Help--Athlon 1.33G scores a dismal 3DMark

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Yes, I have to use the Via Bus Master drivers because Microsoft's don't work. When I try to enable DMA, it reverts everything to compatibility mode drivers and puts the yellow marks on the controller entries, no matter which bus master driver I try to use. The only way I can get DMA on is to install the Via drivers and select DMA that way.

Without DMA, the computer is way too slow.
 
Yeah I install that BIOS update, and I've read that FAQ. It's actually pretty good. I bookmarked it. The computer is usable, (I'm typing on it right now), but I wouldn't qualify it as stable. The USB is useless, so I can't use my ADSL modem, but disabling the USB ports I can get online with a 56K modem.

Black & White seems to run fine, but I can't get 3DMark2001 to run at all. Which PCI Bus drivers are you using on your KK266? Did you install the 4in1 4.29 drivers? If so, did you install everything or only some things?

Since my board has only one card in it--a GeForce2 Pro--I have to assume that the problem is with that card. But it works fine on my 440BX board, even with the AGP way overclocked. It runs 3DMark2001 fine, but when placed in a KK266 it does not make it through 3DMark2001.

So, what did you do to make your KK266 work?
 
It seems odd that you are having problems withthe default microsft drivers. I have never heard of someone haveing better luck with the via busmaster drivers. Is your version the raid version? does it have an onboard ata100 controller? Maybe Noko could shed a little light on this for us. What OS are you running again? Do you have a pci ata 66 or 100 controller you could throw in there and disable the onboard ide?

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!
 
No this is the non-RAID version. It's a KT133A board, which means it's supposed to have ATA-100 support. I have one ATA-100 drive and one ATA-33 drive installed, and it's Windows 98SE.

The Microsoft drivers are dated 1999, whereas the Via drivers are 2000, which is why I initially chose the Via drivers.

If the KT133A chipset was introduced in 2001, how can drivers dated 1999 possibly work anyway? ATA-100 didn't even exist back in 1999 so how could the Microsoft drivers be in support of ATA-100?

Sounds like maybe I'm using the wrong drivers. How do I make sure I'm installing the right stuff?
 
I just figured out my problem with the 3DMark2001 freezing up. I started installing OLDER Via AGP drivers and THAT worked. The 4.04 AGP driver from Via 4in1 4.25(1) release will enable 3DMark2001 tests to complete. The 4.05 driver from Via 4in1 4.27 and up will cause the first set of tests in 3DMark2001 to freeze up on a KT133A system. That is my experience.

What a pain in the ass.

Now I wonder what to do about the crappy IDE drivers?
 
Hey I took a quick peak at Iwill's site and they say something about highpoint pro drivers that need to be installed on your motherboard. They come with the install cd, have you installed these? It also says to use version 1423 of the 4n1's. The highpoint driver is on your installation cd.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!
 
Ignore the post about the 3DMark2001 problem being fixed. It was only working for a few minutes. Now it's back to crashing again.

I don't even know what highpoint pro drivers are.

Ok I just did a search for "highpoint" on the CD and came up with a lot of stuff. Looks like it all has something to do with RAID though, which I don't have. The KK266-R has RAID, but I just have the normal KK266 board, no RAID.
 
Go to Iwill's site and download the pdf manual. It shows highpoint drivers as well as Raid drivers, so it would seem like the two are different.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!
 
Hell TimF. You know I'd love to know why VIA can't make a decent chipset for the Athlon. My Via chipset is sooo beautiful, no probs running my Intel 733's and a heap od hardware too. Just installed a capture card and a digitizer, no probs and I've been playing around with them a fair bit too. (DV300 and Wacom 12x12). Does anyone know a link outlining the actual problems? I'd be interested to read about it. Also good on you Ncogneto, 6 pages of posts and your still trying.

"Cock-a-doodle-do" is what I say to my girl when I wake her UP in the morning!!
 
I installed those Highpoint drivers. Apparently they are some kind of caching enhancement. In any case, after installation my machine would no longer boot Win98SE. Took about 45 minutes of rebooting, uninstalling and reinstalling to get everything somewhat working again. :)

I think we are grasping at straws now. For the next two days I will just chill on this, cling to the hope that this is just a bad apple, and that the new board will come in and solve all my problems and be wonderful. :)

Well, it's POSSIBLE isn't it?
 
My bet is that the new board makes no difference and this is why:

First Ncogneto tells you that the VIA drivers will not give you anything like what the Microsoft drivers will and then you say this:

"The Microsoft drivers are dated 1999, whereas the Via drivers are 2000, which is why I initially chose the Via drivers.

