A7V Step by Step Walkthrough?

[Mahimahi]

To all who was, is still and is affraid to get into TROUBLES when installing their, so much disired A7V.

I've read topics,..... Man did I have read topics, hundreds of them! And the more I read the scarier I become!

Is it not possible for one of you guys or even for one of Tom's Hardware Gurus to publish a walkthrough for the A7V.
We always hear the results from the testing people or from guys who have managed to install and tweak their mobo and components successfully, but no one ever really explained step by step how they did it.

- It doesn’t have to be a complete guide for building a PC that can be found everywhere.

- It doesn’t have to go as far as overclocking, no, only the logical chain of putting in components, the best slot to put them in, Bios settings, in what order to install software drivers and do the right tweaking of the components.

- It doesn’t have to be Brand-related, I won’t state here “A hard disk is a hard disk” but it is all about the principles of in what order and how to do it… e.g. “installing an ATA100 disk”, “enabling AGP4” and so on.

Please guys, any one who has, has had or is (like me) afraid to have troubles when building their A7V system, respond “en mass” to this topic. Perhaps if we stick together we can even convince Tom’s people to give away some secrets of the house.

 

[lrmv]

I'm about to build my first A7V too, and I too have read so many topics about it which scares me a bit too (I've been considering the CUSL2-C as alternative as I wanted to stick with ASUS boards). Still, I wanna go on with it. I'm making sure I'm buying good components (Crucial PC133 CAS2 SDRAM, FOP32 cooler, 300W power supply). The only thing I'm still a bit afraid of now is the possibility of lockups in 3D-games. I'm putting an NVIDIA card in it you see...

 

[Guest]

Well you have to understand with a mb that has become popular you are going to hear more horror stories and success stories, because there are just more of them out there. There's going to be more DOA boards,etc just because of that. The P3B-F was a great board. Extremely flexible, extremely reliable, and it really wasn't touchy feely about the memory, etc. Yet go over to an ASUS NG during it's hey day and you would see a list of posts from people where I have this problem, I can't do this, I can't do that.

So don't let that scare you to death. Figure out the issues you need to deal with an A7V (and probably the majority of these issues have to be considered for other socketA boards as well). Seems clear to me and I haven't even looked into it. You need a good PS, good memory, the right drivers, bios, and preferably a board of rev 1.04 or later. Now the rev 1.04 is probably related to the dipswitch no dipswitch issue. In such that if you had a pre 1.04 board you could make Tom's mods to it and get fuctionality with the new bios (this is a guess). Personally I'd get a board locally because I can to avoid getting a revision of the board I don't want. All the shops I go to will let me look at the motherboard in the box before I purchase it. Might pay more but you get what you want and some piece of mind instead of playing crap shoot with mail order. If you can't do that, call the mail-order shops and ask em if their stock is rev 1.04 or later. If they don't want to help you in that way or can't, start looking somewhere else. If you wait a little while, the pre rev 1.04 boards will fade out. I've had drivers and bios issues that have caused lockups. It's not entirely unusual, especially with new products. It's a hassle.. it's annoying if you can't find a fix for it in a reasonable amount of time, but don't lose sleep over it.

 

[Guest]

There's a small, new A7V FAQ at <A HREF="http://www.athlonmb.com/faq-display.cfm?FAQ=4" target="_new">http://www.athlonmb.com/faq-display.cfm?FAQ=4</A>. The last item points to an Asus-only forum. I looked at it the other day out of curiosity (I don't have this board) and it's loaded with a ton of A7V posts.

Mike

 

[Mahimahi]

OK The system I want to build will be composed with following components:

CASE: LIAN-LI PC60 Alu. With 450 Watt power supply
MOBO: Asus A7V rev. 1.04 (if I can find one) (at least rev.102)
CPU: Thunderbird 1.2GHz
COOLER: FAA7VX2 HEAT-KILLER with FA6025-S Thermistor-Controlled Fan
(From computernerd)
Later I’ll try to build a water-cooling system with the Peltiers not on the processor but in the water tank
RAM: 2x Muskin 256MB PC133 CAS2 SDRAM
VIDEO: Hercules 3D Prophet 2 GTS Ultra 64MB
SOUND : Soundblaster Live - value
HD: 2X IBM Deskstar 45Giga ATA100 7200rpm
JAZ-drive 2 GIGA (recup from existent PC)
Adaptec SCSI card for JAZ and Scanner
CD-RW: Plextor PX-W1210TA CD ReWriter 12xW10xRW32xR int. IDE
CDR: Acer 16x 40x DVD ( With PowerDVD software)
LAN: recup from existing PC, not sure of the Brand (placed by the cable company)
FLOPPY: 1.44 Mb

USAGE: ACAD drawing, Photoshop picturing and of course....
Kicking ass in Team Fortress!!!

As one can see it’s a lot of stuff to put in the box.
Desperately waiting- and searching for a walkthrough

 

[Guest]

I have 2 A7V boards, a 1.01 and a 1.02. The 1.01 died and has yet to come back to life, but the 1.02 has been really solid. I like Asus boards but I only bought my 2nd because it was the only socket a board available locally. I would have prefered to buy the Microstar Kt7pro2 board. My neighbor bought one and its really nice plus its $50 cheaper.....

