First post, by F2bnp
- Rank
- l33t
Yello! After all the trouble I went through with the Tualatin 1.4 I decided to stay with what I had, but someone gave me an Athlon XP board and processor for free so I decided to give it a try.
The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-7VTXE (Rev 1.1) with the KT266A chipset and the processor is an Athlon XP 1600+. So, I set up the following system :
Gigabyte GA-7TXE
Athlon XP 1600+
512MB RAM
Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
Sound Blaster Live! Value
Aureal Vortex 2 + DB60XG for MIDI playback
350 Watt PSU
80GB HDD
DVD-ROM
Windows ME
I've only got DDR333 and DDR400 sticks and most of them wouldn't work at first. I tried a 1GB 400 one and it worked, I flashed the latest bios and then the rest of my sticks would work, so I installed 2 sticks of 256MB each. Weird thing is, on both cases, POST reports more RAM than it should. So that is 1048MB for 1GB and 524 for 512MB! While I was installing WinME I got a Windows Protection Error blue screen, but I managed to install it afterwards. I installed all the necessary drivers, including the Via 4in1 4.33 Service Pack. The system however is quite unstable. It just restarts whenever it feels like it, while listening to music or doing nothing at all. 3D is almost out of the question, 3DMark 99MAX crashed twice and only managed to finish once. Quake 3 works for a while and then drops me to the desktop or crashes and I see the mouse pointer.
I tried different sticks of RAM, they all work at 266MHz obviously, but could that really be the problem? Maybe some incompatibility with one of the cards I installed? I also noticed some "strained" capacitors, those could very well be the problem, can I fix them/replace them somehow?