A7M266 & 2 PC2100 DIMMS crashing 3D apps

[Guest]

Hi

I've been fighting this one for about 2 weeks and my teeth are almost completely ground away, so if anyone can save me from spending the rest of my life on a diet of milkshakes & baby food through a straw, I'd appreciate it.

System is as follows;
Athlon 1.33
A7M266
512 Megs Crucial PC2100 RAM
GeForceDDR
Other bits; Alcatel ADSL modem, Aureal Vortex2 sound card, couple of IBM drives, Tosh CD & ZipCDR

Any time I try to start a 3D applicaiton when I've got both DIMMS installed, it exits to the desktop.

If I drop the FSB to 100MHz it works fine, well fine if you like P2 performance

If I take out one DIMM, it works fine, so this is what I've done for now.

Tried every RAM voltage the board offers, makes no difference.

I've tried 4 DIMM sticks in total, makes no difference.

Going to try a different GFX card today. Will post results.

Cheers
Chods

 

[igottaknife]

download and flash the newest 1003 BIOS. It allows you to change the latency settings you may be able to tune it to stability. <A HREF="http://www.asus.com/Products/Motherboard/bios_socka.html" target="_new">http://www.asus.com/Products/Motherboard/bios_socka.html</A>

Your Signature Sucks

 

[Guest]

Actually, the board came with the 1003 BIOS and I also tried the 1004a3(?) beta - tried changing the Latency settings from 2.5/3/3 which I think is default but made no difference

C

 

[Guest]

Welcome to the club! Have you tried to set the FSB to
120 MHz?
(User defined setting –1 MHz at time) Its max for me, 2 more MHz and there will be crashes any time any ware.
Let me know how it works out, maybe I’m not alone (most probably NOT) with this problem.


/e.

 

[Guest]

Hmm, interesting observation - GeForce2 made absolutely no difference, but when testing Tribes2, OpenGL is fine, whereas Direct3D is not - This really surprised me and I suspect that this counts out problems on the board - probably... and points to an incompatibility in DX8 somewhere?

Am I way off the mark?
Chods

 

[Guest]

Fixed!

That DX8 versus OpenGL thing got me thinking so...

Even though I'd already tried this once, just after I got the board, I reinstalled Windows again, applying all the patches and drivers that I'd acquired in the last couple of weeks, 1 or 2 of which I didn't have on the first re-install.

Success! Everything worked fine. Has to be one of the strangest symptoms of a dodgy Windows conflict that I've run into yet. But I hope this info might be of some use to someone else out there.

Cheers
Chods

P.S. Just wanted to also say "big up" to Crucial technical support who replied to my mail within 4 hours with a very detailed personal reply explaining a number of working scenarios and offering a telephone number to call and compare BIOS settings with the engineer's lab machine.

 

[paulcalmond]

I agree you had a very strange combination of symptoms.
It just goes to show that by a process of changing hardware you can be certain that you've found the cause (hardware fault), then it turns out to be software configuration problem.
Or so it seems....

Glad you fixed it anyhow.

P.S when you said that you had tried every combination of RAM voltages did that include the 'undocumented' 2.5V setting ?


<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by paulcalmond on 06/01/01 04:06 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

The best way I've found to test total system stability is to install linux. I do a full kernel compile, make -j60 - 100 or so to stress all the ram, then you can also do a full libc compile with also an updatedb. Do all this aboue 3 or 4 times and if it doesn't crash, it's not the hardware. I did this when I built my new computer. All this in linux ran solid, windows hated it. Had to reinstall windows and install all the drivers in funky orders etc.

 

[Guest]

hehe good idea Qbert. Unfortunately, I've got no idea how to recover from a linux install trashing the boot sector (fdisk /mbr ? Would that work?) Can I do that and then just delete the linux install dir to return to the previous state? Sorry, bit Off Topic.

And yes, I tried 2.5V and plan to leave that as the permanent setting although I think it's on 2.9 at the moment from all my messing about.

C

 

[Guest]

I never let it touch the MBR, windows just doesn't like it at all. I always end up using a LILO boot disk, works alot better.