How´s Via KT133 + 4in1 4.24 + T-bird 900 + G400 with Win2k?

[Nuno]

Just asking because I have the chance to sell my gigabyte 7IX (AMD 751) + Athlon 700 for a good price and get a T-bird 900 + a generic KT133 board. It´ll be a temporary board, I am thinking of AMD 760 + DDR in a near future. Meanwhile I could get the T-bird and use my PC-133 SDRAM.

So how´s that combination under win2k? I fear about VIA, so how´s your experiences?

TIA

Cheers

Nuno

[Rik]

I was as VIA-Phobic as you, but have recently switched from an ASUS P2B to an Abit KT7 + T-Bird 900.
So far Win2k has been very solid (and WinME too). Beforehand, I read up as much as possible on potential pitfalls and managed to avoid them. The only problems I've encountered have been due to my Vortex II in Win2k (but this is written in stone - 'thou shalt not use Aureal 8830 with KT133' as they are mutually incompatible). Trying to increase FSB speed can also give trouble - any overclocking may have to be done by unlocking the CPU.

Try this link for a great resource on potential problems and solutions with the Abit KT7, which should also mostly apply to the KT133 chipset in general: (it helped me a lot) http://www.apushardware.com/faqs/kt7faq/kt7faq.htm


[This message has been edited by Rik (edited 16 November 2000).]

[Nuno]

Ok, I´ll be using a sb live.
Any particular order installing the drivers?

[Rik]

From what I've read, this is the safest way (and it worked for me):
• Boot with only the AGP card, install Win2k
• Install VIA 4-in1 (version 25a beta is the latest)
• Install MS's new VIA AGP fix for Win2k
• Install Powerdesk
• Add SBLive (PCI slot 4 is the recommended position)
• Install Liveware
• (Install DX8)

There's also an AGP driver from AMD, apparently this shouldn't be used with the KT133.

[Nuno]

Rik, thanks for your help.

Never heard about the MS's new VIA AGP fix for Win2k. Is this the one?
http://www.microsoft.com/Windows2000...6/download.asp

[aaroncgi]

Nuno,

A friend of mine at work just put together a system using the KT7 and Thunderbird 750. He's running it at 1GHz or so stable, but has been very near 1.1GHz. Anyhow, he has a soundblaster card and mentioned to me that he had some teething problems with it until he disabled the soundblaster 16 emulation.

I also have recently discovered the pain of trying to get a Vortex 2 (Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla) card to work in a KX133 board, which I guess is no surprise given how similar it is to the KT133.

Aaron

[This message has been edited by aaroncgi (edited 16 November 2000).]

[Rik]

That's the one, Nuno. However, I noticed when I applied this 'hotfix' I was still left with VIA's agp driver from the 4-in-1's (called 'VIAAGP1.SYS'). What I had to do was manually update the driver using the device manager and pick the driver 'VIA Tech CPU to AGP Controller'. It does work wonders for stability, though.

Aaron -
Did that KT7 have the Highpoint (Raid) controller? Apparently it uses IRQ5 and can conflict with legacy SB emulation.



[This message has been edited by Rik (edited 16 November 2000).]

[DentyCracker]

Rik,
erm where is the driver located after the fix is applied. The major problem I have with Win2k on my KT7 is the unavailability of video modes 512X384 to 1024X768 for DirectX.I had this before and after I applied the hotfix. I had no problems with SBLive! drivers, most likely because I have the 5.1 card and it came with the latest drivers. I have the plain KT7 which is a lovely board, ever since I updated the crap TL BIOS that wouldn't recognise my Week 32 700 MHz Duron (been a 850 for 6 weeks now)

[Rik]

I think that after you apply the hotfix, it overwrites the file 'VIAAGP.SYS' in the \System32\Drivers folder and also sticks a copy in \Driver\Cache\I386. The thing is, VIA's AGP driver is called 'VIAAGP1.SYS', so it still remains in use and doesn't get overwritten. You can check what version you've got in the device manager, If it says it's using 'VIAAGP1.SYS' it's the VIA 4-in-1 driver, if it says 'VIAAGP.SYS' with the version number '5.0.2195.2104' it's the correct, updated one. Take a look, you might be surprised...

I'm not sure if it'll do anything for the resolutions problem, though. Might be more of a Powerdesk thing.