Biggest load of shit ever

[xortam]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by SCompRacer:
A SCSI card will limit your pursuit of a high FSB.</font>

Why?
My Mylex SCSI RAID is spec'ed at 133 MHz FSB and I don't know how hard it can be pushed beyond that. Why would the fact that its a SCSI adapter limit its bus speed more than other PCI cards?

[Taz]

My Abit KT7A RAID is stable under Win2k now, I have these cards in the following slots if it's any help :-

AGP - Hercules Prophet 4500
PCI2 - Compaq PCI Fast Wide SCSI controller (Symbios 875)
PCI4 - SB Live value
PCI5 - 3Com 3C905C NIC
PCI6 - Hauppagge WinTV

Quantum IDE HD on Highpoint Controller
DVD, CD-RW and LS120 on IDE controller

HP 12/24Gb DAT on SCSI controller

USB disabled

[This message has been edited by Taz (edited 15 June 2001).]

[Liquid Snake]

Wow! Are VIA boards really this buggy? My Abit BX boards (BX6 2.0 and BE6-II) are rock solid.

[SCompRacer]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by xortam:
Why?
My Mylex SCSI RAID is spec'ed at 133 MHz FSB and I don't know how hard it can be pushed beyond that. Why would the fact that its a SCSI adapter limit its bus speed more than other PCI cards?

</font>

Back when I had trouble getting my FSB on my KT7A RAID board up as high as others, I posted a question at another forum as to why. The answer I got was from someone who had a SCSI RAID array. I was told that when overclocking, critical PCI components are network cards or SCSI adapters. I pulled my 2940U2W card out temporarily and was able to add another 4 MHz to my FSB (112 to 116). I had left all other cards in, including sound and NIC. No detailed explantion was given and I doubt I would have understood or remembered it anyway.

Even though a PCI card is spec'ed for a 133MHz FSB, it still designed to run at the 33MHz specification anyway. The PCI bus divider for a 100MHz FSB bus is 3, while the PCI divider for a 133FSB is 4.

[SCompRacer]

Taz, thats quite a bit of sharing going on, nice going.

My config with the KT7A RAID was:

AGP - Matrox G400 MAX
PCI1 - SB Live
PCI2 - 3Com 905B-TX NIC Card
PCI3 - Hollywood +
PCI4 - 2940U2W
PCI5 - open Highpoint enabled, two RAID 0's
PCI6 - open
ISA - SCSI scanner card (until I got USB scanner)

Both serial, parallel & USB enabled.



[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 15 June 2001).]

[The PIT]

Well it's on it's big test will it last the day. Pity the fans are so darn noisy otherwise I'd leave chugging over night as well.

The fsb and mem are within spec i.e 100 fsb and mem fsb + pci. It's never liked 133fsb for some dumb reason. Then didn't AMD take them off the supported list because of that?
The k7 clk_ctl is set at fast but when it was doing all the hard disk trashing it was set to default.
Whats in what.

AMD TBIRD 1Ghz Guarenteed at 1150.
G400
pci slot1 empty
pci slot2 scsi card
pci slot3 was sb live
pci slot4 wintv
pci slot5 promise tx2 controller
pci slot6 3com network card.
USB enabled for scanner.
IBM dpta 27 gig drive IBM DTLA 30 gig drive. Yamaha scsi 1644 cdrw Toshiba 40x CD Asus x8 DVD seagate 8gig tape drive.
Via ide disabled and highpoint disabled. Win98 se and win2k sp2 installed.

[az]

This sounds like you've got an early revision of the board - AFAIK later revisions did show up on the compatibility list again. Maybe you should contact your dealer or ABit for a newer revision (which would of course mean you can't use your current board for quite some time)

AZ

[DentyCracker]

My ATi TV Wonder now works in win2k sort of.
TV tuning is fine, Video Wallpaper works as well. Video capture does not work
I'm using the ATi special purpose drivers (MultiMedia Centre 7.1). DirectX 8 must be installed for these drivers to work. They never worked with DX7 in this mobo. You can VIA all you like Paul, I think the fault lies mostly with the mobo manufacturers. QC is a big problem. I don't think I'll buy another Abit although this mobo seems to be one of the good ones. It is a very early build too, as it came out before AMD upprd the voltage on its Durons, causing my almost heart failure when I just got the mobo and processor. Damn it when I get that Glaciator, I'll try for a Giga again. For now I'll settle for 950. By the way mp3pro at 64 kbps sounds reasonably good, and will playback on wmp7 and mantis techdemo. Don't know if it plays back under winamp as I don't like/use it, but I suspect that it does.

