New system advice please amd 1.0Ghz socket A on the build

TacT

I'm getting a 1Ghz Athlon thunderbird (last one's that were made, not sure exactly which one) socket A and I'm looking for a board that is going to be stable and provide me with some juice as I will be playing a few games.

Using an Sk6 thermalight for cpu cooling and 2 80mm system fans and 1 small exhaust fan (bout 20-30mm afaik)
I'll be putting 2 hdds on primary ide (WD 20GB 7200rpm and Maxtor 10GB 7200rpm)
1 creative cdrw and a sony dvd drive on the secondary IDE (not bothered with more than ata 66 support, same goes for hdd's)
Hercules Geforce 2 gts pro 64mb ddr with tv-out (upgrade soon a possibility but I'll be steering clear of gf4's for the time being, won't put more than a gf3 ti500 in it)
Yamaha Ds-XG soundcard.
3com 3c905c-tx NIC 100MB full duplex
isdn TA (yet to be purchased)
256MB pc133 corsair ram.
I may overclock at a later stage.
psu is a 300W codegen (for the time being, looking to get something nice in a week or two after I get some more cash)
OS will be 98se because I like my games to run the way they should.
Agp 2.0 with side band addressing and fast write support would be nice for me tweakage.
Anyone got any recommendations or anything I should steer clear of with a ten foot barge pole, no interest in raid on board sound or on board video because I've found that the more features you have the more likely you are to have problems.

This will be my 2nd amd system and being completely inexperienced with them I want to make sure this all goes well.
I had some headaches with my k7-750 and k7m (especially with the wd hdd they have big problems together and bios flashes a no go for a fixin)

Thanks for listening.

If all goes well I'll get to work on the modding, It will be black and silver (got a nice stainless steel sheet to use as a side, the rest will be black, not fussed with lights, just gonna make a nice tidy case painted black and silver with my own rounded ide cables etc)

PPC

Abit KR7A-133
An evolutionary rather than revolutionary upgrade the KR7A-133 uses the VIA VT8233A southbridge to provide onboard UDMA133 support.

Featuring :
» 4 x 184pin DDR-SDRAM slots (3 if using standard unbuffered DDR-SDRAM)
» 6 x PCI slots
» 1 x AGP (4x) slot
» 4 x IDE Busmaster (UDMA133) devices

And I heard that you can flash it and put an XP in in a later stage.

TacT

cheers ppc, I'll look into it

JustHalf

Yeah, nice one PPC. Good copy and paste from http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_AMD_Motherboards_68.html there.

Gerry

The kt266a is now outdated, and the kr7a has more than its fair share of problems.

You want to get the most from that processor, so I'd recommend the msi kt3 ultra ( 155 euro roughly on komplett ).

via kt333 chipset, the fastest around for the athlon.
4 ide channels, I think ata/100 ( makes sfa difference anyway)
Very solid and stable board, overclocks nicely also. You could
unlock your chip, and run your fsb and ram at crazy speeds, while keeping the chip at close to stock speed. I never had a single crash on this board, or any problems with compatibility. It does come with onboard sound, but you can disable that.

Remember to upgrade that psu soon though

PPC

Originally posted by JustHalf
Yeah, nice one PPC. Good copy and paste from http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_AMD_Motherboards_68.html there.

And is there anything wrong with it?

Its just a couple of people highly recommend that board

TacT

Thanks Gerry, I think I'll go with that due to your appraisal and €150 is bang on my budget, I like to overclock

cheers

Quigs Snr

Just to add, I've used the KR7A-133 and found it a good budget board. People have had problems with it, but it was fine for me.

I have to say though that the MSI board spanked it for performance (I fitted it into a machine for a friend/customer). I was so impressed that I am getting one for my own machine.

If you were on a budget though, for half the price, I found the KR7A-133 to be a solid purchase too in my experience.

astrofool

read the original post Gerry, it's SDR memory, and needs an SDR board for it (hence the recommendation of a KT7a-133), if u want to upgrade the memory to DDR (as in buy new memory), i'd recommand an Asus AV333 or Abit KX7-333 (abit's do kick arse and I've had a grand total of 0 problems from this KR7a i use, all memory at highest setting).

