ALi MAGiK experiences?

[Kelledin]

Just out of curiosity, who here has an ALi MAGiK motherboard, and how well has it served you? Does it have all the problems people complain about with VIA motherboards?

I've heard of one or two people with such a chipset, and I've seen absolutely zero problem reports. It may be the perfect T-bird chipset for people who don't want to put up with VIA.

Kelledin

bash-2.04$ kill -9 1
init: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

 

[rcf84]

Well its a pretty good chipset. I use it for work only. Its an Asus A7A266, Athlon 700 w/ FOP38"runs 3 days straight cant overheat at all cost", 128mb PC1600 ddrsdram, 15gb ata66, ATi rage128 32mb AGP, SB live! value, win 2000. Runs nice and fast for my for my work "Autocad (2d), Dreamweaver4, Flash5, StarOffice 5.2a, Java programming, Visial Basic 6, and Adobe Photoshop 6). All the other computers there are P3 500, 128mb PC100, 440bx, 10gb ATA66, TNT 16mb, onboard sound, win nt4. My pc whips them all.

Well my game machine and internet explorer is P3 733, 512mb PC133 sdram, i815ep, 40gb ATA100, ATi radeon 32mb ddr, SB live! mp3+ . WOW isnt that nice.

The only nice Intel guy.

 

[Crashman]

It's actually a pretty darned great chipset. It is slightly slower in some apps than VIA's DDR chipset, but has none of the problems. In some apps it's faster. In all apps it looses to AMD 760/VIA combo boards, but still, it is still in the same legue and has none of the problems. Of all the people I know with MAGiK, none have had a single problem with the chipset.

Cast not thine pearls before the swine

 

[Guest]

Well, rfc I'd suggest you read Anandtech's Socket A Comparision, because the benchy's say that MAGiK on A7A266 performs like crap unless it's operating at 133MHz FSB. Go to http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1448 to read it.

 

[rcf84]

Well im only running office Apps. I dont need much. Heck the p2 runs all the stuff pretty fast. My pc is 3x as fast as the P2 systems there. Well im not playing games but im buying 128mb Pc1600 to up proformace in win2k. I have no problem at all with. The only real stable athlon chipset.

The only nice Intel guy.

 

[Guest]

The initial reports were that the MaGiK performed less than well, but recent updates and revisions have proved it performs nearly as well as the VIA KT266 chipset, at least at 133MHz FSB.

f you're buying PC1600, I guess you're using 100MHz DDR FSB, and I doubt the performance increase will be very much over PC133. Heck, it's not even that much on a AMD760. Seriously, on a AMD760, with PC1600, a Duron 900MHz (non-oc) was scoring 158 Sysmarks, while with PC133 on a VIA KT133 it was scoring 146. This is less than 8%.

I've heard of problems booting 133MHz FSB Athlons on the early bios revisions of the MaGiK. Try to get a board with a revision higher than 1.03 (I think?).

~ The First Formally Rehabilitated AMD Lemming ~

 

[Guest]

From postings in this forum you can see that there are some of us with problems of getting video output from our A7A266.
So if somebody can tell me how to make a backup of the existing BIOS and an upgrade to the new version 1.04 in the blind, I will be more than happy thereafter (provided that the upgraded fixes the video problem) to tell you how the board/chipset works.

 

[Guest]

wow, that might be a bit scary running a bios update without any visuals. But it can be done.. just make a batch file that will run the bios update and put everything on a bootup disk.. let it run the update for you wait maybe 5 minutes just to be safe.. say a short prayer.. then reboot.



Backups? We doan *NEED* no steenking baX%^~,VbKx NO CARRIER

 

[Guest]

The easiest way is to use autoexec.bat on an emergency recovery or boot disk. Create one, then save this as autoexec.bat in the root folder of the floppy:

flashutil -options

Replacing the necesary details with the ones they've told you to type. You'll also need to copy the new bios and flash utility to the disk. If they don't fit, you can delete anything on the disk except command.com, io.sys and msdos.sys (may be called winboot.ini).

If your machine is dead, you'll need to do it on a friends, but it should still work.

~ The First Formally Rehabilitated AMD Lemming ~

 

[Guest]

Before I had dared to make a blind upgrade of BIOS, I discovered that the problem was due to faulty RAM.