What's the Duron like then ?

[Paul Cunningham]

Darren, You Back !! Good to see you again.

I was thinking of getting a Duron 600. But what's a good motherboard for it and do you need an AMD approved power supply ?

Also, (Minor point here) whats it go like ?

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[Darren Wilson]

Hi Paul

I will be spending a whole day on Friday playing with both a Duron 700 & 600 with a Microstar Board. I have the chips already but will not get the boards until Friday morning I know the Duron draws more power than a Celeron but nowhere near the amount of wattage that the Athlon uses. So you should in theory be able to get away with nearly any PSU out there.

If they are anythign like the Athlon's I have een having recently then I think I will push these to the back of the shelf as well.

Looks like I could go back to being Intel only distributing

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[sradicator]

Dear Darren, every system has its problems and incompatibilities. Do you remember Asus P3c-2000 (and others like that)?
I don't think Amd is the only one with a lot of problems....

[Darren Wilson]

sradicator

If you read my post carefully you will see that it states RECENTLY the problems have been occuring with the Athlons.

I for one have never fallen into the trap of using i820 based boards anyway.

I was stating a personal finding that I have been having problems recently with Athlons and compatiability with various cards , boards and other items of equipment, which for a funny reason all work fine when used in an Intel based system.

You cannot sell systems to your customers (and if you do then you shouldn't be in business to start with) that have problems can you??? What I am trying to put across is that I am still trying to find a set of components that will work together with a minimum of hassles and will be as reliable as an Intel based machine.

It is a funny coincidence that the only systems that we have the most problems with are the ones based on non-Intel chipsets & processors isn't it????

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[jmlozan]

couldn't have said it better myself Darren!

[CEDAR]

Built two Duron's in the last two weeks. Used the Gigabyte mainboard, PC133 SDRAM and a 300/w PS. No problems and systems outpermed an Athlon 600 on the benchmarks. I would like to try other mainboards now that there are more available. When I built the first two, the gigabyte board was most readily available at a decent price.

[dr cool]

i cannot understand what you have against AMD Darren, I have much experience with them even more than intel. I have found they perform the same if not better than intel processors and cost relitively less than the same clocked intel. I have not experienced any problems related to incompatiblity. This is a problem that today is the least likely circumstance to arrise when you are having problems.

[Bohemian]

Abit KT7

[LuvNCustomers]

Sorry to hear you say this, Darren. I am not going to launch a personal attack or get into a which chip is better argument. I have had great success with both manufacturers. I however did get sucked into the 820 chipset thing. Oh, well. Anyhow, I have built 27 Athlons and 23 Pentium machines and I have 50 happy customers so far this year. I had 3 machines come back. 1 Athlon with a bad dvd drive and 2 Intels with the 820 boards in them. All in all I have been happy with both brands and I am proud to sell them both out of my shop. My feelings are stick with what you like no matter what it is. Ultimatly, the customer makes the final call so you have to get to know how to get eveything to run correctly. I would rather sell an Athlon to a customer then have him buy one from someone else.

Sorry this is problably off the subject.

[sradicator]

I don't have understand: "I have been having problems recently with Athlons and compatiability with various cards , boards and other items of equipment, which for a funny reason all work fine when used in an Intel based system."
Could you be more specific? I build a lot of Athlon systems, and, if they had a problem, I was not able to solve it replacing cpu with an Intel one!
I'm not against Intel, but I havent't found a lot of problems with AMD cpu (I mean problems not resolved yet). I only have heard the bad performance of Voodoo5 with Athlon systems (but I think is a driver issue anyway). And what did you intend with "recently"? Did you find fake Athlons?

[Darren Wilson]

Firstly, I have nothing against AMD at all. I may have misrepresented my actual comments by not stating that the problem normally lies with the chipset on the motherboard. If I was anti-AMD then I would not be spending a few days messing around with the Duron would I??
I will now make myself clear, well try to. Recently I have been forced to chop and change around Motherboards and Video Cards due to suppliers changing their major stocks. Previously I have always used boards which use the 750 chipset and had very few problems. I am now forced into using NMC and QDI boards. I think a lot of the problem revolves around the VIA KX133 chipset that is used upon these boards. It doesn't matter how many or when you install the VIA SP4 onto the system to try to stabilise the system, it just doesn't want to know. This is with nearly all of the ATI cards and TNT/GeForce cards. Yes I am using a 300W AMD Approved PSU and the systems are not overheating as a thermal probe has been used to test for any temperature problems. I have contacted my suppliers regarding the ATI problem and they responded by telling me that there was a problem with compatiability with the Rage Fury Maxx cards and teh KX133 to which ATI couldn't get them to work in any colour scheme higher than 256 colours. I have managed to get them to work in higher resolution, so I have solved a problem somewhere along the line, yet no 3D or DirectX apps will work for longer than 45 seconds!!!!!! YET, if I swap out the mobo & processor and replace them with an Intel chipse based board and either Celeron or PIII , then the apps all work fine and the system is stable!!! BTW this is without formatting, just going into safe mode and removing the chipset drivers for the VIA.
Like I stated before this has only started happening recently.