If the KT133A chipset was introduced in 2001, how can drivers dated 1999 possibly work anyway? ATA-100 didn't even exist back in 1999 so how could the Microsoft drivers be in support of ATA-100?"

So in other words you never even tried the Microsoft drivers. And previously you thought that you could just throw in the new board and it would just work. As if all of your old stuff would just go away and the new system would work. LOL. Are you serious? You are switching platforms. Do you also try to play your playstation games on your Nintendo? I think that this isn't a case of there being too much information, I think that you disregard too much of it. The same thing would have happened to someone like you going from an AMD to an Intel system. If you think that you can 1/2 ass a new system setup then yes, you should stick with Intel, since that is what you are using now. Their stuff costs a lot more and is much slower but it's also easier for someone like you who firmly believes that computer parts are hot swappable to stick with the same platform.

I'd hate to be in your presence when you try to cram a video tape into your VCR or a floppy into your CD drive.

But seriously, this whole thread makes me think of all the time that I have spent at my dads house fixing his computer for him since he thought that "Everything should work"!!
 
Well by now with all the drivers installed and uninstalled your windows regisrty is probably one big mess. How about a reformat, nothing but the video card, cd-rom, hard drive, and the owners manual. From what I can tell fom the .pdf from Iwill you do want those highpoint drivers, and they have USb drivers as well on that install cd.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!
 
You can also try booting into safe mode and checking for duplicate devices ( exspecially Ide controllers) one last trick boot to a coomand prompt only, instead of "safe mode" and run this:


scanreg/fix

You really need to read that manual and stop guessing at what drivers you need. Also, post a thread over at AMDzone asking exactly what drivers you need for that motherboard.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!
 
<b>I just upgraded my old Pentium III 700 which was running on a 440BX motherboard.</b>
As <b>mx6</b> said if you upgraded like that, you should have made a fresh installation of OS rather than just swapping the motherboard and CPU. That's why you have experienced all the problems now.
 
Dude, don't just come in and read half the posts, or every other line. I've already said I DID try the Microsoft drivers, and they DIDN'T work.

I've also said that I bought a new ATA100 hard drive and installed a clean copy of Win98SE onto it, right after removing ALL my PCI cards and USB devices. USB is completely disabled at this point and all drivers removed, so as to simplify the troubleshooting process.

Just because this is my first Athlon system doesn't make me a complete idiot. You can try all you want to make someone out to be a fool, but the people that have been reading all the posts from the beginning are aware of my trying. If you have any information on a special TYPE of Microsoft driver or a certain method of installation that is different from any other drivers, please do chime in.

Thanks anyway for your opinions though.
 
I will try that scanreg/fix thing. I'll wait on the reformat until after I've tried the replacement board first.

If I do a reformat, I should install all the recommended drivers except for the Via IDE controller then? Maybe the Microsoft drivers don't work if you've ever installed Via drivers previously?

By the way, every computer I've ever built, I never had to worry about any of this. ALL the drivers were Microsoft, (AGP, IDE controllers, chipset, USB controllers). I don't have any problem with "Microsoft" drivers. It's just that they haven't worked on this board. This is the first time I've seen a board where the standard Windows drivers didn't work, and I've built about 8 or 9 systems for myself over the years, (but none of those were Via).
 
I read every post here and as before it just sounds to me like you are haphazardly throwing everything at your system in no particular order.

That is not the way to get it to work. You should know exactly what you need to do first, then do it. You wouldn't even be here asking these questions now if you knew.

Since I read all the previous posts I will point out that you didn't even know to use the VIA 4-1 AGP driver. You previously tried to just swap out your mobo and boot from the same win98 install.

Those things and what I posted earlier tell me all I need to know about your competence in troubleshooting your problem and I will again state that I doubt that a new mobo will correct your problem because I doubt that your mobo is the problem.

Just a guess but from what I have read and what I know from experience my guess is that you have been drawing straws in no particular order from the beginning. Get a clue first, then upgrade your system.
 
I did a quick breaze through the post again, can't seem to find were you said what power supply you were currently using.

do the following:

In bios disable agp 4x or set to 2x ( not exactly sure how your bios words this. Also disable fast writes.

1) reformat
2) With only video card installed and one HDD (preferably the ata 100) reinstall windows.
3) After re-install first enable dma, reboot.
4) Install latest drivers for your video card from your video cards site, not nvidia. when promted do not reboot. Now install via 4.29 final drivers using only the agp drivers not the busmaster drivers. Install in standard mode. when promted do not reboot. Now install ( hopefully you have this on file) The version of direct x you plan on using. Now reboot.

