Abit KT7 and Asus V7100 with 110FSB

[Guest]

When i overclock my FSB from 100 to 110 on my abit KT7 my videocard seems to get unstable. (Asus V7100+tv out, GF2 MX)

I had to ease up some settings in the bios for the 110x10 setting to work on my athlon 800. The processor seems to be running fine, memory too, i have tested it with sisoft sandra (burn in test). But when i run the wintune benchmark, the video test and opengl test are ok, but when it starts the Direct3D tests (3 in total) it locks up when starting the third test. (first is the triangle rotating, second is the null driver test, third is the primary something test with the cube circling around a globe).
Whether i have the Geforce overclocked or not, that doesn't make a difference. But setting the enhance chip performance (in BIOS) to enabled seems to make a difference. That seems so strange to me. Enhanced chip performance should have nothing to do with my GeForce should it?

anyone got some ideas about this?

 

[phsstpok]

Try boosting the I/O voltage from 3.3 volts to 3.5 volts.

 

[Guest]

Ok, i'll try that. I hope my Soundblaster Live!, Network card and modem won't be fried..

I already tried 3.4 V but that didn't help much.

How far can you safely go with increasing the i/o voltage?

 

[phsstpok]

I ran my KT7 for about a day with I/O voltage at 3.9 volts (probably not a good idea). I was trying to improve my video overclocking but it didn't help. I've been running a at 3.5 volts for seven months.

I was looking at your original post and realized you only have problems with a Direct3D test. This does not sound like a hardware stability issue.

I suspect software, video driver or DirectX, maybe, but I would test something else first. Try disabling ACPI. I think the WZ-b01 BIOS is the only one that will let you do this. With any other BIOS I just disable the VIA Tech VT82C686 Power Management Controller in Device Manager. (This is with Windows 98SE). This seems to improve stability quite a bit when overclocking to the max. Incidentally, I can't go beyond 106 mhz FSB with my KT7.

Getting back to drivers, I find detonator 12.41 and DirectX 8.0a very stable. 7.0a was also very stable.

You might find some good advice for you problem at these two sites.

<A HREF="http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm" target="_new">Paul's Unoffical Abit KT7 FAQ</A>

<A HREF="http://www.geforcefaq.com" target="_new">www.geforcefaq.com</A>

 

[Guest]

Hi, thanx for the reply!

When i set the FSB a little higher i get instabilities pretty quick. But since i can set everything to the maximum and fastest with a normal FSB, i figured that a higher fsb would be possible if i relaxed some of the other settings.

The weird thing is, that when i use benchmark and testing programs, they all work fine, but when i start playing games and stuff, then the system will hang. I only had some problems with wintune's direct3d testing. But that seems to work fine sometimes too... So first i figured it was some hardware AGP issue, but drivers could also be the problem.
I downloaded the latest driver for my Asus V7100T which is at 6.31 i believe. The other Asus drivers are for the MX400 and MX200 chipsets and i don't know if they work with this card which is a 'regular' Geforce2 MX.
I tried the nvidia drivers a while ago, but they have bad support (in my opinion) for the TV-OUT.
But when i still have instabilities, i'll give the NVidia stuff a try. I used DirectX7 before and have recently upgraded to 8.0 which came with Pro Rally 2001. That didn't help. The game 'Black and White' also locks up after a while which was very frustrating...
I am using Windows 98 by the way.

I have erased my whole hard drive this weekend and i want to have a 'clean' machine now. I'll install everything from scratch and if it still locks up, it's a lot easier to find the problem. (I hope).

I'll try 3.5 volts, but 3.9 seems a little too high i guess...

 

[phsstpok]

You mentioned "relaxed settings". Which BIOS are you using. The early UL and UT BIOS had a bug. The "Normal" memory setting actually used the most agressive memory timings and was very unstable unless you had the very best CAS2 memory. You can read about the problem at <A HREF="http://Paul's Unofficial Abit KT7 FAQ" target="_new">http://Paul's Unofficial Abit KT7 FAQ</A>. I think I mentioned this before but I highly recommend the WZ-b01 BIOS if you can find it.

Here's another thought but you might not like it. Perhaps you have a rare video card that does not like operating with the AGP bus at 73.33mhz because that's the speed it's at when your FSB is at 110mhz.

 

[Guest]

I am currently using the ZT bios which i downloaded from www.abit.nl i think.

The WZ bios is older, so wouldn't the ZT be better?

The Highpoint 103b drivers work well, but i am not sure about the latest version because they advise you to make a system backup first. With 60G that's not really possible i guess...

 

[phsstpok]

Didn't realize you have a KT7-RAID. I thought you had the KT7 but no matter. Personally, I keep going back to this WZ-b01 BIOS which has been more stable for me than the YH or ZT bios. I also like that it has more options settings (most of which are more curiosities than enhancements).

Right now, I have been testing the 3R-b01, beta 1, and the 3R, final release, BIOSes. Interesting that they both came from the Beta folder at the Abit FTP server.

I like 3R-b01 because it seems to implement the WPCREDIT offset 52 hack which drastically lowers CPU idle temperatures. (The 3R does not). My idle temperature went from 39 degrees down to 29 degrees. I'm still suspicious of this hack but when I get an external temperature monitor I will learn of the hack's effectiveness. Incidentally, if you want to try the 3R-b01 BIOS make sure you set the BIOS option K7 CTL CLK to <b>optimal</b>, otherwise you will get frequent crashes. (I learned of this at <A HREF="http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm" target="_new">Paul's Unofficial Abit KT7 FAQ</A>).

So far the 3R's are pretty stable but when I get close to my maximum overclock for my Duron and my Geforce256 things are pretty unstable. At that same level, using the WZ-b01 BIOS, I have no problems. This is why I keep going back to it. It is the one that allows me to overclock my system the furthest.

I think, starting with the ZT BIOS, Abit has addressed the 686B southbridge problem but since the KT7 has the 686A we don't have to worry about this. Choose the BIOS that works best for your system.