This machine would be a speed demon for DOS. I don't know if Windows 98SE DOS gives troubles with that much memory but for DOS yes, the YMF-718 is an excellent card. If you get a GM wavetable DB on it its even better when playing newer DOS games.

Other option is AWE64 Gold, but YMF-718 + DB is better than AWE64 IMO.

Well, I currently have an AWE64 Value card in my Socket 7 machine and I recently bought an AWE64 Gold. But I was planning on using it in that system, since the AWE64 Value really sounds crap. I suppose that I could *hypothetically* chuck the AWE64 Gold in this system when it arrives, would that be sensible? Or should I rather get a Sound Blaster Live! to complement the Yamaha?

Yes get a Live! to complement the Yamaha.

I've got the same ABIT KT7A-RAID that had a AWE64 Gold but had to removed after I started to experience problems with the sound which slurs really badly during HDD and CD-ROM access. It's fine otherwise. I had the same problem with the Sound Blaster 16 Pnp & ESS1868 Audiodrive. Disconnecting the IDE CD-ROM the situation improves but still happens. It's now ended with a PCI based sound card instead which is fine. Any ideas why ISA soundcards are being an issue with the KT7A RAID motherboard?

This probably has nothing to do with it, but in what condition are the capacitors on your board and sound card? ABIT and Creative use really shit electronic parts from time to time.

Nice system! AWE64 Gold would be very appropriate. SB Live! or alternatively a Vortex 2 card for Windows.
V5 5500 will also make a lot of sense and avoid any AGP nonsense with KT133A (as it's AGP 1X anyway).

Make sure you get all the VIA drivers installed. KT133A wasn't that stable in my experience, but worth it to get the ISA slot.
Bonus points if you manage to make this system quiet (my 1.2 Tbird system is pretty loud with the CPU/Case/GPU fans). I run a GF3 Ti200 on KT266, no ISA though.

I think Win98SE needs a patch for more than 512MB?

All the capacitors on the Sound card are fine and works perfectly well in another ISA bus system. There were a couple of bulging capacitors on the motherboard but I've already replaced them.

Change of topics here is my northbridge heatsink on mine. Looks like a Zalman universal one. It was already on this board before I got it.
Yes Win98SE can't run on systems with more than 512MB of ram. I am unaware of any patch through.

(Deleted. No longer relevant anyway)

Well made good progress I've ended up moving the HDD to the RAID Primary IDE port and installed the HPT370 driver with success under Win98SE. But still got the sound problem during CD-ROM access. Moving the CD drive to RAID port caused the drive not to be found but however the Sound Blaster happened to have an IDE interface on it so connected to that instead. Disabled the onboard IDE and set the Sound Blaster IDE port within CTPNP.CFG to IRQ 15 at 170H. DOS see's the drive with success and the slurring sound issue is gone! There is still a little bit of static niose within the sound on the High DMA Channel when playing 16 bit so I have just changed the Basic configuration in windows not to use High DMA in Windows and set Sound Blaster Pro for DOS games so the High DMA is not used. Then all is good!

Cheers for the link to the patch!

I'd be very interested to hear about anyone else getting their ISA sound cards working with their KT7A/KT7A-RAID boards.
Here's the setup shown below.

I have a KT7A-RAID with a GUS PnP. No problems here. This doesn't say much however, since I use it mainly for watching scene demos, which rarely utilise IRQs or DMA.
I had to disable the "Delay Transaction" feature in BIOS, otherwise the GUS wouldn't reliably initialise with IWINIT. This seems to be an issue with the GUS PnP though, because I had to do the same on my K6-3 machine.

I've got four KT7A boards. I like them alot. Which revision is yours?

I don't understand why folks are having problems with the KT7A and ISA sound cards. With the KT7A, it's actually the PCI cards you should avoid. These boards were notorious for having issues with SB Live, etc. It's a well-known issue with the 686B southbridge. You can get around the issues with patches, but if you want a PCI sound card you should really consider a non-KT133A board. I run AWE64 Value and Gold cards in all of mine and never had any sound issues at all.

