Not sure where to post this one.....

Our shop recently started getting into building and selling Athlons. We had heard a lot of things that kind of made us shy away but we thought we'd give them a try. The first one was great, no problems and it sold well and made us some good money. Our next try was a Duron. We finally gave up on it and sent it back and got another Athlon and now we are having similar problems with this Athlon that we did with the Duron.

The system.
AMD Athlon 900MHZ
Future Power Socket A motherboard ( Via chipset)w/ onboard sound
128mb PC133 RAM
Realtek 8139a NIC
3dfx Voodoo3
30gb WD hard drive.

We have also tried to different flavors of tnt2 cards.

The Problem: When we run 3dmark2000 it locks up solid. The Duron was also having problems with this and also had rather poor performance in games. I haven't tried any games on the Athlon yet. Has this ever happened to someone before? The other athlon we had ( pretty much same set with a tnt2 card ) ran just fine. In fact it benched quite well. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Oh and yes I loaded the via 4in1 driver.

Thanks in advance

GLSmith

could it possibly be a heat issue here? have you any other diag prog to try? It seems suspect that you have had 2 amd cpu doing the same thing.

I am by no means a moderator and no offense; but it would probably be more appropiate to post your question on the AMD forum.

Just my two cents. .

I love Nvidia based cards, but I have had nothing but problems with them and via chipsets, I would if possible go with a raedon or some other Ati card.

Quote:

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Originally posted by xPoseidonx:
I am by no means a moderator and no offense; but it would probably be more appropiate to post your question on the AMD forum.

Just my two cents. .

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The thread is fine where it is. Shard just for the heck of it have you swapped memory?

Thanks Shawn, no I don't believe I have. We hosted a Lan party here the other night so I don't remember for sure ( we were awful busy!! ) I'm pretty sure we did with the Duron we had before but I don't think we did with the athlon.

I had heard before of problems with Nvidia and Via chipsets but the other Athlon we had, used the same motherboard as this one and had a tnt2 card and it worked great! Also we have a Voodoo3 in it right now and getting the same results. I'll see if we have a decent ati card around here to try though. Thanks everyone and keep the ideas coming!

GLSmith

Sorry I don't know how I missed the post about overheating the first time I read through. I set the motherboard to shutdown if it got too hot and no warnings. Also when I went to change the memory, the voodoo card and the chipset on the motherboard are both hotter than the cpu. I tried running 3dmark2000 again and this time it just dumped when it got to the medium resolution test. Straight back to the desktop. Sometimes it does that and sometimes it just locks up solid.

GLSmith


Oh Shawn, I changed memory and it still dumps.

Its an obvious one but...PSU? What wattage are you running? 250watt doesn't really cut it. What about AGP bus speed...is it at x2 or x4? There are also some problems with generic memory according to my supplier...i only use branded with Athlons and Durons.

The power supply is rated on the AMD site for up to a 900 or a 950 I'm not sure which. As far as memory I'd have to look again to be 100% sure but I believe it is brand name stuff. The thing that gets me we had an almost identical setup just a few weeks ago that worked great. The only difference was a slightly different flavor of tnt2 card.

I'll keep trying and you all keep posting! Thanks again for the ideas!

GLsmith

Quote:

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Originally posted by orange:
[B]Its an obvious one but...PSU? What wattage are you running? 250watt doesn't really cut it. B]

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This is imortant on Athalons when we started building them at the shop I was at the 250wat pws were a 50-50 on whether they would work we went up to 300 & 350 watts and the errors stopped.

I agree with Pyroate - 250w doesn't cut it with an AMD proc - go with an AMD certified 300 or 350 and see how you fare. I had very similar problems a while back, and a friend gave me a good 350 watt power supply to try. Worked like a charm!

Sort of related to heat... the heatsinks your using..

We had a problem from the vendor we get our boxes from awhile back. They were putting Intel fans on AMD chips.. The tolerance is different between the two types of heatsinks and therefore, the Intel heatsinks were crushing the die on the AMD chips..

Try visually inspecting your chips that you have had problems with, you may have the wrong type of heatsink (for Intel not AMD).

First off like I posted above, I am using a 300w power supply and it is a rated one off amd's website. Also we had a identical setup before and had no problems. As far as heatsink, we do have an athlon heatsink and fan on the cpu. Today we finally had some time and put win98se on instead of ME and we are still having problems. In fact the problems just happen alot sooner now.

As far as Ram goes I believe the stuff we are using is name brand but how can I tell for sure? I also have two sticks that I know for a fact are Micron mem coming so I will try them when they arrive. And what are your suggestions regarding brand of mem to use with an Athlon?

GLSmith

We built alot of athlon/duron machines. Like 160 t0 250 a day.

Our simplest configuration is a BIOSTAR M7VKB MoBo.
Pine technology TNT2 VANTA 16 MEG VIDEO CARD
128 MEG OF KINGSTON MEMORY PART# KVR133X64C3
ASCENT AC1000 CPU COOLER
SPARKLE 300 WATT PWR SUP FSP300-60BT

WE ALSO USE THE SOYO SY-7VTA-B MoBo

The main thing is to use a CPU cooler with phase change tape to get the best cooling, also don't use a colored heat sink, too much thermal resistance. Also use the detenator three drivers from Nvidia and the latest VIA chipset drivers 1431V. I hope this may help you.