board a k7m with a slota 700 thunderbird clocked @ 1000 and it is every bit as stable as my celeron 500 not onerclocked.

 

[Merle451]

TB 700 OC to 800
ASUS A7V
256MBs of generic RAM
SB Live

I havent had a problem.

Maybe the board is dead.

-Merle

 

[frastini]

u sure your heatsink is seated properly? how are your temps?

sounds a lot like overheating to me.

 

[Topweasel]

No problems here
A7v rev 1.01
Asus V7700 Deluxe
Duron 600 at 925
Thunderbird 700 at 950
256 ram
SBlive
45 gig IBM GXP75

 

[cabojoe]

Overclocking includes the fine art of knowing when to stop...if you have already increased your voltage and have throughly optimized your bios, maybe your chip just doesn't want to go that fast. Just a thought. And "luck of the draw" as Moolman puts it, applies also to which particular chip out of millions that u end up with. But to post a message with the header of "Atlhon Instability", and not posting a speed at which the overclocked T-Bird WAS stable, seems kinda shallow to me.

*********
Athlon 850 @ 1008 1/3 L2 1.9 volts
Abit KA7
128 megs Mushkin Rev.2 PC-133 running cas2 at 141 mhtz.
Ninja Micros FreeSpeed Pro goldfinger
GlobalWin FKK32 Heatsink/Fans
Creative Annihilator 2 GeForce GTS
Sound Blaster Live
MS Digital Sound System
HP 8x4x32 Burner
48x CD-ROM
Kingston Nic
WireSpeed DSL Modem

 

[Brute]

It's not overclocked. It's running at standard speed.

The main problem now is getting it running with the SB Live! It won't boot. It just hangs there. How am I supposed to get this thing working?

 

[cabojoe]

oops...My bad. Try switching the Blaster to another slot. Are you running ME?

 

[Brute]

Any particular slot? Slot 2 can't be used by anything because the stupid ATA100 bus wants it, even though I disabled it in BIOS.

No, I use 98SE. Now that I have 98Lite IV, for WinME, I might upgrade. I tested ME on another computer with 98Lite and man does it haul ass. 20 second boot up, 2 second shut down. Wow.

 

[cabojoe]

Just keep checkin different slots...it is normal for most mobos to share irqs between the agp and another pci slot. Good luck!