The only one of my KT7A boards that ever gave me problems was my original v1.0 RAID board. Others have also had issues with that variant. You can read about my troubles with it here. If your board is newer than v1.0, you shouldn't have any problems. Also, as others have mentioned, ABIT used cheap crapacitors on their products. If you want to keep it in good shape, get it recapped. Also also, if you're running Win9x, use VIA 4in1 v4.43v. For Win2K or XP, use VIA Hyperion 4in1 v4.56v.

Like you, I replaced the northbridge coolers on all of my boards. I used the Zalman NB47J coolers:

Prior to owning my KT7A-RAID v1.0, I always ran with 768MB RAM in Win98SE. You just need to edit your vcache settings to get it working right. However, my v1.0 board just refused to work with more than 512MB RAM no matter what I did. In the end, I have acquiesced to running a max of 512MB RAM in all of my Win98SE systems to avoid problems and maintain stability. For legacy Win9x gaming, you really don't need more than that anyway.

The KT7A is a really great board. They're also very stable if you set them up correctly.

Interesting. I had no problems with a PCI sound card in mine. I had a good search trying to find what version I have but gave up. 😀 I believe I have the V1.0 when I somehow managed to have found out when I bought it 11 years ago. I know it has the latest BIOS as far as I know.

I have only replaced capacitors that were physically bulging. Should they all be replaced then?

Yeah I had the NB47J on my Abit KV7 Socket A M/B that I used to have. It was perfect along with the ZALMAN Cnps7000C-Alcu CPU Cooler. That's why the last two row of fins are shorter to make way for the flower shaped CPU cooler.

The one on my KT7A RAID is the ZM-NB32K

I don't trust ABIT's capacitors at all. I had Chris at BadCaps.net replace them all on all of my boards. He's expensive, but good. I don't have to worry about them now or ever again.

The revision of your board should be indicated on the sticker with the barcode in front of PCI slots #4 and #5. Sometimes the sticker is stuck on the side of the ISA slot.

I couldn't figure out Zalman's logic behind the one side of the NB47J being shorter, but now I know why. Cool! On two of my boards, I've got extra large HSF's that got in the way of the NB47J, so I just snapped off the fins. I figure the heatsink is so large that 2 or 3 missing fins won't affect its performance anyway. The NB32K that you're using is probably a better choice, but I could never find those for sale. I also hated the goofy mounting mechanism for these Zalman northbridge coolers, so I used thermal epoxy instead. It will only be a problem if I ever decide to sell the boards. Since they're not worth much anyway, I'm not really worried about lowering their resale value.

brad1982_5 wrote:

I have only replaced capacitors that were physically bulging. Should they all be replaced then?

Keep in mind that capacitors don't always bulge when they fail, and if they do bulge, it only happens after their failure has progressed to an extreme state (they were out of spec a long time ago). There's also a risk in waiting for this to happen - occasionally bad caps can cause collateral damage to the board, at which point recapping might not save it. For example, failing caps don't remove noise from the voltage supplies that they're supposed to, and this can stress ICs. Bad caps also sometimes go short, which can ruin MOSFETs.

If some caps have bulged, you can assume that many of the others are also likely bad, or in the process of failing.

There's been a couple occasions when I've taken a shortcut and just replaced a few bulged caps on a motherboard. One of them was a modern board, the other was an ABit of this era. In both cases I ended up regretting it, because many of the caps I left behind were found bulging a year later. It's risky to let that happen for reasons described above.
The only way to solve the problem for good is to replace all of them, or at minimum, at least all the caps that are similar to the ones which have previously failed. In the case of this board though, I bet the caps are Jackcon, and Jackcons are extremely failure prone so all of them should be replaced for a long term fix.

Found the sticker! Yep it's a V1.0 found right by the BIOS chip - Thanks for the information KT7AGuy. Also thanks to shamino for the capacitor information. I do have most values already to hand so will get to work on it soon and order the ones I don't have. It's worth a try at least. 😀

Evert:
I was looking at your picture of your KT7A. The Athlon 1400 is a very hot chip. So-called "orb" coolers like yours were generally found to be less effective than traditional HSF's. I don't want to criticize your build, but if it were mine, I would replace that orb HSF with a better unit.