As for the fake Athlon question, yes in OEM circles there are a lot of remarked/overclocked chips in circulation, esp in the UK where I am. A few of the OC boys are actually hard soldering the resistors that determine the speed of the chip ala Toms Hardware.com (not that it is Toms People that are doing the clocking). This is one of the real problems that you can put down to the chip itself which is why I would rather buy a retail chip than an OEM.

For ref:

This is one of the systems that is causing the problems

AMD Athlon 750
NMC VA7 ATX Motherboard
128Mb PC133 SDRAM (Cube)
ATI or TNT2-GeForce based cards
15Gb Seagate DMA66 IDE
8x40 CTX DVD
onboard VIA sound
Rockwell HCF Modem (which works sweet)
300W AMD Approved PSU

Anyone care to try to shed any light on the subject ???

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[sradicator]

Mmm... Nothing to say about Ati Rage Maxx problem (I haven't tried it yet), but it seems the typical Ati driver problem. Ati seems to make not too much attention to their drivers (in win98SE appears a yellow mak on the driver of Ati Rage Pro Vivo, a known problem says Ati...), and for Ati Rage Maxx there isn't a Win2000 driver... I hope that with Radeon something will change...
But this is another question.

With Tnt-2 or Ge-Force I never had problems, even with economical m/b (I used Qdi, Asus, Abit and Lex (Jetway remarked))
I have read (I don't remember where) that if you install all the service pack of Via on kx-133 you could have troubles.
Try installing only "via agp 4.03" and "via inf".
Try also Nvidia detonators 2.
I have found that proprietary drivers cause a lot of problems (creative one, first of all...)

[Darren Wilson]

I think that I can safely say that it is one of three things that is causing the problems.

• [1] Too higher power consumption of the system components which is very tricky to figure as I am using an approved 300W PSU.
  [2] The chipset on the boards (VIA KX/KT133) is not compatiable with the drivers of the video cards.
  [3] The 3D Now! instruction set is some how causing the system to fail in D3D & OGL apps.

I have concluded the chipset theory as I have now used the same components on a Duron with a Microsotar mobo (VIA SP4.20 installed) and the very same problems are occuring.

As previously stated, I know the other components are fine as they perform as expected on both a Celeron 566 & PIII 633 (both using i440BX chipset, 633 running on unsupported 133Mhz FSB for testing purposes).
The Intel board for reference is a QDI BrilianX9.

I will get this sorted if it kills me

BTW I have now added SIS 6326 (P.O.S. Card but normally fail safe!!) , Diamond Speedstar A90 (S3 Savage 4 , another P.O.S. Card) and VooDoo3 2000 AGP, to the list of cards that are causing the same problems!!!! Although I did get a bit further using the VooDoo 3 2000 as Unreal Tournament (v4.20) actually played without GPF's or droping back to the desktop.

I am still adamant that the chipset is the cause of this now , closely followed by the PSU not supplying enough power to the AGP.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGHHHHHHHHH I have a headache!!!!!!!!!!

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why are our jobs so interesting??????

For a different ' angle ' on life visit my NEW homepage @ The Carpers Lodge - The UK's No.1 Non-Commercial / Independant Carp Angling Website

[This message has been edited by Darren Wilson (edited August 04, 2000).]

[Paul Cunningham]

Thanks for all the interest !

I had already half decided on the Gigabyte Baord as I have one now and it goes like $£%" off a shovel

I would also like to add a Matrox G400 Dual head but can find next to nothing about these as magazines tend to only review games cards and shy away from anything different.

Would this card work on this board, and does anyone know how well the dual head system works ?

Thankyou

Paul

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[dr cool]

darren i believe the problem may lie in your motherboard selection, i have not heard of these incompatabilities with video cards and the kt133 chipset. Have you tried a GeForce in any of your boards to see if it worked. Also you might want to go with the Asus A7V or if you can get your hands on an Abit KT7.