I have a similar issue with my P5A, same revision. I haven't really looked into it. It won't reboot all the time - only seldomly when running 3d games - but I tough it's video card related... I stopped using it and switched to my AX59 PRO.

I have the same board, same revision, running a GeForce 5700LE and it works perfectly and has never exhibited that kind of behavior. It's perfectly stable.

Which PSU are you using?

Check your cooling. Check cpu voltage, maybe it needs te be a tad lower or a tad higher on this particular setup to be stable. so try 2,1 or 2,3 volts on a 2,2v cpu.

Try a different psu and try a different stick of ram. Also the intel garaphics card can be the problem, not every agp card runs great with the ali V chipset.

So start changing out parts, otherwise it is hard to find the problem....

I use the 1.04 revision with a k6-3+ but also have the 1.06 and it works without problems with a k6-2 500 or a k6-3 450. I mostly use 3dfx and Nvidia cards.

A bit of thread necromancy here to resolve the issue possibly:

The ASUS website says you need BIOS 1007.A or later to resolve specifically an issue with the K6-2 500MHz chip. Additionally, the K6+ compatibility page says that the version 1.05 and 1.06 boards are slow with K6+ CPUs due to a hardware problem. It doesn't elaborate. I stumbled across this unanswered question looking for details as I've got one and would like to use a K6+ CPU in it.

I have an Asus P5A rev. 1.06 and it is perfectly stable when running a K6-2 @500Mhz. 😀

Is it true that P5A Rev 1.06 doesn't run the K6/3+ well?

dexvx wrote:

Is it true that P5A Rev 1.06 doesn't run the K6/3+ well?

Yes. It is a hardware bug and nothing can be done about it, the 1.05 and 1.06 revision of p5a and p5a-b run very slow with a k6-2+ or k6-3+ cpu. NO problems running a normal k6-2 or k6-3.

These boards use revision ''G'' of the ali chipset,Older boards run revision ''E'' or earlier. E and earlier can only cache 128mb (but can run k6+cpu) revision ''G'' should be able to cache a lot more.

So was this found to be an Ali chipset problem, or some implementation specific to Asus? Looking at some of the K6/3+ articles, it seems to imply the latter.

So the P5A <= 1.04 use Ali Rev E, and can only cache 128MB memory? Meaning performance will degrade when using > 128MB system memory (similar to 430TX caching 64MB)?

dexvx wrote:

So was this found to be an Ali chipset problem, or some implementation specific to Asus? Looking at some of the K6/3+ articles, it seems to imply the latter.

So the P5A <= 1.04 use Ali Rev E, and can only cache 128MB memory? Meaning performance will degrade when using > 128MB system memory (similar to 430TX caching 64MB)?

I have only seen this on the web about Asus boards but i am also fairly certain that most of the Ali V boards out there from other brands are with the older chipset revision.

I only (recently) know about the Gigabyte Ga5ax where the latest revisions can use Ali revision'' H''. Can't find specifics about that one but it is the last revision and these boards do support the k6+ without issues. Don't know how much they can cache.. probably more than 128mb?

Yes, 1.04 and lower have a cacheable area of max. 128mb. This is however not a big issue with k6-3 or k6+ cpu's as they have their own l2 cache. Performance hit for going over 128mb with these cpu's is maybe some 5%. So the K6-2 will go much slower.

So in theory, the normal k6-3 with the 1.06 would be a great match as it should be able to cache more ram without any performance penalty. Only bad side is that the normal k6-3 will hardly overclock. 1.06 is also the board of choice when running a k6-2 with more than 128mb.

Having said all this: i run my 1.04 with k6-3+ with 128mb and never had an issue. For win98se it is enough and any game that needs more will also really need a faster system like a p3.

I have the 1.03, 1.04 and 1.06 and will do some tests in the future.