NOW it works (K7S5A)...and another question, regarding power issues

[NTB]

Ordered this board about a few days ago, along with an Athlon XP 1600+, after several people recomended it to me. After the order, I came back to see all kinds of "Help Me! (K7S5A)" subjects pop up in this forum and elsewhere. Needless to say, I got a little nervous. Looks like I got lucky; thing seems to be running without a hitch. That said, I did notice a few strange things:

1: on the initial boot, I got 2 messages: "CMOS Battery Low" and "CMOS memory size incorrect", or something to that effect. Pulling the jumper to clear the CMOS seemed to fix this though, and I haven't seen it since. CMOS settings haven't disappeared either, which I think they would if the battery were going dead.

2: Try as I might, I cannot disable ACPI with this board. I disabled both Power Management and ACPI in the BIOS, and did the F5--->"standard PC" trick when trying to install WinXP. All my PCI devices still ended up on only two IRQs, #'s 5 and 11. No problems yet, but I haven't had a whole lot of time to play with it.

3: still working on what the best BIOS settings would be. I got pretty good with the award bios, between my old SOYO /k6-2 system and more recent Epox/Duron combo, but the AMI bios is set up a little differently still have to figure out what some of the stuff does.

4: tried several stability tests, and got varied results. the CPU_Burn program recommended in the FAQ here locked the system up, as did a few of the other programs found on the same download page. Sisoft Sandra burn-in worked fine, and I've been encoding a Divx movie using FairUse for the last few hours here with no problems. So maybe the lock-ups are program specific? system seems to be working fine now.

Well, that's enough of a rant for now; I mostly just wanted to try and balance all the woe-is-me posts I've seen with this board. Here is proof that it can work. And if anybody has any suggestions about some of the stuff I listed above - bios settings, ACPI, maybe I should replace the CMOS battery? - let me know.

Nate

 

[jfunk]

There have been several cases of the board showing up w/ a dead CMOS battery.

For $5, may just want to go ahead and replace it so you don't have to worry about it.




j

 

[Endless]

I've had that message pop up once before too. But after I loaded the setup defaults and then reconfigured the BIOS the way I like it, it never came back. But I agree it is strange for it to appear straight out of the box....

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Yeah, the K7S5A always shows the "CMOS Battery Low" and "CMOS memory size incorrect", out of the box, and after clearing the CMOS as well. I think it's their version of "to run setup press F1" function so you setup the bios. Anyways, I'd change the battery even though it's probably not an issue...YET my P.O.S. KTS battery died after 2months on my K7S5A and ther have been many reports of faulty batteries shipping with it. As to disabling ACPI read this and if it's not causing problems then don't fix what ain't broke If it does cause problems then to remove it do the following
<< Disable ACPI in Win2K: Under Windows 2000 you can disable ACPI from within Windows as follows:
1. Go to Device Manager and select Computer -> Properties of ACPI PC
2. Click the driver Tab and choose Update Driver
3. When the wizard gets to the "What do you want the wizard to do?" page, select "Display a list of the known drivers..."
4. Then "Show all hardware of this device class"
5. Then select "Standard PC"
6. Reboot the machine, enter Bios immediately and disable ACPI
7. When Windows 2000 restarts it'll redetect most of the hardware in your machine again and reassign IRQ's to them, turning off ACPI.
8. After rebooting, check under Device manager for double entries of Standard Computer. If you see 2 entries, check which one has no driver installed for it by checking under the driver tab for Standard Computer and delete that one and reboot.
So, you don't really need to reinstall the OS with Win 2K. I recommend a reinstall though. I guess it's all about how much of a perfectionist you are. I have seen some cases where you can just uninstall ACPI from 2K *without* disabling it in the bios. I've done it before, but if I had an error or problem, I wasn't sure if it came from not disabling it in the bios too or not. I mean the OS seems to run fine for some, gets all screwed up for others. I guess one can try it before resorting to flashing the bios. That's with Win 2K only though. >>

 

[NTB]

Heh. Looks like I spoke too soon. See here.

Nate

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Your bumming me out dude I thought we had added another happy camper to the club Anyways, start with the K7S5A Bible as it's the best place to start. I would suggest just by looking @your rig specs, that you should disable anything your not using in the bios E.G. serial ports, on-board modem, ect., load the optimal bios settings, and try 1 stick of ram at a time to see if the memory timings or memory itself is causing the lock ups. Also, read the PSU FAQs to eliminate your PSU as the culprit and make certain you don't have heat issues. post back and let us know how your getting on.

 

[NTB]

Thanks for the referal, punisher, but I've already read that stuff several times over. From what I've read, the only thing that might be a problem is my Antec Power supply - A PP-352X with a TCO of 180. Everything else looks good as far as I can see. Next step is to go into the BIOS, load default settings and disable stuff I'm not using. Sound and Network are already disabled, but there are a few other things I can still disable, I think.