JustHalf

What?

TacT

I got a 1.1Ghz chip as opposed to the 1.0Ghz
I was offered a ECS Elite Group KS75A for 89 Euro and I swapped my pc100 ram (256mb) with mobo (Asus K7-M) for 256MB single stick of pc2100 cl2.5 DDR ram

I took out my old K7-M and K7-750 and the ram, swapped in the new board, plugged it in, powered on, loaded my setup defaults from bios, let windows load (surprisingly did so with NO problems whatsoever despite my previous drivers, I was ready to re-format but no need now
Installed my agp driver, rebooted, set all my ram timings to their most aggressive, disabled on board malrchy, added a fan or two and experienced one of the smoothest and most pleasant setup of a board I have experienced (last time I was trying to go from a via chipset to an intel, wouldnt' even load the os in safe mode). It was rock solid, pld cs for 6hrs straight after I got it up and running and I was v.impressed, it hit the spot like my first pint on a friday night after a horrible week!

Rock Solid, fast and nice bios with just what ya need, unless your an absolute "must have the latest " a few drawbacks like no udma133 support (not that there's much difference between that and 100)

There's my review, I'm happy, got more bang for my buck than expected, the boards specs are as follows

K7S5A SiS® 735 Chipset
Socket A for AMD® Athlon/Duron (K7) processors
Two 184-pin DDR DIMMs and two 168-pin DIMMs
with DDR SDRAM or SDRAM support, up to 1GB (I really like this feature, handy moving from say a pIII on 133fsb and not having some ddr handy
5 PCI slots, 1 4X AGP slot, 1 AMR slot
LAN: MAC integrated in SiS735 & PHY on board
(optional)
AC97 Audio Codec on board
Special Features:
Magic Setting
LAN, Modem Wake Up
Keyboard Power On
Hardware Monitoring
Support UltraDMA 100
Support DDR200, DDR266 ATX Size
(304mm*244mm )

picture of the board itself is here

Gerry

Originally posted by astrofool
read the original post Gerry, it's SDR memory, and needs an SDR board for it (hence the recommendation of a KT7a-133), if u want to upgrade the memory to DDR (as in buy new memory), i'd recommand an Asus AV333 or Abit KX7-333 (abit's do kick arse and I've had a grand total of 0 problems from this KR7a i use, all memory at highest setting).

hence the recommendation of the kr7a 133 you mean?. Might want to check over your own posts. Nicely done.

Winters

Originally posted by tactical anni

I'll be putting 2 hdds on primary ide (WD 20GB 7200rpm and Maxtor 10GB 7200rpm)

I hate to say it but isint hat a bit small? I bought a 30GB HDD a while ago and ive only got about 8GB Free...

komplett are doing a very good deal at the moment... 80GB Segate 7200rpm for €112...

I would advise going bigger then 30GB anywho

Quigs Snr

tactical anni you've made a huge mistake, I have made several posts about this board. I have had 4 of those boards in fact I still have one. In 6 months you could be looking for a new one. Get back to me as soon as you start having problems with it, there are things which can be done to prolong it's life.

Do yourself a big favour and download memtest86 (search in google), run it. If you have no problems you got one of the few good ones. If you get one single error on memtest, replace the ram with another stuc, if you get the same errors again, the board is knackered, take my word for it, I;ve sent back 2 under warranty (as have some friends of mine, in total 5 I know of have gone back out of about 8 on the strength of this test, and have been replaced under warranty).

Be aware, my first one had problems, however I was able to play Max Payne from start to finish with no problems in one day (10 hrs), shortly afterwards I started on OpFlash, after a few hours it hung, I rebooted, hard drive trashed. The problems are very hard to detect and often only become obvious if you are running at 133FSB.