If all is well, load your cmi sound card drivers. Then install 3dmark and test for stability. If all is stil well we can begin to make adjustments and find out when and were the problem occurs.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!
 
<b>If I do a reformat, I should install all the recommended drivers except for the Via IDE controller then? Maybe the Microsoft drivers don't work if you've ever installed Via drivers previously?</b>
I have done several installations on various mobos (Asus, Abit, Biostar, FIC, Tyan and Epox) although I haven't used IWill's. Every time, after installing Win98, I loaded <b>VIA 4-in-1 driver</b> right away and haven't had any problems at all (If I remember correctly, WinME does have VIA chipset supported so you don't need to install it).
BTW, I'm sorry I misunderstood your previous message.
 
well now that you have two hard drives reformatting one should not be an issue, just reformat the one that you are not currently using. Re- read my post and install exactly as I said do not differ or second guess here. I am not saying that this is the optimum just that it should be the most stable. You may even want to try the winodws update site and download any updated drivers they have. And yes, the via busmaster drivers are notorious for not uninstalling correctly. Please give what I told you a shot. and you still have not answered my question in regards to power supply. If you are using an older 250 wattt power supply than all this may be for nothing. BTW, do you have any hard drive mirroring software? Something simulat should have came with the new harddrive you jsut purchased.

One last thing, yes microsoft does have much better support for intel chipsets, this is partly microsofts fault, but mainly via fault.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!
 
I am using all of the 4.29 4in1 drivers with a Radeon. I have a USB speaker system which seems to work without any problems both in W2K and WinMe. Sometimes I use the onboard sound but my digital speaker system is better in quality and I just use the onboard audio in to watch TV from my cable box. Now I have a much slower cpu (866mhz) and will soon be buying a 1.33mhz like yourself, hopefully without the problems. I have DMA enabled for my one hard drive and both DVD and CDRW drives, no problem there. Without DMA the ATI DVD player just doesn't work correctly.
 
mx6, please don't post here anymore. You're not helping anyone. Saying "get a clue" doesn't help.

I've followed the manual to the letter. (To the best of my ability anyway, since the English translation isn't very good.) True I didn't follow it at first, because I've built many many of these systems so I know what the basic plan is already. However, when that failed I did start over from the beginning and did everything by the letter from a clean slate and it still didn't work.

So, please just go away. You are unhelpful here.
 
Hmm. Well I am embarrassed to say that I still have my old 250W PSU in there. The 365W PSU I ordered is still at FedEx, being delivered to me on Monday, but I couldn't wait that long so I powered it up with the old PSU. I figured that the 250W meets the AMD requirements, and it was good enough to power my old Pentium III 750 system on the 440BX board, so I plugged it in and went with it. By this time tomorrow I should have a 365W PSU plugged in though.

The hardware monitor shows all voltage sensors are within the "normal" range, so doesn't that mean the PSU is doing its job?

Geez, why did I not have to worry about all these details the last 8 times I built PCs from scratch?
 
Well, for what it is worth you cant run a p4 on a 250 watt ps either. Kinda suprised at you, the fact that you need a 300 watt+ power supply is a well known issue. I don't doubt you have assembled systems before, however I can't beleive you actually tried to just swap motherboards and processors and expected it to boot up without issues. This is a tell tale sign of your expertise. Sure, you have spent a lot of time with this system and you are thinking that it is the worst POS you ever seen, but know face the facts. You, yourself caused half this heartache by first trying to take a shortcut, and second trying to eek by with an underrated power supply. for all you know right now, all your troubles could have been caused by the PS, and for this you blame AMD? They come right out and tell you that you need an approved power supply. Then, discounting this as the possible problem, you install via busmaster drivers when even VIA themselves ( read there website) recommends you use microsoft default drivers. Then, and only then you decide to sit down and read the manual. Let me explain, 3dmark puts a strain on your system, expecailly the video card. Your video card uses quite a bit of power. The poor thing was doing all it could do just to power your devices and cpu. As soon as you tried to run 3dapps and the video card needed a little more juice, yeah it konked out on ya. Unfortuantly now, after so many attempts at different drivers and all, your windows reg is totally screwed. Anything other than a complete format and reinstall after you get the new power supply will be just asking for trouble. I suggest this, get the new power supply, reformat and install just as i said. If the problems continue then RMA the board and be done with it. If, everything works as it should, then you should take a good look in the mirror to see the source of your problems.

Now I know why so many intel users have trouble with AMD systems.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!
 
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