I don’t know who to blame anymore, but I’ll blame VIA for now. I’m an AMD fan, mainly because of their price/performance ratio and the competition they bring to intel. But Im really loosing faith in the SocketA platform.
I’ve upgraded from a completely problem free (but boring) Dell P3-500 to a homebrew Duron 600 for overclocking, about a year ago. (not exactly my first PC assembly, I’ve been assembling ever since the 386 came out).
I thought I’d simply purchase a new MB, CPU, Ram and be done with.. well, it turned out differently. I got myself this:
MSI K7T Turbo Raid
256 Mb PC133
Duron 600 (seen it working @950)
TT Chrome Orb (big mistake)
2x Maxtor 7200 rpm 20Gb
The setup was cheap enough, the installation not too hard. The Chrome Orb was a piece of [-peep-], and got replaced by a Silverado (almost $100). I also upgraded the PSU, because the one I had was too noisy to my liking.. hence an Enermax ($80).
Anyway, I loved my Duron for its overclocking performance (it would easily run 933 Mhz, though I usually ran it @866 1.6v 38°C). I also loved the performance of the setup, especially the RAID 0 seemed to make a huge difference.
Stability was another thing. No, it did not crash under w2K. Even under extreme stress, and highly overclocked. But sometimes it would suddenly not boot into Win2K, because the RAID and/or NTFS partition seemed corrupted (although Win98 on the same RAID, but FAT partition booted ok). This happened to me more than once. I got ‘inaccessible boot device’ errors. Repairing w2K sometimes helped, sometimes didn’t. I could usually install fresh copy of W2K alongside the exisiting, and recover all my data though. Once installed, the partition seemed in perfect condition, but it would just not boot the old win2K setup. Im still not sure what caused this (perhaps the fact that both drives are not identical ? one is AT100, the other ATA66) Maybe the Promise controller/driver is a piece of crap ? (yes I upgraded bios and drivers, to no avail).
Suspend to Ram has been another thing that just wouldn’t work for longer than a day. Even win2k’s hibernate feature would often not allow me to resume. This was unrelated to the overclocking, cause it did exactly the same, even when I underclocked it. I tried EVERYTHING. Any possible bios setting, bios version, service pack, 4-1 packs, reinstalls, component swaps, even cpu swaps. Nothing would really cure it.
Then came the USB trouble. I got myself an ADSL connection, and bought a USB modem. My MSI board would shutdown the USB devices every so often (once per 2 hours or so), requiring a reboot to reactivate them. This seemed to be a commonly witnessed MSI issue. Just when I was about to buy an add in USB card, the motherboard completely died on me. First, I could not boot into Win2K, while Win98 worked fine. I tried to install a fresh copy of Win2K, to be able to access the NTFS partition, but the installation gave me a ‘hardware error’ STOP message (blue screen of death). 10 minutes later, the machine wouldn’t boot at all (not even fans spinning up), and it became clear the MB was dead.
The MSI board was replaced under warranty. The new one would exhibit the USB problems even worse. It would not retain a connection for longer than 5 seconds before shutting down the USB.. Oddly, I discovered it worked fine with the FSB set at 100 Mhz instead of 133.. No, this was not an overclocking issue either, tested it with another stock speed Athlon. Installed USB filter patch, latest drivers, latest BIOS, tried everyone goddamn BIOS setting, tried with and without ACPI. Nothing helped.
So I bought an PCI USB card. That works fine, but completely ruins the machines ability to resume from STR3 or hibernation. *sigh*.
Now, just yesterday I noticed my event log contained an enormous amount of errors concerning sms.sys or something. Knowledge base didn’t help me much.. I left it at what it was, and started installing Windows2000 server to test some apps for my work. During the hardware detection phase I get “hardware error, please contact your manufacturer”. ?? Great, the first time I got this message, my system died within 10 minutes
So I tried to install Windows XP RC2, since XP usually gives you more info. It did. Another BSOD: “an interrupt storm has been detected. The installation has been halted to prevent damage to your system”. Interrupt storm?? WTF is an interrupt storm ? It also reported usbport.sys as the culprit, so I disabled USB in the BIOS, and removed the USB PCI card. Tried again, and now I got generic STOP error, “hardware error has occurred” with an error code that gives me no info on MS knowledge base.
Please note all of this in on a completely not overclocked system, that runs cool as my fridge (36°C) with a very adequate power supply (450W). Don’t tell me its due to my previous overclocking, cause its not. I have the same issues with a brandnew Athlon 1.2 running at stock speed (or even @900 for testing purposes). And its my second board…
Meanwhile, my existing copy of Windows 2000 Professional still works without trouble.. I can play OPF online for hours, without any issue; I ran Simmtester to test my memory, and after 16 hours, it has not reported ONE error. I can rip DVD’s and convert them into DivX for days.. so, in a way its stable..
But im fed up with it.. really. Im gonna try one more motherboard with a SiS or AMD chipset, and this better work. If that doesn’t satisfy me, I really consider going back to intel, just for their chipsets. But no more VIA for me, thank you very much.. I’ve had my share.
