A7V Troubles

[Guest]

I have a rev 1.01 a7v mainboard, with a 800 t-bird. last month i bought a new rev 1.02 a7v and a 1100 t-bird. I wanted to use the new a7v for my gaming machine, and the 800 for a q3 server. when I assembled the new 1100 it would get to the "win98" splash screen, but would only show the bottem 1/3 of the screen and then lock up. I swapped out ram, harddrive, vid card, sound and nic card. still locked up at same point. the cpu was at 45 degrees celcius, so I dont think heat was a problem. I even disconnected the harddrve and booted off a floppy, it would get bout 1/2 thru booting before locking up. I also tried the latest firmware, same result. if i put the 800 tbird in the new board, it worked great. I also tried putting the 1100 in the rev 1.01 board and it didnt even boot. so I figured it was a bad cpu, and sent it back. it was confirmed by the company i bought it from it was defective and they sent me a new one. I tried putting the new one in today and it does the exact same thing the old one did. also putting the 1100 into my rev 1.01 board, resulted in it booting, but locking up before loading windows. The only thing i can think of that could be causing this is my power supply, its only a 235 watt. is this the kind of problems that come up when the power supply is too weak? I thought that 235 would be plenty to drive a 1100 with no hardrive and 32meg of ram but even that would lock up on a dos boot disk. either that or I have the worst luck at getting AMD cpu's, lol

anyone have any ideas?

thanks
Mike_jetter@hotmail.com

 

[Guest]

OUCH!! that sucks, dude! I would beg to differ with you on the power supply. Could you maybe track a buddy down with a beefier power supply and test your chip? I think you might be on the right track with pointing a finger at the 235W power supply! Especially running a 1100Mhz chip.

Good Luck

 

[Guest]

I ordered a 450 enermax from coolerguys.com about 3 weeks ago. for some reason there having dificulties getting it in the mail. im about to give up on it and get it somewhere else.

 

[Bubba]

Maybe its the 235W PS????
I would say for sure that it is.
I wouldn't even think about anything less than 300W.
I think you will very happy with your Enermax if you ever get it. Even if you don't, find someone else that will sell you the same one, its really great.

 

[Guest]

welp just installed a 350 watt power supply and I got the same problem. It craps out with the top 2/3 of the win98 splash screen missing. any other ideas? If i unlock the amd chip, will I be able to "underclock" it? right now, id be happy with the 1100 running at 1000.

 

[Guest]

I have a prophet 2 64meg card. I tried swapping it out with another video card, the leadtek geforce card, but got the same results. tonite i will try to use a pci video card, maybe its the agp port thats the problem. i reset to "setup defaults" in bios , so they shouldnt be too far off. is there a way to change the agp multiplier? i didnt see it in any of the menus.

 

[Bubba]

You didn't modify anything in the bios?
You are running all the defaults?
Try switching the bios display setting to AGP (the default is PCI).

But after rereading your post, I think you got another crappy CPU. Its very unlikely but possible. You should send it back and ask for a new one. All your parts work and the PS is now more than adequate.
They may have sent you the same one back by mistake.
Or possibly, they may have sent you two chips from a single batch and the entire batch could be bad.

Since the 800 works in both your new system and your old one and the 1.1GHz doesn't work in either system, it has to be the chip.

What HSF are you using and is it connected correctly? You are not frying the chips by not putting the HSF on correctly are you?

Send it back, give them hell.

 

[Guest]

im using just a plain old stock cpu fan and hs for now till my fop38 arrives. this is interesting tho, i took out my sblive, intel nic, prophet2 cards, and just installed a crappy old pci vid card. i also pulled my 2-128meg mushkin ram out and put in a 32meg dimm. i tried booting off a dos 6.22 boot disk, and himem fails saying theres unreliable memory address. it also does this with my mushkin ram. so i start going thru the settings in bios, trying each one and seeing if it makes himem happy. none help at all until i get to the "operating frequency setting". i take it off of standard and choose user defined. then instead of "100", i choose "95". now it passes himem check. im going to put my good parts back in now and see if windows will load. but what do you think it means if 95 will work, but 100 wont?

thanks for your reply
Mike

 

[Guest]

yep, now i can boot into windows. how much of a performance hit do you think im taking for running at 95 instead of 100?

 

[Guest]

rizzo,

Probably means you have shaky RAM.

Is it PC133 or better? If not, it'll be unreliable in that board.

Could be another bad processor, too.

Pete