Nate

 

[NTB]

OK, I'm back. Went into the BIOS, chose "load optimal settings" then went through and changed only what I needed to - disabled onboard sound, midi/gameport, and networking, along with the serial ports. Reset the FSB to 133/133 so that my processor is running at the correct speed. The rest I left as it was. Now to see if it will still lock up on me. Next thing to try, I guess, to is to disable ACPI if it continues to lock up.

Nate

 

[NTB]

D@mn, I thought I had it . Turns out that I can back the memory off a little more though (Safe rather than Normal) and I tried manually setting the CAS to 3 rather than by SPD as well. Back to testing.

Nate

 

[SleepyGuy]

Yeah I took a gamble and bought 2 of these motherboards... best motherboards i have bought yet! My duron 750 runs at 1 ghz and my 700 runs at 966 mhz. Use the latest bios to get stability. turn off any components you aren't using... ie, gameport, serial port, sound, etc. Set PIO to 5 on all hd's... use smart for hard disk. Windows 2000 has been up for 1 month no-reboots on the duron 750@1000... my duron 700 @ 966 (gaming rig) has it's crashes once in a while but that's from using Win98se. Remember to run latest drivers and don't turn on features you don't need. Peace out.

 

[NTB]

Sleepyguy - I've done all that. Board came out of the box with the 12/15/01 bios. All IDE devices are set to auto, SMART is enabled, RAM timings are backed off as far as they can go, CAS is set to 3 manually (no SPD). All unneccesary stuff is disabled. ACPI isn't giving me a fit anymore either - disabling all the on-board stuff freed a few IRQS, and the only shared one I have is between one of the USB hubs and my Hollywood+. I ran Prime 95 torture test for an hour earlier which pushed my CPU temp to 49C, but the computer didn't crash, so it doesn't appear to be a heat problem. Any other suggestions?

Nate

 

[NTB]

Hmmm...maybe the hardware isn't my problem. It seems to lock up most often when I'm doing one thing: Opening an Explorer window. Diging around on my computer or surfing, it makes no difference. And it didn't seem to make any difference what I was running when it locked, either. Only common denominator seems to be explorer. That's odd. I know one thing I can do to see if it helps, if not, I'm going to try and install a different version of windows and see if earlier versions of explorer will do the same thing - I've got copies of both 2k and 98 gold sitting around.

Nate

 

[NTB]

That didn't do it either....I'm getting closer and closer to putting my old epox back in...

Nate

 

[FrostyFlakes]

what are u system specs? mainly which vc and sound card.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I was wondering if you ever tried each stick of ram individually? I'm presuming you have as many people in the OCworkbench ECS forum mentioned that though theirs run stable with one stick(be it SDRAM or DDR) that they can't get theirs stable with 2 sticks. I've been using 2 128mb sticks of Apacer PC133 in mine lately with no problems however.

 

[NTB]

Dapunisher - it looks like you may be right. Before I went to work tonight, I shut the system down and took out the 128MB stick. Booted back up, and it's been running since 5:15 CST (Prime 95 running in the background) without a hitch. Going to leave it on tonight and see if it's still going in the morning. Will report back then. Bugs me that I've got 128MB RAM that I can't use though...and no, I'm not going to send it/sell it to anybody that reads this

Nate

 

[erwin1978]

So, buddy, can I have that ram.

Do you have any IRQ conflicts?

I'm not familiar with SIS chipset so I don't know what settings it provides. Turn down all the settings for the graphics card, agp and pci bus like fast R/W turnaround or something of that nature in bios.

I may have further supreme-being expertise that might be of help, but I'll let you know later.

 

[Duvie]

some ppl have talked about doing a volatge mod to the power supply as the ecs board lacks necessary ram voltage adjustments to deal with this issue...May do a search on it, but I know I have seen ppl working around this issue and being able to occupy both pc133 dimm slots with total stability after first having instabilit issues like yours...


Biggest problem with ecs boards are...power issues...

 

[NTB]

13 hours and counting... I'm just going to leave it as-is for now and wait until I can pick up a good board. I'm not going to do any modifications to it because, IMO, it should work as advertised out of the box. I'll just wait a few weeks here and pick up a KT266A+DDR. A question, though - Will other boards have these power issues? What do you think? Here's what I'm running: Athlon XP 1600+, Geforce 3Ti 200, Soundblaster Audigy, 3com NIC, Hollywood+ MPEG decoder, 2x HDD, DVD-ROM, CD-RW, and, of course, a floppy drive. All on an Antec PP352x (350W) PS.

Nate