Another Happy AthWiper Customer - with an UNSTABLE system !
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BEHIND THE SCENES - The hunt for stability - part II
Over the past few weeks I've been wrestling with some instability
problems with my new system. So far, I've found what appears to be the
problem, and my system is now stable. What follows is my trip to
stability:
The stats on the system are:
ECS K7S5A motherboard
- SiS 735 chipset
- Socket A (for AMD Athlon/Duron)
- built-in sound
- built-in 10/100 Ethernet
1.4GHz Athlon (Thunderbird)
256 MB Crucial PC2100 DDR
30 GB Maxtor hard drive - ATA/100
52x CD-ROM
ATX mid-tower case
300 watt Enermax AMD-approved power supply
I attempted to install Windows XP on the system after assembly and it
all went fine. I noticed that the sound chip was not detected, though.
After trying to get the sound to work, and getting various error
messages and stop errors in XP, I decided to do a re-install.
After re-installing I still had troubles, even with the sound disabled
on the motherboard. After mentioning the problem in the last
newsletter, a regular reader (RDN) steered me towards a FAQ on it at
OCWorkbench:
forum.ocworkbench.com
4&t=003792&p=
The problem apparently has to do with ECS changing a part on its
motherboards to accommodate Athlon XP processors in some revisions of
the motherboard. Newer (and older) K7S5As don't have the problem, and
even problem revisions of the board will not always display the
problem--but the potential is there. If you get unlucky with your
particular board and Athlon chip, you will have a problem.
The fix is simple: either kick down your bus speed to 100MHz (instead
of 133MHz) or you can solder a resistor onto the motherboard. Another
possibility is simply returning the board for another one of a newer
revision with the "XP" sticker on it. ECS has apparently fixed the
problem in newer revisions, and some boards are certified to work by
AMD. However, ECS has not yet acknowledged the problem publicly in any
manner that I have seen.
There's another ECS K7S5A FAQ being worked on at OCWorkbench with all
kinds of info on the K7S5A:
forum.ocworkbench.com
4&t=001477
So, since I throttled my memory bus down to 100MHz (*2) my computer
has been up and running for almost 12 days without a single crash or
glitch. That's a fairly decent test of stability in my book.
Previously, I was unable to get through a single day without a hard
crash. Now I have a motherboard that's crippled, with my 1.4GHz Athlon
running at 1.05GHz. Of course, I could try to RMA this sucker, but
then I'll be without a working system. Or I could just get an Athlon
XP, which may fix the issue. Other things I have left to try are
flashing the BIOS with the newest revision and possibly trying the
hardware fix, but that means soldering.
65.66.90.193
To help track down the problems and test the board under various
configurations, I used Memtest86, as recommended by the FAQ:
teresaudio.com
Memtest86 worked really well for me. Memtest86 is an Open Source
memory diagnostic, and each time I ran it on my system it would give
thousands of errors. After throttling the system bus down to 100MHz, I
ran it again and got no errors. I tried it on my old system that I
have been using for a few years and it ran fine--also with no errors.
Each time I got errors in Memtest86 I would get crashes in Windows XP.
There was a definite pattern, and I'd recommend Memtest86 to anyone
who needs to test out his or her system for memory/CPU/system bus
stability. It should be part of anyone's testing to ensure system
stability. It creates a boot floppy and you just boot right to its own
OS and it runs automatically.
So, for now, even with a 1.05GHz Athlon, I am content with the
stability of my system. However, the audio drivers still leave
something to be desired, as they sometimes "crackle" when a small,
quick sound comes through (like the ticking in Internet Explorer).
That may be because the on-board networking and sound are sharing an
IRQ. As you can see, I still have more work to do, and perhaps someday
soon I will have another installment of my trials and tribulations. |