I have a pair of Antec's version of the orb called "Antec Twister". I run one on a P3-1000 Coppermine and the other on a Celeron 600. I wouldn't trust them on anything more powerful. They look nice, but I'm pretty sure they aren't the best coolers. P3's run relatively cool, so I'm not worried about this cooler in my Intel systems.

The Athlon 1400 also uses quite a bit of power. I'm sure you're fine with the 300W PSU you're using with the Voodoo 5, but I wouldn't try using anything more powerful than a GF3. Beyond that I would recommend a stronger PSU. If you want to stick with the 300W PSU and need more video horsepower, you could try a Radeon 9600XT which is comparable to the GF4 Ti4600 but only uses about 25% as much power. Of course, Radeon cards also have their own unique quirks...

Regarding your HSF's on the Voodoo 5: There are only a few choices available as replacements for the OEM coolers that don't require cutting or epoxy. Vantec has two that fit without any permanent modifications: CCB-A1A and CCB-A1C. You can read about a couple of folks who used those here. They've posted up pics of their cards so you can see what it looks like.

Unfortunately for me, I found that option a few years too late for my V5 cards. I used Evercool EC-VC-RE coolers on mine. One of them will fit without modification, but the second cooler doesn't match up with the V5's mounting holes so I had to use thermal epoxy on it. I regret this modification because it is permanent, but I don't plan to ever sell the cards anyway. I also rationalize it by reminding myself that the Evercool units are doing a better job.

brad1982_5:
I wish I had the skill and steady hands required to do my own recapping. Good luck with yours!
The v1.0 KT7A is a decent board; it just has a few quirks. For mine, I found that it didn't like to run with more than 512mb RAM and it also didn't like NVIDIA cards newer than GF4 Ti4600. It was fine with a Radeon 9600XT and 9800XT.

Now that it has 512mb RAM and a GF4 Ti4600 in it, it runs great! I'm actually using it as my primary legacy gaming machine right now. I also have a pair of Creative Voodoo 2 cards in it which work pretty well. This one has an AWE64 Value card in it, but my other three KT7A's all run AWE64 Gold cards. Personally, I can barely tell the difference between the Gold and Value versions. If I can get around to it, I'll snap some pics of this system and post 'em up.

Fun to see an Abit KT7A still working with a Thunderbird 1400.
I had a Tbird 1400 system myself, and the KT7A (non-raid edition) was my first board.
It was never 100% stable (could be bad caps... if you turned it on, it just didn't do anything... leave it powered on for a few minutes, then reset, and it may start booting... eventually you may actually get as far as booting into the OS... but you're still looking at random crashes). So I sent it back twice, second time I got a new board. Still didn't change a thing, it just couldn't handle the Tbird 1400.
What amazed me most was that the tech actually booted up the machine, noticed the problems of the thing not being able to just boot the OS in one go... but didn't consider this a problem, because eventually he could get into the OS and run Quake for a few minutes.
I'm not sure how incompetent you are when you don't consider this a problem, with a brand new machine. It took a lot of trouble to convince these people that there is something wrong (as I later found out, the specs of the KT7A board actually don't specify CPUs above 1200 MHz, so they should never have sold this board in combination with this CPU in the first place... also, yay AMD for holding on to sockets so people can 'upgrade'... ya right).

The third time the shop offered me the choice to swap it with an MSI K7T Turbo board, which had pretty much the same specs.
I did, and never had a problem again. I still have that system, and it still works, still nice and stable.

Oh and yes, my first cooler was one of those Dual Orb things... It was horribly noisy and didn't cool all that well. I replaced it with a Silverado.

Scali wrote:

Fun to see an Abit KT7A still working with a Thunderbird 1400.
I had a Tbird 1400 system myself, and the KT7A (non-raid edition) was my first board.
It was never 100% stable (could be bad caps... if you turned it on, it just didn't do anything... leave it powered on for a few minutes, then reset, and it may start booting... eventually you may actually get as far as booting into the OS... but you're still looking at random crashes). So I sent it back twice, second time I got a new board. Still didn't change a thing, it just couldn't handle the Tbird 1400.

