Best dual Athlon Mobo?

[XHotKolaX]

Something important I found.

I have 2 K7D-L mobos, same revision, same BIOS, same OS, same hardware, same RAM, same Procs.

One is crash happy with the Parhelia and plain doesn't like it.

The other works great.

The one that works well has a metal lever that closes snaps the Proc pins together.

The one that doesn't work uses that cheap plastic lever. Infact it won't even Post half the time with the Parhelia in.

I guess just something to look out for. I found it rather odd.

[Tapeworm]

XHotKolaX,

These kinds of problems are just plain goofy. I can sympathize with you looking at the plastic lever.

Are your SCSI controllers identical, with the same updates? I've had older dual Adaptecs that had problems getting along (in relation to the graphics board) because they were a few weeks apart.

I know I'm grasping at straws, but I find it interesting that the one 860 based board that seems to work, doesn't have onboard RAID. I don't understand enough about this to say it means anything, but I'm just looking for commonalities.

Brooke

[XHotKolaX]

Well I'm guessing one was made better than the other somehow. I mean if they skimp and a simple lever I'm pretty sure other shortcuts were taken elsewhere.

And yes, everything was the same. As in the same hardware. I took stuff out from this mobo and put it to the other one in the same PCI slots and all.

This mobo is running fine. The other one randomly locks and BSOD's for no reason. At the same time, that lockup mobo runs fine w/ any other videocard.

[Wombat]

Don't think of it as skimping on a socket. How do you know what they cost? Do you have any reason to think the plastic ones break more often than the metal ones? Are they even the same manufacturer?

Sorry, but I've worked with tons of sockets of different models, and you don't have anything to go on here.

[DGhost]

you could have something like a bad stick of ram or a bad PSU...

have you tested all the components? even if they are the "exact same" you could have one bad.

i've seen sticks of ram that won't work with a certain motherboard. pick up another motherboard (same model, same batch) and drop the ram in it works fine. pick up another stick of ram (same model, same batch) and drop it in the first motherboard, it works fine.

it all comes down to tolerances. sometimes two components are not far enough inside their respective tolerances, i suppose.

[XHotKolaX]

Sorry, but I've worked with tons of sockets of different models, and you don't have anything to go on here.

I'm really not going on much. I'm just throwing things in the air. I really have no idea. They *should* be the same, right? I'm mostly posting this as something to look out for.

you could have something like a bad stick of ram or a bad PSU...

have you tested all the components? even if they are the "exact same" you could have one bad.

It's not. I can game for hours and do mass resampling of my wavs for the rest of the day. The other one won't even go for a few hours without crashing from mere browsing.

I've always thought it was the heat or drivers. Since I've moved to watercooling I seperated that out. One crashes w/ the P, the other doesn't. Both run fine w/ my AIW Radeon and G400.

They're both K7D-L Rev: 1.0 M1996 Made in Taiwan. Is there anything else I could look at to ID them?

edit: I would like to add, I'm running completely stock. Other than killing IDE controllers I don't use, disabling onboard sound/joy-- I didn't do a single processor/ram setting tweak.

[DGhost]

have you tried swapping the PSU's and have you tried swapping the video cards to determine if either one is bad, or could be causing problems?

[K6-III]

My thinking would be PSU as well...

[XHotKolaX]

Yeah, I'm using an enermax whisper 431W. I forget what the other one was but it's an enermax 350W.

Both work fine. As I said, on this one I have yet to crash. The K7D-L(B) would crash/BSOD/hardlock(if i wait long enough it turns in a BSOD) with MTXPARHW.dll as the fault from mere tasks as web browsing.

I first started out testing on totally seperate systems. The one I'm using is currently in my sig.

K7D-L(B) is using
256MB Micron PC2100 unregistered
1200 MP's(same stepping and same batch, of course)
AIW Radeon 32MB
350W Enermax
Hercules Fortimisso II DE
PGS C2100 21"

For various reasons I put in the P on that system to test out the CRT PQ. Since it was downstairs I opted to carry the videocard rather than the monitor.

Go thru' the usual uninstall drivers, install P's. reboot. That's when the crashing started. Slowly I tried to seperate what could be the problem and eventually got to putting the exact same components in with the only differing mobo's. I even tried using the ram, PSU, HDD's from the other computer on this mobo. Works fine there too.

I'm thinking the other mobo is bad, but it works fine with either my G400 and AIW radeon. I thought my P was bad, so I test it on a totally seperate ASUS A7A266. Fine there(so long as I don't load the ALi drivers AGP drivers, but that was true for all the other cards too).

I thought I did it quite thoroughly so I came to this conclusion. I think UT2k3 and war3 are recent enough to be demanding to the videocard too. Neither are crashing after hours of play(I don't have FAA on). Other than the recent driver update and initial windows update stuff I have yet to reboot my current system.

[SCompRacer]

I got one of them plastic levered MSI K7D Master L boards and all is well with the P card.

I do have an Epox 8K7A single CPU board that would not post with the P card though. Had the latest BIOS, played with BIOS settings, swapped Crucial memory, took all the other cards out, even swapped out the PS with another 400 watt Antec and no joy. Was just anxious to try my new card back then so I never followed up on it.

[MultimediaMan]

Chaintech 7KDD post 7-11-2002 BIOS update report:

The PCI 64Bit/66MHz Slots are working as advertised now! No system hangs or anything.

The Parhelia even seems to be happy with the use of 64Bit devices. Adaptec ANA 62011 64Bit NIC and a (Borrowed) Adaptec 39160 running 3x10000 RPM SCSI HDDs.

[Paddy]

re: A7M266-D

I've been using the Asus A7M266-D pretty much since they first appeared. I had to send my first one back as the 64bit PCI slots wouldn't work - It would just hang whenever a card was inserted.

My second mobo has a few issues with regards to updating the BIOS. For some reason the Asus Flash Util supplied will not verify any attempts to flash the BIOS. I did have a few issues with the USB controller. Every now and then I would fire up XP and my USB mouse wouldn't work It has not done it in a while now though.... All that aside, I like the board. It's stable as a rock and the only BSOD I have ever seen in recent months is down to my crappy ATI drivers!