ECS K7VMA and

Well I am helping a friend out with a bit of a problem that he ran across during an upgrade.

He was currently running a 1ghz Duron on a ECS K7VMA(ecs along with pchips should burn.hehe), and ordered a XP1900 to replace that chip. According the the ECS website this chip is supported since they are both Socket A chips: www.ecsusa.com/support/table_k7.html

After he flashed the bios and installed the XP1900 chip he had no video feed and the system would not start posting. While after he switched back to the old chip, things booted up fine with no problems there. This was tested several times, and each time he got the same results.

I am thinking that the chip may be DOA, but I want to get some advise of the others on here, and see if they have any experence of XP chips working in this board. I do not see any reason why it should not support this chip.

Thanks a lot.

from the ECS website:

PROCESSORS

462 pin Socket A supports the AMD® Athlon (K7) processors up to 1.2GHz(100MHz FSB)

INFO

Yes and no...
It supports up to 1.4 Athlon and it says it only supports 850 Duron....but thos are clearly wrong...People out there have gotten the 1.4 athlon chip to work on it so thats already proven wrong. I am running myself a 1.0 ghrtz duron so thats wrong too....All i know is i bought the board becouse i was on a tight budget and it said it supports XP.
Thats not misleading..thats expliticitly lieing.
If i knew it was a POS and didnt run XP i wouldnt have even thought about it.
=(
Right now i'm still broke so i'm looking for some ways to get around the "Buy new mobo" solution.
THanks for any help at all.

Well, you will have to take it up with ECS, I agree it says quite clearly that it does support an XP chip in the table you found.

Did you change the fsb to 133?

hehe the problem is that with this chip you only have the option to change the the memory mhz's!
To change the FSB i have to raise both the FSB and PCI...which makes it useless since anything above 36 will make huge tearing.
I was hoping someone would have had this problem before and know a fix/hack for it. Odds are i wont be getting new parts anytime soon.

Sorry to disappoint you, but...this particular motherboard DOES NOT SUPPORT XP PROCESSORS AT ALL! (even if new BIOS has included new CPU microcodes)... :(
We have sold them a lot together with Athlon 1.2 GHz CPUs and now having troubles with CPU replacement, if CPU was burned - even older XP1600 processors doesn't work in this particular motherboard - simply no video at all...
This motherboard does not support 266 Mhz FSB - that could be source of the porblem...

So, your CPU most likely is good, it's just only problem with the motherboard...

Problem could be also related with PCB revision - we are having rev.1.0, rev.2.0 may be working bit better...

According to the manual for that board, it only supports Athlons that use a 100/200mhz fsb..according to all the website info, it supports a 133/266 fsb... :confused: PCchips strikes again

Ok then so think i could get a new board out of them since its not impling they can support it its saying they can.
Which board should i try to get out of them instead?

On their web page they state specifications are subject to change without notice. Good luck.

err so what your saying is that they can be like
Ok this board has never supported XP but we arent legally bound to take it back becouse you wasted your money on it

Yes -

Take a screenshot of that table where is specifically states that it supports Athlons. Use that to point up that you read the table and saw that specification had changed to include Athlon XP's.

You have taken expert advise and found the board does not support them. You don't want a huge fuss, simply a motherboard that will take your processor.

Pretty sure that they will happily do that if you subtely mention that your lawyer is quite interested in their response :)

OOO i got there source to the page with the table and i have many sshots and friends who i had take sshots.
I'm sure my lawyer would be happy with that ECS :flame: