K7S5A Pro Crashes on Win98 and XP with PCI VGA

[Rodrigo Ilton]

The motherboard freezes and reboot. On OpenGL games it locks for a time, then executes all inputas fastly then freezes again.
Them memory is a PC133 SDRam 128Mb module that war working on another board(before the upgrade).
The processor is an Athlon XP2000+ correctly configureg and detected on setup.
My VGA card is an Palit TNT2 M64 PCI 32mb that is not on the pci1 slot.
The IRQ of the pci card(IRQ10) is shared with an USB controller.
Even without PCI IRQ the system freezes.
I've installed a WinXP Pro only for testing and it rebooted too.
After reboot the so says that the VGA driver caused a bad issue.
The VGA card was working(more than perfectly) on the other Motherboard(Even with the SiS630 onboard VGA together).
How can I use my purchased product??? Or it is just a toy?
Someone user this Video Card on this board? Or had success with PCI vga on this board??
About BIOS upgrades, this take much time? I had a fear that power leaks disturb the process and messes everithing.
Wich BIOS upgrades shoud I make. To wich version????

[Peter M]

You should check on that RAM. You wouldn't be the first to migrate an old PC133 RAM from a previous system, only to find that it doesn't really live up to PC133 standard in a more demanding environment.
BIOS updates will do little, since K7S5A pro is a matured board that's been on the market for two and a half years now.
www.memtest86.com for a good RAM test.

[Rodrigo Ilton]

Maybe I'm wrong. But this memory was working at 133MHz on an pentium III board with no problems. An I'm still worried about the video error on windows XP. This can tell me something about the problem. Ou maybe not. I've read about power supply issues with this board predecessor. And my BIOS date is january/2003.
Since I don't have memory modules available can I make another simple tests?
Thanks for you reply. If I could I'll make this test.
You're(from this forum) are great.

I live in Brasil, so contact the manunfacturer is almost impossible.

[Peter M]

Pentium III doesn't push on RAM bandwidth anywhere near as hard as a high clocked Athlon system.

You aren't the first. Belief doesn't help you there. Test it. You got the link, and you CAN run the test.

[AnakiMana]

I just went through the same thing with my K7S5As just last night. I have two of them (non pro). One of them started rebooting out of the blue and leaving me with a powered, but non-working machine. And I could only get it to post 1 out of 15 tries after that, followed by another sudden reboot. I swore it must have been the power supply, even though I've got a new Enermaxx (way overkill) supply in there. I swapped it with another brand new Enermaxx, and then every component with another perfectly working K7S5A system, one at a time until I found what was causing it. It was one of my sticks of Crucial 256mb DDR. I've been using 2 of these for over a year with perfect stability until it started acting up a few days ago. I replaced that stick with another Crucial 256mb DDR and all is perfectly fine now. I never would have guessed it was a RAM issue by the symptoms.

I suggest you try to borrow some RAM from a friend just for diagnosis purposes. Or buy another stick (if that wasn't the problem, at least you have more RAM now!).

AnakiMana

[Rodrigo Ilton]

I'm not certain but underclocking the core to 100MHz (Memory/Processor) the system seems to be stable. Well, I'm gona test for more time and then post the results. If I got one DDR stick I'll test it. Thanks for your help, anyway.

[Rodrigo Ilton]

S**t, it rebooted again at 100MHz clock. It happens when I'm closing an Direct3d/OpenGl app. This makes me think about the PCI video card. Gonna take my friend voodoo 3 - 3000 AGP to make tests. I'll post results here. The starnge thing is that this memory ran at 133MHz with my pentium3 100MHz(700) with the same applications(half-life/cs, gl/d3d/quake, fifa2003) and never locked or rebooted.

[Omardeth]

k7s5a is pretty picking on the ram you put in it and the power supplies . with problems like you have those are the 2 things that are the cause the problems most of the time . try different ram before you pull and change drivers on the video card .

remember KISS ( keep it simple stupid ) try the easiest thing first . and the easiest thing to try is changing the ram .

[Peter M]

I told him twice already ... he's into belief rather than proof.

[TOAD6147]

It seems he's ignoring Peter's suggestions because he's already convinced himself that it has to be the vid card.
Rodrigo Ilton,
Check the RAM as suggested. You came here for help and this is what was suggested to you. Peter is a seasoned pro and doesn't suggest these tests out of guess work. He's the resident expert on these types of boards. That's where you need to start if you desire further help.