Well folks things change rather quickly. I was all happy with my performance increase with VIA's drivers, but since then things have gone downhill. I am about ready to give it up actually. I've spent over $500 on new stuff for this Athlon system and it's a piece of crap. I should have gone for the Pentium III 1GHz that I was thinking about.
The trouble is that it crashes constantly. I've taken ALL the cards out of it except for the GeForce 2 Pro card, and yet it still crashes. My D: drive is inaccessible and has been thoroughly trashed by Windows trying to access it, as the IDE controller does not work properly, and it doesn't matter whether DMA is on or off. I've lost all my games and MP3 library that I had stored there, (it is an expensive, brand-new IBM DeskStar 45 GB drive.) I've got all the BIOS settings at their most conservative, slowest settings and yet it remains unstable. The $80 cooler keeps the cpu under 43C at all times, yet it freezes up regularly. I've tried George's PCI fix but that only made things worse, so I quickly removed it. I have only purchased the most expensive, quality components such as Mushkin PC133 Rev3 SDRAM, and I'm running it at the most conservative CL3 at 133 MHz just to be sure.
No, I am not about to reinstall Windows 98SE again. I would rather spend another $500 on a new Pentium system instead, and throw this Athon 1.33 GHz and KT133A mb into the garbage.
This is just a warning to anyone considering building their own Athlon system. Be aware that you will spend many many hours of hair-pulling and agony to get it working, compared to just about any Intel-based system which will be up and running in 30 minutes. I know, I've built many Intel systems. This is my first Athlon system though. I've now had it for 48 hours and it is STILL not working. I just hope the end result will be worth all this.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by TimF on 04/18/01 09:12 PM.</EM></FONT></P>