 

[toonces]

i fiddled for a few days trying to get mine set up. here was my step-by-step.

1. put in the cpu, heatsink/fan, and ram on the mobo (make sure the heatsink is absolutely level, if not your cpu can overheat and lock up)
2. put the mobo in your case and plug the power supply and other wires to the mobo.
3. install only the following items (hdd, video card, floppy, cdrom, keyboard, mouse) don' forget to plug the power cords in.
4. your hard drive should be plugged into the blue ide channel (not the udma 100, the normal one) with the cable that has the blue end on it.
5. make sure that you have downloaded bios version 1005a promise drivers build 33, and the bios flash utility aflash.exe. (you can find their locations all over this bb). save bios ver. 1005a and aflash on a floppy disk.
6. turn on the power and when it posts, hit delete and go to the bios screen.
7. go to the boot section and change the sequence so that it boots off the cdrom.
8. save and exit the bios then put in your winX cdrom in the drive and restart.
9. it should boot from the cd. once you have installed the o.s. go back into the bios settings and reset the boot option so it boots from the hard drive. then you want to get the floppy disk that contains the aflash.exe bios utility and bios ver. 1005a file.
10. restart in msdos mode, put the disk in and run aflash.exe. you should save your old bios ver. just in case. the program is pretty straight forward.
11. when it's done you can load the stuff from the asus cd that comes with the motherboard. when you want to load the promise drivers, the cd will instruct you to go to device manager and update the drivers on a "pci mass storage controller"
12. install the build 33 drivers that you downloaded. now 1 file will be missing that is not in the b.33 files. just point the program to the promise drivers on the asus cd and that will be taken care of.
13. then install your video card drivers
14. next you should power down your system and install your sound card in pci slot 3, power on and install drivers.
15. power down, install modem in pci slot4, power on, install drivers.
16. slap your case together and you should be done.

if anyone notices anything missing let me know and i'll edit this.

<font color=red>booyah, grandma, booyah..</font color=red>

 

[Mahimahi]

Thanks guys,
Special thanks to Toonces, this will serve me as a backbone on which I can graft the details of related topics, great!

 

[TheAntipop]

i would once again like to point out that what you see and hear on these boards is almost always people with problems. there a lots of people like myself who have never had a single problem with their system, i dont think its just luck

TBird 800 - Asus A7V 1005a
256 PC133 - Maxtor 45GB ATA100
Radeon 32DDR - SB Live MP3+

 

[Bubba]

Nice post Toonces, I think it should clear up a lot of people's problems.

I would also have to agree with TheAntipop. Most people here are here because they have problem. I have none and you usually don't hear from people who have no problems.

 

[Lowlypawn]

I would like to add some words of encouragement.
I just built my first computer about 6 months ago using A7V + Tbird 900, Geforce 2MX, etc.
It took me 2 days to get is up and running (had the on/off wire off one jumper, oops).
But now it is rock stable at 1gig (think I got a dud 900) which I’m still happy with.
I had no real problems other then self inflicted ones.
The best reason to get an A7V is the tons of info out there.
I found a cool A7V site that really has some obscure info.
Like for example the manual FSB for 100 (1,2,3,4, on) Mhz setting is really like 101Mhz.
But if u use the setting (1,2 off 3,4 on) the FSB will be exactly 100Mhz
That info might make the difference in reaching the next multiplier.
http://mitglied.tripod.de/Juggernaut/index.htm
This site also has a lot of bios info.
NEwayz if I can put together an A7V system anybody can.


Dose anyone know if the A7V will accept Tbirds over 1.2 gig when they come out?


Thx

 

[Mahimahi]

Hello Toonces, are you out there somewhere?

Between steps 6 and 7 I'd like to partition the 45Giga disk for use with different OS'ses and do the formatting. Do you think that it's safe to use Partition magic at that time or should I just wait and do the partitioning when everything is installed?
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Mahimahi on 12/31/00 12:06 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Flyboy]

Well said! I pretty much went through that exact procedure myself. I do recall that missing file your talking about. I don't recall finding it on the original ASUS CD though. I wonder if that could be the cause of my problems. If only I were patient enough to actually record a log of everything I did when I put that A7V system together...

 

[Mahimahi]

Happy New Year to all of you, and thanks for the posts guys!
I promise I will keep record of every single move I make when putting the system together Flyboy.

 

[toonces]

sorry my computer was down while i added a few things. i'm still in shock of not having one and trying to catch up.

i'm not familiar with partition magic, but i think the best option is to have it formatted the way you want before you start the whole process, if that is possible. sorry i couldn't be of more help.

<font color=red>booyah, grandma, booyah..</font color=red>

 

[Mahimahi]

Hehe, I changed my mind about the mobo guys I bought the A7V133..still awaiting the delivery

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the info on the new site Mikem...Extremely informative...What a find for an A7V runner....

 

[Guest]

there is a good article, a7v walkthrough to getting your system up and running stable. it says to use an older bios but i used 1005c and it works fine with that too. its at.
http://www.amdzone.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=433
hope this helps, one thing he left out is that you should install the agp fix from amd's site after you have gone through the guide, it fixed the last of any bugs that were there. and my system is 100 percent stable.

If you overclock an Intel Processor enough, it will turn into an AMD. True Story.