[DentyCracker]

I should add that I'm not overclocking the FSB at all, don't like to run PCI cards out of spec. Using PC133 RAM at 100 cAS 2. All bios settings maxed out Turbo memory timing, force interleave, 4-way interleave the aforementione CAS2 as well as K7 CLK_CTL Select on optimal, AGP wait state and all.

[SCompRacer]

If I recall, my KT7A board revision was 1.01. It's on a tag on the bottom of the ISA slot. Read in some forum that there were two or three revisions, but never saw any official info about it.

I was able to run my "B" 900 T'bird at 133 X 7.5 for 1000 reliably. The K7 CLK_CTL Select had to be on "Default" instead of "Optimal" or it would freeze while idle when overclocked only. Last BIOS I used before I sold it was WZ. All my memory settings were cranked up too. Used Crucial 7E.



[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 16 June 2001).]

[The PIT]

I blame myself for not doing my homework first and I should have gone of and looked at places like Viahardware forums.
Via have to many problems for it to be just motherboard manufactures problems. They have problems with soundcards (Not just creative) zip drives, cdwriters, usb scanners. Some problems are made worse no doubt by m/board manufacters not following referance designs close enougth sure enougth. Via drivers suck as well Microsoft do a better job.
Looking at Via hardware forums no one fix seems to cure the 686b bug it seems more like luck if you manage to cure it if you got a particular bad case.
At the moment the machine is still running was it an heating problem caused by the voltage being high?

[Indiana]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by DentyCracker:
[B]Video capture does not work. I'm using the ATi special purpose drivers (MultiMedia Centre 7.1. </font>

Didn't work here either (Radeon64DDR-VIVO) with quite some of the latest Win2k drivers, including the last special-purpose one.
Revert to 3102 (the official one with M$ certification) and you should be fine.
At least no problems at all here in Win2k with capturing, TV-Out, gaming (although I'm not really a heavy gamer).
With ATI I got the impression that the certified drivers are in fact better than the others. Or at least more "complete" / general purpose. Those leaked drivers most often seem to fix only few very special issues compatibility with certain games/apps and often other things are broken (TV-Out/In, DVD, HierachicalZ...) - so until the next complete driver comes out with the fixes of those leaked revisions plus maintaining full functionality you're mostly better off using the released driver. Unless of course you really need a fix of the leaked versions (but hell who really needs a fix for 3DMark2001, and if he does he should've gotten a NVidia product ).

To the ABit KT7: I don't have problems here and the thing is quite overloaded with PCI-cards including the evil SBLive and ATI cards, and mostly run in Win2k. It seems to me that you really have to be lucky with those ABit (or VIA-boards in general, look at all the complaints about the AsusA7V) boards as they're rock-stable for some, no matter what they put in and crap for some others. Maybe really yield problems at VIA?
Here's my Win2k ACPI IRQ-list:




Really a lot of IRQs used and still no problems in Win2k and 98SE, the HighPoint RAID works as it should - and it's stressed quite a lot, since I nearly only use it for video-capturing.

[ALBPM]

VIA SUCKS!!!!!!!

[The PIT]

I'm curious Indiana how come you've got one the Hauppauge Audio on irq 15 I would have expected that to get shoved on irq7 with the rest.
I've seen less complaints about asus boards. The complaints list seems to go Abit (Loads)
Asus a few Msi not a lot and ones by Iwill Epox hardly ever mentioned.
I did see one review of the Iwill that wouldn't boot at all with the sb 1024. He took it out and then said this is the most stable board ever. I would have tried a few other soundcards in it first before I said it was stable. I have friend that has one and also has problems with sblive card.

[Indiana]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by The PIT:
I'm curious Indiana how come you've got one the Hauppauge Audio on irq 15 I would have expected that to get shoved on irq7 with the rest.</font>

Don't know either, it was this way from day one after the install of the Hauppauge. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I had all other devices installed first (I thought I'd use the Radeons TV-in for captures and wanted to spare the 2 IRQs the Hauppauge needs) but then reinstalled the Hauppauge nevertheless - because of it's integrated tuner and it's S-VHS input, makes VHS captures really better.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">I've seen less complaints about asus boards. The complaints list seems to go Abit (Loads), Asus a few Msi not a lot and ones by Iwill Epox hardly ever mentioned.</font>

Well, I guess this is roughly equivalent to the market share...
I had an Asus board before (K7M -> AMD750) and was not so happy with it - problems with AGP - so you see you can have problems with AMDs chips and Asus mobos as well...
To the SBLive: There are also Intel BX users with problems in Win2k with these boards. Creatives drivers simply suck, and the sound-quality of the SBLive is only mediocre at best (wish there was a soundcard with Creatives EAX2/gaming functionality, the HQ sound of the Terratec EWX24/96 and working Win2k drivers all in one product).

Regards,
Joachim


[This message has been edited by Indiana (edited 16 June 2001).]