Have you tried using different CPU? What CPU and speed settings are you using?

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

I cannot for the life of me get windows or linux to install at all. Windows 7 blue screens in setup, windows xp hangs at "Setup […]
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I cannot for the life of me get windows or linux to install at all. Windows 7 blue screens in setup, windows xp hangs at "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware" and linux just a continues reboot. Its making me pull my hair out and I really want to drive a screw driver through this board.

Everything Ive tried so far:
Different RAM sticks
Newest none beta bios
Different HDD
Different ODD
Booting with just necessities connected
Different IDE cable
Double checked everything, no bent pins anywhere, caps look great and also checked all jumpers.

Maybe im missing something or maybe these are junk boards. Here's a link from someone else having the same problem: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/247282-45-h … e-configuration

Check if the CPU is chipped. Also check the caps if you haven't done so already. Sounds like faulty CPU power delivery to me.

Also, may also try different PSU, GPU...

tried a 2100+ and 2700+ both cpu's work in other boards and power supply was popped open and all caps are good. Also tried 2 different agp cards and a pci card as well. PSU is delivering 30A on the +5v.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

tried a 2100+ and 2700+ both cpu's work in other boards and power supply was popped open and all caps are good. Also tried 2 different agp cards and a pci card as well. PSU is delivering 30A on the +5v.

hmm running 2700+ at stock speed might be stretching the board a little bit, but it should run 2100+ stably at stock speed.

Tried disable all unessesary onboard devices? RAID, USB, COM, LPT, FireWire, audio? Parhaps force your RAM to 266MHz or even underclock the CPU to 100MHz FSB and 200MHz DDR for RAM.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

power supply was popped open and all caps are good. PSU is delivering 30A on the +5v.

But does it also do that while under load? A bad quality PSU can lead to intermittent issues that are very hard to detect, but can occur when the system is using multiple components at once, e.g. writing a lot of data from one device to another.

Finally, check for shorts between the case and the motherboard...

These boards were notorious for having bad caps, so I would be extremely skeptical even if they look good.

Im kinda leaning towards recapping the board. Ive tried 3 different power supplies. I managed to get windows 7 to install on a 120GB HDD with only 2GB of RAM if I go 3GB it wont boot into windows and 7 wont install on any other HDD, symptoms are pointing to bad caps even though they look fine.

You're asking for trouble with three double sided sticks on one channel, at least make sure that you're running at slowest possible memory speed and try playing around with timings (don't even dare to enable 1T command control).

Asus stuff from that period is very, very unreliable, particularly KT333 / KT600 and most (if not all) intel i845 / i865 motherboards made by them. The common denominator is CPU power delivery - specifically the mosfets and capacitors. If your caps test OK (test with both a capacitance meter and ESR meter), then check the MOSFETS. Actually, scratch that, using a multimeter with a continuity tester see if the n-gates open / close as they should - it's easy enough to do - but since the board powers on and posts, it's very likely that the offending part is not completely dead, but getting there, in witch case it needs to be tested on a transistor tester device / circuit.... pain in the ass.

Well..... i had the board back when it was new and had absolutely no troubles with it. I had a 2400+ i believe. Later i bought a Nforce just for the higher frontsidebus.

Right now i also have an a7v333 running and again it is absolutely trouble free (and caps are fine, never had a recap). I'm running it with a 600w Corsair psu, XP 3000+ barton and a Geforce 7800gs, and 1gb ddr.
It is good match for my other socket A system (a7n8x-e, 3200+, 6800ultra, 1gb) and only slightly slower. I use them to play old racing games against my son.

I run the board with 2x 512mb ddr400 so maybe the ram is the problem. I don't think it is a good setup for windows 7 and it doesn't need 3gb. Windows vista/7 is far better off on a dual core or better.

In ANY case: when trouble shooting try and run a MINIMUM setup. That means 1 ram stick, cpu and gpu only and switch off as much onboard stuff as you can. Test for stability and go from there.
Never use a crammed system when not stable, and never trust old ram and old psu's.

So i have to disagree: I have 3x Asus a7n8x versions, 1x A7V333 and for pentium 4 i have 3x Asus p4p800 (i865) version and 1x p4C800 (i875) and every single board is tested and runs without problems. I had a LOT more problems with other boards from that era (MSI,ABIT, EPOX) than i had with Asus.

When using google i find more problems from people that try to max out this board's ram. It can ONLY run 2 sticks at pc2700 speed, not 3.
3 sticks should be at pc2100 speed. What you are trying to do is Maxing out the ram (3gb is max) AND maxing out the speed and i think that is the problem.

This board came out in a time where 256mb sticks were the norm and 512mb sticks were huge. Trying to run 1gb sticks is maybe too much, despite of the manual saying it can be done.
Perhaps with some brands of ram?

Kamerat wrote:

You're asking for trouble with three double sided sticks on one channel, at least make sure that you're running at slowest possible memory speed and try playing around with timings (don't even dare to enable 1T command control).

I tend to use as few "sides" as possible, preferably with modules that are at least somewhat matched (especially chip densities, but that's just me).
I also don't like running memory and FSB at different frequencies.

I've used an A7V333 for a while and regretfully I ended up killing it. But I did like it.

I'm not really that much of a fan about ASUS, they seemed pricey and many boards of them had or later developed weird problems. Some of their boards had weird quirks and some of their boards are notoriously poor choices even.

Oldskoolmaniac, what configuration/parts are you using?
Are you trying to mix different brands of memory modules?

You have any pics?

Have you tried to run your board in jumpered mode?

I haven't tried jumper mode yet

Ive tried just one single sided 256MB RAM stick

Ive only been successful one time with getting windows 7 to install I really want xp, but it won't install.

Ive never used a multimeter ever.

Ill get some pic's up sometime tomorrow and ill get a pic of the multimeter that I have at work, perhaps someone can tell me how to read it correctly?