I know it's far too late for troubleshooting this now, but I have a couple of theories about the problems you experienced.
1 - Your symptoms are very similar to the problems I had with my v1.0 KT7A-RAID when I tried to run more than 512mb RAM in it. After dropping to 512mb RAM, it worked fine.
2 - Official support for the Athlon 1400 was introduced with revision 4A of the BIOS. Could it be that the BIOS simply needed a flash update?

Scali wrote:

What amazed me most was that the tech actually booted up the machine, noticed the problems of the thing not being able to just boot the OS in one go... but didn't consider this a problem, because eventually he could get into the OS and run Quake for a few minutes.
I'm not sure how incompetent you are when you don't consider this a problem, with a brand new machine. It took a lot of trouble to convince these people that there is something wrong

Yah, that's a crappy technician. What shop was this?

Scali wrote:

(as I later found out, the specs of the KT7A board actually don't specify CPUs above 1200 MHz, so they should never have sold this board in combination with this CPU in the first place

This is what makes me think you probably just needed a BIOS update.

Scali wrote:

also, yay AMD for holding on to sockets so people can 'upgrade'... ya right).

I'm not sure what you mean.

Scali wrote:

The third time the shop offered me the choice to swap it with an MSI K7T Turbo board, which had pretty much the same specs.
I did, and never had a problem again. I still have that system, and it still works, still nice and stable.

I'm a sucker for the ISA slot on the KT7A. It's why I like them so much.

Scali wrote:

Oh and yes, my first cooler was one of those Dual Orb things... It was horribly noisy and didn't cool all that well. I replaced it with a Silverado.

You're the first person I've ever heard of who actually owns one of those. I imagine it must be terribly noisy with the two blowers.

I have a GlobalWin TAK-68 which is a spiritual cousin in design philosophy to the Silverado. It's a very effective HSF, but I couldn't stand the whine of the dual fans. I still have it, but I don't use it anymore.

KT7AGuy wrote:

I know it's far too late for troubleshooting this now, but I have a couple of theories about the problems you experienced.
1 - Your symptoms are very similar to the problems I had with my v1.0 KT7A-RAID when I tried to run more than 512mb RAM in it. After dropping to 512mb RAM, it worked fine.

Well, I currently have 768MB in the system, but I really can't recall if I had that much when I first got it, or if I upgraded it later. I think it's the latter though.
Even so, I probably would have tried to boot it with a minimum configuration of memory as one of the first things.
I can't recall now.

KT7AGuy wrote:

2 - Official support for the Athlon 1400 was introduced with revision 4A of the BIOS. Could it be that the BIOS simply needed a flash update?

Likewise, upgrading the BIOS would have been one of the first things I would have done.
It's not a BIOS thing though, it was just non-deterministic behaviour, clearly related to power supply (but I ran it on a brand new 400W PSU, which I later used without problems on the MSI board for years... with the 768MB of memory, so the PSU was probably just fine).

KT7AGuy wrote:

Yah, that's a crappy technician. What shop was this?

Just some local shop, I think they went out of business years ago 😀

KT7AGuy wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean.

I mean there are various cases where an AMD CPU will physically fit into a certain socket/motherboard, but won't actually be compatible.
This was an early case, but even recently we've had that problem with Bulldozer-based CPUs that would fit in AM3+ boards, but because of too much power draw, they wouldn't work.
I would much prefer a simpler system of: "If it fits, it works".

KT7AGuy wrote:

You're the first person I've ever heard of who actually owns one of those. I imagine it must be terribly noisy with the two blowers.

The Dual Orb you mean?
The Silverado is actually very silent, it was the cooler to have at the time (they are radial fans, much quieter than regular open axial fans... I later got a 650W PSU which also has a radial fan, quite nice). I have two of them, second one on an XP1800+ system (with an Asus board which is again not 100% stable. However, it only freezes once every few days in daily use, so not that big of a deal).
Coolers were quite primitive back in those days, so there wasn't a lot of choice. Not many coolers could handle a Tbird 1400.
Here's a review from that era:
http://www.thg.ru/cpu/20010306/print.html
Features both the Noise Control Silverado and the ThermalTake Super Orb that I used.