---- Owner of the only Dell computer with an AMD chip
I’ve upgraded from a completely problem free (but boring) Dell P3-500 to a homebrew Duron 600 for overclocking, about a year ago. (not exactly my first PC assembly, I’ve been assembling ever since the 386 came out).
I thought I’d simply purchase a new MB, CPU, Ram and be done with.. well, it turned out differently. I got myself this:
MSI K7T Turbo Raid
256 Mb PC133
Duron 600 (seen it working @950)
TT Chrome Orb (big mistake)
2x Maxtor 7200 rpm 20Gb
The setup was cheap enough, the installation not too hard. The Chrome Orb was a piece of [-peep-], and got replaced by a Silverado (almost $100). I also upgraded the PSU, because the one I had was too noisy to my liking.. hence an Enermax ($80).
Anyway, I loved my Duron for its overclocking performance (it would easily run 933 Mhz, though I usually ran it @866 1.6v 38°C). I also loved the performance of the setup, especially the RAID 0 seemed to make a huge difference.
Stability was another thing. No, it did not crash under w2K. Even under extreme stress, and highly overclocked. But sometimes it would suddenly not boot into Win2K, because the RAID and/or NTFS partition seemed corrupted (although Win98 on the same RAID, but FAT partition booted ok). This happened to me more than once. I got ‘inaccessible boot device’ errors. Repairing w2K sometimes helped, sometimes didn’t. I could usually install fresh copy of W2K alongside the exisiting, and recover all my data though. Once installed, the partition seemed in perfect condition, but it would just not boot the old win2K setup. Im still not sure what caused this (perhaps the fact that both drives are not identical ? one is AT100, the other ATA66) Maybe the Promise controller/driver is a piece of crap ? (yes I upgraded bios and drivers, to no avail).
Suspend to Ram has been another thing that just wouldn’t work for longer than a day. Even win2k’s hibernate feature would often not allow me to resume. This was unrelated to the overclocking, cause it did exactly the same, even when I underclocked it. I tried EVERYTHING. Any possible bios setting, bios version, service pack, 4-1 packs, reinstalls, component swaps, even cpu swaps. Nothing would really cure it.
Then came the USB trouble. I got myself an ADSL connection, and bought a USB modem. My MSI board would shutdown the USB devices every so often (once per 2 hours or so), requiring a reboot to reactivate them. This seemed to be a commonly witnessed MSI issue. Just when I was about to buy an add in USB card, the motherboard completely died on me. First, I could not boot into Win2K, while Win98 worked fine. I tried to install a fresh copy of Win2K, to be able to access the NTFS partition, but the installation gave me a ‘hardware error’ STOP message (blue screen of death). 10 minutes later, the machine wouldn’t boot at all (not even fans spinning up), and it became clear the MB was dead.
The MSI board was replaced under warranty. The new one would exhibit the USB problems even worse. It would not retain a connection for longer than 5 seconds before shutting down the USB.. Oddly, I discovered it worked fine with the FSB set at 100 Mhz instead of 133.. No, this was not an overclocking issue either, tested it with another stock speed Athlon. Installed USB filter patch, latest drivers, latest BIOS, tried everyone goddamn BIOS setting, tried with and without ACPI. Nothing helped.
So I bought an PCI USB card. That works fine, but completely ruins the machines ability to resume from STR3 or hibernation. *sigh*.
Now, just yesterday I noticed my event log contained an enormous amount of errors concerning sms.sys or something. Knowledge base didn’t help me much.. I left it at what it was, and started installing Windows2000 server to test some apps for my work. During the hardware detection phase I get “hardware error, please contact your manufacturer”. ?? Great, the first time I got this message, my system died within 10 minutes
So I tried to install Windows XP RC2, since XP usually gives you more info. It did. Another BSOD: “an interrupt storm has been detected. The installation has been halted to prevent damage to your system”. Interrupt storm?? WTF is an interrupt storm ? It also reported usbport.sys as the culprit, so I disabled USB in the BIOS, and removed the USB PCI card. Tried again, and now I got generic STOP error, “hardware error has occurred” with an error code that gives me no info on MS knowledge base.
Please note all of this in on a completely not overclocked system, that runs cool as my fridge (36°C) with a very adequate power supply (450W). Don’t tell me its due to my previous overclocking, cause its not. I have the same issues with a brandnew Athlon 1.2 running at stock speed (or even @900 for testing purposes). And its my second board…
Meanwhile, my existing copy of Windows 2000 Professional still works without trouble.. I can play OPF online for hours, without any issue; I ran Simmtester to test my memory, and after 16 hours, it has not reported ONE error. I can rip DVD’s and convert them into DivX for days.. so, in a way its stable..
But im fed up with it.. really. Im gonna try one more motherboard with a SiS or AMD chipset, and this better work. If that doesn’t satisfy me, I really consider going back to intel, just for their chipsets. But no more VIA for me, thank you very much.. I’ve had my share.
---- Owner of the only Dell computer with an AMD chip
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