Every small time local builder was using that board for a while (cheap to build due to combined north/southbridge controller), till they started getting them back in droves, I could name one or two shops who used to stock them (Planet PC in waterford for one) and now wouldn't go near them with a barge pole. I'm sure Gerry could back me up on those stats.

I have a 'good' K7S5A, however, like me, you may find that in 6 months time, you are getting random hard disk corruptions and all sorts of strange behaviour (these problems are very well known with this board, see www.ocworkbench.com in the ECS forum, note how big that forum is compared to the others note also that there are 2 archived versions containing about 30,000 posts each).

Its a good thing firstly to remove the chipset heatsink, and replace the rubbish double sided sticky tape with some Artic Silver, this has helped improve stability somewhat.

Also if you are using Windows 9x or ME, hell whatever you're using, if you start getting configmg or windows protection errors (common on 50% of the boards I used (all from different batches)), disable acpi in the bios and re-install the os, probably best to do this from the start.

This motherboard is especially vunerable to cheap power supplies and can behave erratically unless you get a good PSU.

You really do get what you pay for with motherboards, I am not trying to put you off or scare you. You have a 50.50 chance at best of trouble free times with this board. If you do get problems with the machine, post back here or PM me. I have seen it all as far as this board in concerned. Like some of the others here I have been building PC's since the days when soundcards didn't actually come with a machine and I am probably going to give away my ECS board when I replace it with the MSI because I couldn't in good conscience accept money for it. Best of luck with it, because when it does perform, it performs exceptionally well for the cash.

TacT

holy coroza! :eek:

Well thankfully the 2nd day with my board I ran benchmarks (sandra / hdtach/ 3dmark2001/ memtest and one or two others) and didn't run into any trouble at all. So I suppose I'm in the clear for the moment.

Funny you should bring it up as I know another 3 people running them with no complaints whatsoever, 2 of which are running over 6months+

I tested the boards stability with different ram timings and I tested it on 133mhz ram 100fsb with no further trouble either.

Suppose I might be lucky for a change, thanks for the info quigs, you shall be hearing from me if/when I do run into probs, thanks for the kind offer.

Quigs Snr

No worries, don't get me wrong, this board was a number one seller, however as production ramped up quality didn't go with it. If you got a good one, as you seem to have, you will find it very very good for the cash. (I used to get mine for about£40 stg on Ebuyer.com)

My trouble is that I was putting it into PC's I was assembling for people, and I take a certain pride in the quality of the systems I put together, also I am liable really for any faulty boards etc.. so I can't use them anymore as it's too much of a risk. However, the one I have at home in a gaming machine, is running very well, after 6 months of use it did start getting the windows protection error. That was a few weeks ago, however I did the acpi trick and the machine is perfect again.

I would note that when building my main gaming machine (XP1800, GF4Ti 4600) I made one identical for my brother, his machine uses the same K7S5A and gets a hell of a lot if use, he has not had a single problem and in fact his machine outperforms many of the big boys (I use our machines to test new boards that I am thinking of using etc....). So I'm not surprised that your friends have had good experiences. It's good to be aware up front though of the potential problems, so IF they do arise, you will not waste time barking up the wrong trees, as before, www.ocworkbench.com, despite their nazi-like administrator who appears to be on the ECS payroll is a wealth of information and fixes for this board, no other site on the web can match it.

TacT

indeed, just been reading up there, was just about to flash my bio but I'm thinking heh "how about if I flash it and then start having problems" despite they're being obvious improvements, any danger flashing this sucker? (silly q but hehe

the cpu is a 1.1 Duron, not a t-bird as I had expected it to be.....
memory bandwidth is around the 1312/1294 as displayed in sandra. (cl2.5)

Fidelis

I've got an ECS K7S5A running an XP-1700 on Win98SE.
I don't want to believe that it's the mobo but ever since I turned the fsb to 133, I've experienced a few crashes & winamp always locks up the pc, be it 2 minutes or 2 hours into playing music.

