Athlon XP on KT133?

[J1mb0b]

Okay, situation is this: My old man has a Biostar M7VKB (KT133 chipset) and wanted to get a new 1.4GHz tbird with 133MHz FSB processor. I suggested he get an XP 1600+ (1.4GHz) rather than the 1.4GHz tbird since it should run cooler and use less power. When we installed it, nothing happened. The fans and disks all started, but no POST, no beeps, no video, nothing. We tried removing the power from all the disks, removed all cards, leaving just the video, RAM and processor and still the same result. We updated the BIOS & still nothing.

I have now tried the processor on my Shuttle AK31 V3.1 & it booted first time - no problem at all. So it's obviously not a processor problem.

My question is, why wouldn't it run on the KT133 chipset? I know it will be limited to 100 FSB (1.05GHz) and he won't get the SSE benefits, but he doesn't really want to buy a new mobo right now (since that would mean probably wanting DDR RAM & it's getting pricey right now). Is there any reason why the XP won't work with the KT133? Or could it be something else? Oh, by the way, just to make things really difficult he's in London & I'm in California, so troubleshooting is tough. I'm looking for as many suggestions as possible before I get back to him.

Thanks for your help guys.

Jim

 

[Sleater]

I'm not really familiar with that particular board, but maybe you should look for a BIOS upgdate that will recognize the XP chip.

 

[J1mb0b]

Yeah, we already flashed the latest BIOS. Trouble is that it doesn't officially support the XP since the KT133 is limited to 100 FSB. On other chipsets, the XP is recognised only as a standard Athlon before a BIOS update and that was what I expected on the KT133, and I would be happy with that in this case. I just can't quite understand why it doesn't recognise anything - although power is obviously available to everything. Is this similar to if there is no processor in place?

 

[jfunk]

Mabye he should try an ECS K7S5A board. They are only like $65 and he can continue to use his SDRAM on it until he wants to buy DDR, since it supports both.


j