First post, by Mizar
Hello, I've been following this forum for a while but I've only made an account recently. I have a few issues with an AMD Athlon Slot A system, namely, the system is highly unstable with AGP video cards. I've read up a bit about this on the internet and it seems this is a chipset problem but I wanted to ask here just in case I am wrong. It goes like this: I boot up the system, 10% of the time it doesn't even get to the desktop because it freezes.
Sometimes I can run 3DMark99 10 times in a row with no crash, other times it crashes about 2 runs in. With games it seems to be a little bit more consistent, as it crashes roughly around the 20-30 minute mark.
Is there something I can do to fix this? It doesn't happen with all the graphics cards that I've tried, but it happens with the great majority of them. I've only found 2 cards so far which doesn't cause the system to crash and those are the 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 and Matrox G450. I tried it with a couple of PCI graphics cards and none of those crashed either. The other AGP cards I've tried this system with and crashed include:
PowerVR Kyro1, ATI Rage 128 Pro, ATI Radeon 7000VE, nVidia Riva TNT2 Pro, nVidia GeForce 2 Pro, GF2 MX400, GF2 MX200, GF4 MX400, GF4 MX440, GF4 Ti 4200 x 2(one MSI, one Medion), GF 3 Ti200, GeForce 256 SDR and god knows what.
All of these crashed and I couldn't do anything to influence how often they'd bring the system down with them.
Here's my system config:
Motherboard: MSI MS-6167, AMD 750 NB, AMD 756 SB, latest bios.
CPU: AMD Athlon K7 650 MHz
RAM: 3 x 256MB PC133 CL3, one of them is a kingston stick, the others are generic. Tested with memtest in 4 passes and returned no error. They run at 100MHz due to the chipset.
Sound Card: SB Live! 5.1(?) Value
HDD: 40GB Maxtor 7200 RPM, no clue what the name is. It has one 6.5GB partition and another 32.7GB partition. Master.
Optical Drives: 2x Asus DVD RWs, Master and Slave on secondary IDE.
Network card: AMD PCNET something.
More stuff: VIA 4x USB2 PCI card.
Thanks in advance.