On a side note, I can rarely ever restart my machine through windoze. Almost always have to hit the restart button on the machine itself (it shuts down to the windows screen where it says "Windows in now shutting down" but just stays there). I only have explorer/systray & norton running in the background and even when they're all disabled, it's still a problem. Ah well

At least my monitor isn't hissing like a prebuscent rattlesnake anymore, although wave patterns are visible from time to time travelling from the bottom of the screen to top like heat waves.
Woe is me!

TacT

yikes kev! :eek:

as stated download memtest and run it on all your ram overnight and if it comes up with a single error, bring the board back and rma!

You getting any windows protection faults/registry errors?

Disable ACPI in system properties and your bios and allow the devices to redetect themselves. Could be better off disabling acpi in bios formatting and clean re-install seeing as you're still having problems kev, I didn't even need a clean install to get mine up and running, upgrading from an old board, it was such a pleasure to set up for me.............someone must have been looking down on me that day

Quigs Snr

Fidelis, I have seen your problems before. They tend to be random and inexplicable.

Run memtest, if you get errors, suspect the board. I can give you a lot more info on this as I have had it out with the manufacturers on more than one occasion (They hate the memtest86 program, it was banned on ocworkbench, no doubt due to a backhander from ECS - that said though I have had a few replaced, with no arguments on the basis of the results of that test). Essentially, if you get lots of errors (I once got 250,000 on one pass) it's probably the board. If you get a few errors at the same memory location each time, then it's the ram.

The good news is your shutdown problem can possibly be fixed. It sounds like the classic windows 98 fast shutdown problem. Due to timings within the OS, it gets confused shutting down too quickly on a fast machine and hangs there. Goto Microsoft and download the fast shutdown patch for windows 98se. SHould solve your problem.

Download it here :
http://www.microsoft.com/windows98/downloads/contents/WURecommended/S_WUFeatured/Win98SE/Default.asp

Quigs Snr

Incidentally, if there is a problem with the board, memtest should detect it on the first pass (second at worst). In all cases I have seen the board cause problems, the errors started filling up the screen around about test4,5 or 6 on the first pass.
Good Luck.

Fidelis

I'm going to run memtest tonight and hopefully, I'll be able to report on it tomorrow.

Originally posted by tactical anni
You getting any windows protection faults/registry errors?

No reg errors but I get the odd stack dump error message and also the "xxx.exe caused an invalid page fault" error. Nothing serious though, except when the PC locks up for little or no reason


What is ACPI and what is disabling it supposed to do?

Thanks for the help by the way.

zAbbo

Read Regi`s post Here

Fidelis

Thanks bazH. However, Gerry says that it can also cause your system to slow down... I think I'll leave that alone, IRQ settings aren't my cup of tea.

Gerry

I don't think acpi will make any difference to you, you should ignore it for the minute. See what happens when you run the memory tests.

Quigs Snr

Yeah, the ACPI thing is a far less serious thing. Memtest is your main man right now. If you get problems with that on the ECS board, all the fiddling with the bios in the world isn't going to help you.

Fidelis

I ran MemTest last night. I turned on the monitor at about 8am this morning and the clock read "1:52am"

The pc locked up 3 hours into the test. The stats on the program were:

123,923 cycles
6669% coverage

no errors.

I'll give it another for a good 8-10 hrs over the weekend if I can.

As regards the restarting clitch, it's still borked. I executed the MS Fast Shut Down patch and it required a restart after it had done the business. The computer shut down to the "Window's is shutting down" screen, and just stayed there

Quigs Snr

The memtest thing is good news.

Next thing to do is check your temperatures in the bios. Whats the CPU temp whern it crashes ?

Also the power lines, whats the voltage on the 3.3 and 5v lines in the bios ?
As for the shutdown patch, this is normal, the first time you shut down after applying it, it normally hangs for me too. But it's fine after that.

Fidelis

The computer still requires a press of the reboot button

I installed a modem over the weekend which gave me some conflicts with my fortissimo audio card, which I eventually resolved (it took up my entire Sunday!) but now the boot-up time is in the region of 2 minutes - the computer lingers about for ages on the windows image. Not sure why though